Afgantsy

Even when they are on campaign, the soldiers in most armies spend little time fighting. Instead they hang around, grumble about their officers, their sergeants, and the stupidity of the military machine in general, avoid extra duties, scrounge for food, try to get drunk, think and talk incessantly about women (though not in battle, when they have other things on their minds), boast disgracefully, and engage in laddish horseplay which sometimes degenerates into bullying and physical violence. All this apparently pointless activity, which the British call ‘soldiering’, has one invaluable by-product. It reinforces the sense of comradeship which is essential to the soldiers’ survival in a fight.¹

The soldiers of the 40th Army were little different. They lived in primitive and unhealthy surroundings, freezing in winter, boiling in summer, with few amenities and practically no female company. They ate bad and sometimes insufficient food. They succumbed to epidemic disease. They were often bullied by their officers, by their sergeants, and by the senior soldiers. They got no leave, except perhaps to attend the funeral of an immediate family member. But they endured hardship with the stoicism of the Russian soldier throughout the ages, and they were willing to go on fighting for their comrades even when the war itself seemed to have lost any purpose.

The Conscripts

However reluctantly, most young men in the Soviet Union accepted service in the army as an inescapable staging post on the road to adulthood. The ideals of patriotism, duty, the leading role of an omniscient Communist Party, and the superiority of the Soviet way of life were drilled into them from their earliest days. Some of these ideals stuck.

Conscripts served for two years. The annual batch of recruits was called up in two massive levies, in spring and autumn, and their heads were shaved, a tradition from Tsarist times. After one month’s basic training, those destined for Afghanistan were usually sent for three months into ‘Quarantine’—training camps in the Central Asian republics—where the physical conditions were similar to those in Afghanistan. So those who were called up in the spring might not actually get to Afghanistan itself until August. They would then serve there for some twenty months, though commanders could and did hold back soldiers due for demobilisation until the next bunch of new recruits had arrived.²

Conscripts who already had a speciality—higher education, medical or other relevant qualifications—would serve in an appropriate capacity; or they might be selected for six months’ training as sergeant-drivers or gunners before going to Afghanistan, and would then serve there only eighteen months. Able soldiers could be promoted to sergeant after a year or eighteen months in the field. The power lay with their commanders, who could also reduce a sergeant to the ranks again if he failed to perform.³

Despite the surrounding secrecy, parents quickly realised what was going on. Those with money or influence—parents from Moscow or Leningrad or the Baltic States—had regularly bribed the recruiting office or pulled strings to keep their sons out of the army.⁴ They did so with even greater determination once the war began. And so the boys who fought were mostly from the rural and working classes. A survey of fifteen hundred soldiers taken in 1986 showed that more than two-thirds were from the countryside or from working-class families with no secondary education, at a time when nearly two-thirds of the population already lived in cities. Nearly a quarter came from broken families. Not one came from a family with a background in the Party, bureaucratic, institutional, or military elite.⁵ Colonel General Krivosheev, the military historian, remarked sarcastically that they might as well restore ‘the old romantic name of the armed forces—The Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army’.⁶

Sometimes the authorities did not bother to tell the conscripts where they were going, but simply bundled them off with a round of vodka to ease the transition.⁷ Even when they knew their destination, they were supposed to tell their families only that they would be serving abroad. The prohibition was eroded with time, but many soldiers—like the youth adviser Vyacheslav Nekrasov—still tried to ease their families’ anxiety by saying they were going to Mongolia. Most parents were not fooled: Vladislav Tamarov’s father replied to his first soothing letter home that he shouldn’t think his parents were stupid: they knew perfectly well where he was.⁸

On the eve of his departure Andrei Ponomarev was paraded with his fellow conscripts and told that anyone not wishing to go to Afghanistan should take three paces forward: he would then serve in the Soviet Union. Much as they might have liked to, neither Ponomarev nor anyone else did so out of a sense of shame and a fear that they would be ostracised. Ponomarev later served in the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment in Badakhshan in north-east Afghanistan.⁹

In May 1985 Vitali Krivenko and his fellow conscripts were taken by train and plane more than twelve hundred miles from his home in Kazakhstan to a training camp outside Leningrad. There they were sent to the bathhouse, given two hours to get their new uniforms in order, and started their training straight away. The standard infantry training—route marches, field exercises, shooting, drill, political classes, and PT—was very harsh. So were the drill sergeants. But when it came to the test of battle, Krivenko found that the training had served him well and that he had become a good general-purpose soldier.

Problems

There had always been a great deal of bullying in the Soviet army, and in the Tsarist army before it. But a more established ritual of bullying, dedovshchina, the ‘grandfather system’, emerged in the late 1960s.

Russian commentators give various reasons for the rise of dedovshchina. The conscript army was demoralised. It was too large and the soldiers were underemployed. Many conscripts fell below the standards needed by a technically sophisticated force. Some were recruited from the prisons and brought with them the bullying rituals of the criminal world.

Under this system, a soldier in his last six months was known as a ‘grandfather’ (ded). New recruits were made to clean the barracks, look after the grandfathers’ kit, get them cigarettes from the shop and food from the canteen. They were ritually humiliated, and beaten sometimes to the point of serious injury. Most endured, and consoled themselves with the thought that they too would be grandfathers one day. Some broke under the strain: they deserted, mutilated themselves, or committed suicide.

Some, of unusual physical as well as moral strength, stood up for themselves and were eventually left alone. Krivenko was older than the other conscripts because he had spent time in prison. His age and experience gave him authority among the other soldiers, and the grandfathers dealt with him cautiously.¹⁰ Sergei Nikiforov was a judo expert and fought his tormentors to a standstill. Soldiers from the same republic or region stuck together in self-defence. The grandfathers in one unit were warned that if anything happened to the only two Chechen soldiers there, their countrymen would take a merciless revenge.¹¹

It depended, too, on where you were. The army could not afford to employ substandard soldiers in the elite strategic rocket forces, where the grandfather system was much less brutal. It was the same in the KGB’s frontier forces, who had a real job to do; and in the elite special forces and parachute units, where morale was usually high. Sergei Morozov, a sergeant in the 56th Guards Independent Airborne Assault Brigade, claimed that there was no dedovshchina in his unit: people were always too busy or too tired. When they were not on operations, all they wanted to do was eat and sleep.¹²

In Afghanistan the system was less oppressive even in the motor-rifle units, because there too the soldiers had real work to do. The grandfathers still gave their juniors the run-around, but it was hard to preserve the distinctions in battle. And a bully risked being cut down by a bullet from his own side, as well as from the enemy: in the heat of the fight no one would bother to investigate.¹³ Even so, 33 per cent of the military crimes dealt with in the 40th Army in 1987 were ‘military bullying’. More than two hundred soldiers suffered in one year: