Afgantsy

armed escort. By 1986 they were not allowed to go without escort even into the centre of major cities such as Kabul. But the temptations of the Afghan bazaars, with their rich variety of Western consumer goods and designer clothes, were too great for some to resist. The more daring or irresponsible of them found their way to the bazaars despite the obstacles. Some hoped that if they kept their mouths shut while they were walking through the bazaars they would be mistaken for Western missionaries whom—they optimistically believed—the mujahedin would leave unharmed.⁴⁴

The advisers were never specially targeted by the mujahedin. But there were casualties nevertheless. Evgeni Okhrimiuk was a geologist who was posted to Afghanistan in 1976, when he was already sixty-three years old; at that time geologists were among the few Soviet advisers then working there. Okhrimiuk was put in charge of the team searching for natural resources, especially natural gas. Once the war started, and work in the outlying provinces became too difficult, he and his colleagues worked in the neighbourhood of Kabul, looking for water and building materials.

On 18 August 1981 Okhrimiuk left his apartment in the microrayon in his official car with his usual driver to go to his office about a mile away. He never arrived. The Russians later learned what had happened. Okhrimiuk agreed to let his driver give a lift to a couple of relatives. It was a put-up job. The two men took Okhrimiuk prisoner, so that he could be exchanged for the brother of one of the local guerrilla commanders, who had been captured by the Afghan army. Okhrimiuk wrote to his people that his captors had taken him on foot for five days to a hiding place in the high mountains, and asked for a helicopter to pick him up once the exchange had been agreed. Unfortunately the commander’s brother had already been shot. There were protracted negotiations about a ransom. They petered out. After Okhrimiuk had spent a year in captivity, the French Communist paper L’Humanite reported that he had been executed. His wife asked for a memorial to be erected in a Moscow cemetery. The authorities refused permission.⁴⁵

Aleksei and Marina Muratov first went to Afghanistan in 1970, above all because they needed the money. In Moscow they both worked as junior scientific assistants in the university, they had two sons, and they had to rely on help from Aleksei’s parents to get by. In Kabul Aleksei lectured in the polytechnic and Marina worked as a secretary. They liked the country and the people, and they remained there for three years.

Then the war came. ‘We understood from the beginning,’ said Marina later, ‘that the invasion was a crime. And when we returned to Afghanistan in the autumn of 1981, we continually felt ashamed: ashamed for our country which had sent its soldiers there to kill and be killed.’ This time both Aleksei and Marina taught in the Polytechnic Institute. Marina helped prepare Afghan students who were going to study in the Soviet Union.

They got used to the wartime conditions—continual shooting, breakdowns in the supply of electricity, sleeping with an automatic rifle under the bed—and the difficulties of life in the Soviet community, where you could be sent home for stepping even an inch out of line, and where their immediate superior disliked the Afghans and drank a lot too much.

The movements of the advisers and their families who lived at the Polytechnic Institute were strictly controlled. Alarms were signalled by the firing of a rocket, three long bursts from an automatic rifle, and by repeated banging on a length of rail outside the guardroom. Those who were assigned to the local defence force took up their positions; the rest took shelter. All lights in the apartments had to be turned out. The all clear was signalled by separate blows on the rail, by word of mouth, and by radio. The radios in the apartments had to be left on all the time.

The polytechnic regularly came under fire, and the inhabitants had to keep their eyes out for bombs and booby traps hidden under tables and in corners. Marina once picked up an explosive device disguised as an electric torch, but luckily it did not go off. She rarely saw any bloodshed, though she was there when a member of the embassy was shot down outside a shop after collecting his son from school. The boy sat by his body for forty minutes before he was picked up.

Towards the end of their third year in Afghanistan Aleksei and Marina went shopping. On their way out of the polytechnic she noticed one of the young Afghan guards looking at her oddly. She thought he must be under the influence of drugs. As they were returning to the polytechnic she fell over; it was only later that she realised the man had shot her. Aleksei was lying just behind her. He was dying. Marina subsequently had ten operations to save her leg. Her Afghan students visited her every day; one brought his father from the northern city of Mazar-i Sharif to pray for her.⁴⁶

Life and Death in the Provinces

Work in the provinces was more difficult than in Kabul and more dangerous too. The advisers had to travel across roads that were regularly mined. One group of Komsomol advisers from Kabul was ambushed and a woman was killed. In Herat the advisers were in principle only allowed to travel in armoured vehicles. But often there would be none available, so they had to travel in ordinary vehicles. And though the armour might protect you from bullets, it would not save you from a roadside mine. Herat did have one advantage, however. If you ran out of vodka, you could send a special messenger to get some from Kushka, the major logistics base, only three hours away by road.⁴⁷

As well as being dangerous, the work in the regions was depressing. In Logar province the advisers discovered that not one village supported the Kabul regime. Only 2.5 per cent of the children there were going to school.⁴⁸ From 1984 to 1986 Alexander Yuriev was in Kandahar: he had volunteered to go there when his predecessor, Grisha Semchenko, had been badly wounded. He described the state of the city in his diary: ‘Kandahar is a very beautiful town. But half of it has been destroyed, whole streets and blocks are in ruins, and the surviving buildings are pitted with scars from shell splinters and bullets. It is very dangerous to drive around: the rebels are firing from the green zone outside the city, and mount ambushes inside the city itself. Everyone goes around with their guns at the ready. What makes it worse is that we control only two of the city’s six administrative regions. The other four are controlled by the rebels, and the road along which we have to travel goes through the middle of them.’⁴⁹

Yuriev wrote home cheerfully enough: ‘Everything is fine with me. I live in a villa outside town, which was built by the Americans. Our working day is quite short—from 8–9 a.m. to 2 p.m. We sometimes get two or three days off in the week.’ These bland words were not inaccurate, but they concealed the reality. The villa had indeed been built by Americans constructing the local airport. But the water supply had broken down, and there was neither lighting nor heating. The place was bombarded several times a day. ‘During the bombardments, you made sure there were two walls between you and the street. You lay on the floor in your flak jacket and helmet, and hoped that there wouldn’t be a direct hit on the ceiling.’ It was several miles from the villa to the Kandahar headquarters of the local committee of the DOMA, where Yuriev worked. The road was always heavily mined: every week someone got blown up on it. Every morning a flail tank cleared the mines, Soviet soldiers were posted along the road, and it was safe to travel. Then the soldiers were withdrawn and the road was back in the hands of the rebels. So Yuriev had to get home again by two o’clock. If serious fighting was going on, it was better not to leave the house at all; those were counted as days off. Fighting went on all around, even on working days. ‘There was fighting on 10 and 11 August [1985],’ writes Yuriev in his diary. ‘Many dead and wounded. We open a branch of the Institute for Youth Workers of the Central Committee of the DOMA… Comrade Khanif spoke at the meeting. He said that the branch was being opened in the middle of a war. But that was necessary, because young people needed to learn the theory of revolution, and use it in the course of the revolutionary struggle. In the open, on the street, I hold the first lesson for students of the branch on “The place and role of DOMA in the political system of Afghan society”.’⁵⁰

The advisers could go for weeks without hearing a word of Russian spoken. Not everyone was able to stand the nervous tension. ‘How can one describe the conditions in which we lived?’ asked Alexander Gavrya, who was in Afghanistan from October 1982 to October 1985, and again from April to November 1988. ‘Well, take for example Chag-charan, in the province of Ghor. It was deep in the mountains, and helicopters flying there were shot down, so that you had to get there in an armed column, which might have to fight its way through. I was there once, and called in on Sasha Babchenko, one of our advisers. Suddenly I heard someone wailing on the other side of the wall, loudly, terribly, like an animal. I jumped for my gun. “Don’t worry,” said Sasha, “that’s an adviser from another department. He gets drunk and wails every evening. The boys will soon calm him down.”’⁵¹