Afgantsy

The rebels controlled the countryside by night, even if they did not do so by day. There was little opportunity to work effectively with the peasants. And there was of course no proletariat to work with since there was almost no industry in the country anyway. So the advisers concentrated on building up the local party and youth organisations, on helping the schools, and setting up children’s summer camps. One visitor from the Soviet Union tactlessly gave a talk to a local school on how Soviet children helped their elders fight the Germans by putting sand in their machine guns and tanks. The listeners naturally pricked up their ears. The divisional commander was duly furious: ‘Don’t ever let a loudmouth like that get within range of my pistol again.’⁵²

Yusuf Abdullaev, another youth adviser, reported on a trip round the provinces in June 1981: ‘The situation is very difficult. Only the regional centres are in the hands of the people’s power [the Kabul regime]… Everyone’s efforts are directed to the struggle against the rebels. After an attempt to open a school they broke the arms and the legs of four of the children. There are strong feelings of hostility towards the Soviets, and towards the Russian soldiers, for which the soldiers themselves are often to blame. The rebels have burned a column of eighteen vehicles carrying food, which they commandeered in order to sell. There is no sign of the Afghan army and Tsarandoi. The people who are doing the fighting are our own military units and some of the malishi [militia detachments for the defence of the revolution] from among the local population. The rebels terrorise the locals—they fine the families of those who are collaborating with the authorities twenty or forty thousand afgani [the Afghan currency].’⁵³

By February 1982 Abdullaev was even more gloomy. There were over a hundred schools in Farakh province: perhaps no more than ten were open. Only four thousand out of more than twenty-one thousand children of school age were studying. Not one of the fifty-one cooperatives was working. The local Communist youth organisation was totally disorganised, and probably had no more than two hundred members. There were more than forty rebel bands operating in the area; their average age was under thirty. Abdullaev nevertheless believed that most of the population accepted that government terror and violence had declined with the installation of the Babrak regime, and that the bands were discrediting themselves by their behaviour. But people remained very cautious. A few months later Abdullaev reported from Khost that no one mentioned Babrak Karmal, apart from an Afghan officer who had shouted out, ‘Death to Karmal!’ at a political meeting in his artillery regiment.

Herat, where it had all started, was contested territory throughout the war. The mujahedin controlled the old city, while the government and the Russians controlled the suburbs and the essential main road which skirted them. The Soviet advisers lived in the Hotel Herat, which had been built a few years earlier on the edge of the city on the road to the airport, and had been popular with tourists. By now it had been transformed into a small fortress: sandbags on the balconies, a BTR and a mortar team at the entrance, and instead of a liveried doorman a heavily armed soldier in a flak jacket. The inhabitants were advised to travel with an armoured escort even inside the city.

In June 1981 one of the Komsomol advisers, Gena Kulazhenko, set off to drive the short distance from the airport to the hotel. There was no escort available, so he took a Toyota taxi. He never arrived. His colleagues from Kabul got no help from the Soviet military or civilian authorities, and went themselves to Herat to find out what had happened. They managed to find the Toyota, riddled with bullets; a local mullah said he knew where Kulazhenko’s grave was. They set off escorted by a tank and two BTRs, which promptly got stuck in the narrow street of the local kishlak. The mullah led them on foot to a grave, but the corpse they dug up was badly decomposed and was not that of Kulazhenko. They then fell into an ambush. Later one of the local rebel bands put out a leaflet saying that Kulazhenko had been executed and buried in secret.⁵⁴

This was the first of four fatal casualties suffered by the Komsomol advisers. Nikolai Serov then died in 1984 of cancer of the blood, Ator Abdukadyrov was killed in a bombardment, and Alexander Babchenko died in 1987 just before he was due to go home.

Nikolai Komissarov was a Komsomol official from Kazan. He was sent to Faisabad in 1982. There were eighteen other advisers there, four military, the rest civilians, living in rented accommodation in the town. Komissarov was responsible for eleven kishlaks, which he and his Tajik interpreter visited regularly, unarmed, to do youth work; one of their triumphs was to persuade the local girls’ school to abandon the veil. They had other tasks as well: to acquire intelligence and to help set up local self-defence organisations.⁵⁵

When Komissarov heard that the whole of the senior class in one of his schools had been persuaded to go over to the rebels he took a military driver and drove off to see what was happening. The kishlak was deep in the countryside and to go there without an armoured escort was an exceptionally dangerous thing to do. Two armoured vehicles were sent to rescue him if they could. It turned out to be unnecessary. ‘When we were halfway there,’ Captain Igor Morozov recounted, ‘we found his car. The soldier, white-faced from what he had been through, was gripping the steering wheel convulsively. Komissarov was sitting beside him without batting an eyelid, and even tried to make a joke of it, the bastard. What he had said to those schoolboys no one knows. But it’s a fact that none of them joined the rebels. Komissarov was reprimanded for his breach of discipline—quite rightly.’⁵⁶

Vyacheslav Nekrasov came from Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg), where he worked as a lathe operator and foreman in a defence factory, served in the army, and studied at the Higher Komsomol School. He was twenty-eight years old and working as First Secretary of a local Komsomol committee when he was chosen in 1982 to go to Afghanistan to advise on youth affairs. Like others, he told his family he was being sent to Mongolia. He would work there for a year, he said, and would then bring them out to join him. He bought a Mongolian dictionary to back up his story.

Nekrasov and his interpreter, Dodikhudo Saimetdinov, flew to Kabul in October 1982, which they found far more sophisticated and Westernised than they had been led to believe. In November they were sent to work in Faryab province in northern Afghanistan.

Here Nekrasov was given a good deal of freedom by his bosses to act as he thought best. One project was to send a group of young leaders to see how Muslims lived in the Soviet Union. Nekrasov and Saimetdinov managed, with considerable difficulty, to persuade a local mullah to go with them. It was worth it: shortly after the mullah returned, Nekrasov heard him describe the visit in glowing terms over the muezzin loudspeakers.

On a visit to Kabul, Nekrasov laid hands on a mobile cinema, complete with a library of Indian, Soviet, and Afghan films and three Afghan operators. He cadged an aeroplane to fly the team to Fariab and took it around the province. The films were popular even in otherwise hostile kishlaks. Nekrasov’s team did not charge for tickets and there were only two conditions: there should have been no shooting in the kishlak for a week before the performance and weapons had to be left outside. Ironically, one film popular among the Afghans was the comedy thriller White Sun of the Desert (Beloe Solntse Pustynya), among the most successful of all Soviet films, about the war in the 1920s against the rebels in Central Asia—rebels who were ethnically similar to the Afghans themselves.

Like the other civilian political advisers, Nekrasov did get mixed up in military operations from time to time. But his contacts also occasionally enabled him to negotiate ceasefire arrangements with the local guerrilla leaders, saving civilian lives as well as those of the fighters on both sides.⁵⁷

The number of specialists and advisers was run down from 1986 onwards as the aim of modernising Afghanistan’s society and its political and economic system came to seem more and more unattainable. It was a bitter disappointment for those who had risked their lives and health in what they believed was a good cause.

And yet when people back in the Soviet Union asked them how they managed to survive the horrors, many of them discovered that they had fallen in love with Afghanistan. ‘We did not survive—we lived. We lived life to the full. Everything was interesting, every day was packed,’ wrote Vyacheslav Nekrasov. ‘Of course we were young, carefree, quick to make new friends. Even though more than ten years have passed, we are still like a single family of brothers.’⁵⁸

– EIGHT – Soldiering