Afgantsy

some had been killed and others severely wounded.¹⁴

Some Afgantsy maintained that despite its obvious negative features dedovshchina helped to maintain order and discipline.¹⁵ In front-line units, they said, the seasoned soldiers taught the new arrivals to keep themselves clean, obey orders, and care for their equipment. As a recruit, Andrei Ponomarev found the bullying very difficult to bear, and though he did not break, he often crept away after a ritual beating to weep in a corner. He and his colleagues vowed that when they became senior soldiers in their turn they would not use the methods that had been applied to them. But they found this did not work. The new recruits ceased to respect them and would not do what they were told. So Ponomarev too started to use his fists: it was, he said, the only reliable way of getting your point across.¹⁶ He and those who thought like him knew well enough that in other armies the positive aspects they claimed for dedovshchina were the responsibility of experienced professional NCOs. Alexander Gergel, a conscript sergeant in the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment, accepted that dedovshchina had eaten away at the military system. That would not change, he thought, until the Russian army too was given the corps of long-service professional NCOs it lacked.

In one serious way the 40th Army in Afghanistan differed from its predecessors: it had a massive health problem, of a kind the Soviet army had never experienced before. The Russians built seven military hospitals in Afghanistan, but chronic lack of funds meant that they were badly equipped, undermanned, and barely able to cope.¹⁷ The near collapse of the 40th Army’s medical services was one of the worst consequences of the improvisation and lack of funding which accompanied its deployment. One doctor in a brigade casualty clearing station expressed himself with particular bitterness: ‘One has to stick it out and look as if one is saving people. But how can you save people, when there are no medicines, no bandages, and no doctors? People die of infections, of disease, because they weren’t helped in time. Our superiors think that you can save people by giving them one injection against shock. But you can’t, and when the effect of the injection wears off, the patient gives up the ghost and there’s nothing we can do to help him. The only thing we have is alcohol, and even that doesn’t always help. If we had what we needed, we could save three-quarters of them, but as it is…’¹⁸

He may have been exaggerating. But what is clear is that the medical services almost lost the battle not against war wounds, but against infectious disease. The figures speak for themselves. More than three-quarters of those who served in Afghanistan spent time in hospital. Some 11 per cent were wounded or injured. The rest—69 per cent of all those who served during the war—suffered from serious sickness: 28 per cent from infectious hepatitis, 7.5 per cent from typhoid fever, and the rest from infectious dysentery, malaria, and other diseases.¹⁹

Units were often far below strength because so many of the soldiers were sick. The main scourge was hepatitis. The joke among the soldiers was that soldiers got jaundice, officers got Botkin’s disease, and generals were treated for hepatitis. There were stories that some soldiers evaded duty by getting medical orderlies in the hospitals to give them urine from infected patients: if you drank it, you got the disease.²⁰

By the end of 1981 every fourth soldier in the 5th Guards Motor-rifle Division in Shindand had been laid low. The commander, Boris Gromov, his deputies, and all the regimental commanders were down at the same time. The division was effectively unfit for battle.²¹ At any given moment up to a quarter, perhaps even a third, of the 40th Army might be incapacitated by disease. At the height of the epidemic, there was only one nurse for every three hundred patients.²²

Hepatitis was not the only problem. In the summer of 1985 a patrol from the 66th Independent Motor-rifle Brigade in Jalalabad drank the water from a roadside spring as they were returning from patrol. A few days later three of them collapsed on parade with cholera. More than half the brigade fell sick. A rumour circulated that the water had been deliberately infected by ‘two Europeans dressed in local clothes’. To prevent further infection, people said, the bodies were being cremated—something almost unheard of in what was still at heart an Orthodox country.²³ The sick were isolated behind barbed wire, the doctors and nurses were isolated with them, and additional medical staff had to be flown in from Moscow as reinforcements.²⁴

The situation of the 40th Army thus resembled that of the British and French armies in the Crimean War, and for much the same reasons: dirty water, appalling sanitation, dirty cooks, dirty canteens, dirty clothes, poor diet. The Soviets prided themselves on the number of hospitals and orphanages they built in Afghanistan. But they filled more hospitals and orphanages than they constructed, and the bigger the hospital, the worse the sanitary conditions: the rate of hepatitis was highest not in the small outposts, but in the base camps, where it should have been easiest to prevent. The Soviet medical services in the Second World War were much better at controlling disease than their successors.

But the successors were better off in one important way: they could evacuate casualties from the battlefield by helicopter. One sanguine account claimed that nine out of ten wounded soldiers received first aid in thirty minutes and got to a doctor in six hours.²⁵ It was a matter of pride to evacuate the wounded and the bodies of the dead, even under fire and even at the risk of further casualties. The collapse of this tradition, said one officer who had served in both wars, marked for him the degradation which distinguished the Soviet army in Afghanistan from the Russian army in Chechnya.²⁶

Everyday Life

The 40th Army was deployed in four main bases, each housing a division and other units. The 5th Guards Motor-rifle Division was in Shindand near Helmand, where there was also a major airbase. The 201st Motor-rifle Division was in Kunduz in the north. The 108th Motor-rifle Division was in Kabul, and later at the airbase in Bagram. The 103rd Guards Air Assault Division was at Kabul airport. Lesser forces were based around the country—brigades detached from their parent divisions, independent regiments, isolated battalions, special forces units, and in the numerous zastavas. These were concentrated particularly in the south and east, facing the vulnerable thirteen hundred-mile frontier with Pakistan around Kandahar, Gardez, and Jalalabad. All these bases, even in Kabul, were defended against terrorist attack by rings of mines, barbed wire, and guard posts.

In the larger bases the officers, the medical section, and the shop were eventually accommodated in ‘modules’, single-storey prefabricated plywood huts, painted green, with tiled washrooms, though the staff of the 108th Motor-rifle Division on the edge of Kabul continued to live in scruffy huts on the back of lorries.²⁷ The rest—unlucky junior officers, the soldiers, the canteen, the kitchen, the stores, the armouries—were usually accommodated in tents. Women usually had separate modules, though occasionally they had to share them with the officers, separated by a partition from the men, though this did not always present an absolute barrier to the enterprising.

Each base had a military hospital or casualty clearing station to deal with battle casualties and the far larger number of soldiers suffering from diseases, and a morgue where the dead were prepared for their journey home. Even the smallest bases had a ‘Lenin Room’, in which the soldiers could relax, with a portrait of Lenin and the current Soviet leader on the wall, a noticeboard with the latest political slogans, a few books and magazines, and somewhere to sit and write letters.

Sometimes units were accommodated in existing buildings. The 3rd Battalion of the 56th Independent Air Assault Brigade was based in a former Anglican church mission near the Pakistan border. The handful of buildings and the wall around them were built of mud bricks mixed with cement. Outside the wall was a large refuse dump, where the garrison got rid of unwanted munitions along with household rubbish. Once the dump caught fire, and going to the nearby latrine became a dangerous business as shells and rockets exploded. The base was surrounded by minefields laid by the motor-rifle unit which had been there earlier. They had not had the sense to leave maps behind and so two or three times a year someone—usually one of the locals—blew himself up on an anti-personnel mine. By day the government controlled the surrounding villages; by night they were controlled by the rebels. A major operation was mounted against the rebels every year, but even if the authority of the government could be reasserted, it was never for long.²⁸

The 860th Independent Red Banner Pskov Motor-Rifle Regiment occupied a typical medium-sized base in Faisabad in Badakhshan province in north-east Afghanistan. The regiment arrived there in late January 1980 from its home in Kyrgyzstan, after marching for a month through the snow-covered mountains and over passes up to