Afgantsy

twelve to eighteen roubles a month. A specialist—a sniper or a machine-gunner—would get nine roubles. Ordinary soldiers were paid a miserable seven roubles. At that time the average (minimum) wage in the Soviet Union was one hundred roubles a month.

So both officers and men turned to various forms of corruption. The 40th Army was not unique: the victorious Allied armies had done much the same in Europe after 1945. But the corruption in the 40th Army was on a heroic scale. Vladimir Snegirev, the correspondent from Komsomolskaya Pravda, called it the grabarmy where everyone grabbed what he could (by a useful coincidence, the Russian word grabarmia combines the noun armia with the verb grabit, to steal or loot).⁵¹ The detachments guarding the Salang Highway would shake down passing Afghan vehicles. Storekeepers and lorry drivers would conspire to take their cut from the cargoes they were transporting. ‘One enterprising soldier,’ wrote Snegirev, ‘detached the spare wheel of my car during the brief half-hour that I was talking to the political officer of a helicopter regiment. The theft took place in broad daylight on the territory of an elite unit, right next to the staff building, practically under the eyes of the sentry. Oho! I thought. If the “internationalist warriors” could so cheerfully pinch anything that was not nailed down even from their own people, I could imagine how they behaved with the Afghans.

‘The quartermasters of military units stationed throughout the country secretly gave the shopkeepers condensed milk, flour, fat, butter, sugar; and with the money they made they would enthusiastically acquire goods which previously they had seen only on the television. The civilian specialists were not far behind them. For a crate of vodka you could get three fur jackets; back in the Soviet Union you could sell the jackets for enough money to buy a second-hand car.’

The soldiers necessarily operated on a more modest scale. ‘If you were cunning you could put together enough money to drink Coca-Cola or Fanta, drinks still unknown in the Soviet Union; or take souvenirs home for your family—a folding umbrella, local jewellery, or (the pinnacle of their dreams) “Montana” jeans.’⁵²

‘Some of the guys brought porcelain, precious stones, jewellery, carpets,’ one private soldier said. ‘They picked them up in battle when they went into the villages, or bought them. For example, the magazine of a Kalashnikov bought you a make-up set for your girlfriend, including mascara, eyeshadow and powder. Of course the cartridges were “cooked”, because a cooked bullet can’t fly, it just kind of spits out the barrel and can’t kill. We’d fill a bucket or a bowl with water, throw in the cartridges, boil them for a couple of hours and sell them the same evening. Everyone traded, officers as well as the rest of us, heroes as well as cowards. Knives, bowls, spoons, forks, mugs, stools, hammers, they all got nicked from the canteen and the barracks. Bayonets disappeared from guns, mirrors from cars, spare parts, medals… You could sell anything, even the rubbish collected from the garrison, full of cans, old newspapers, rusty nails, bits of plywood, and plastic bags. They sold it by the truckload, with the price depending on the amount of scrap metal.’⁵³

Much of this thieving went unpunished. From time to time the authorities would send in a team of military prosecutors and a few exemplary punishments would be handed out. Then things would go on as before—not least because senior officers were also on the take.

In the absence of other opportunities for entertainment, there was, of course, a great deal of drinking in the 40th Army. The officers mostly drank vodka and other spirits, which some consumed in vast quantities.⁵⁴ The soldiers could not normally afford vodka. But they were philosophical: officers were permitted to drink and it was quite natural that they should. After all, they were long-term professionals, whereas the soldiers only had to put up with the army for two years. Anyway, they could make themselves a moderately alcoholic beer called braga, which brewed quickly in the Afghan heat.⁵⁵ They hid it between the wooden lining and the canvas wall of their tents, or in the external fuel and water tanks of their armoured vehicles. And they had their drugs, mostly marijuana, which they called chars. A particular and rather rare delicacy was tea laced with hashish. They would trade drugs and drink with soldiers from other units, or buy them off the Afghans for cash, or in exchange for military goods of various kinds. They would share a joint or quench their thirst with braga on the way to battle, though most had the sense to shake off the influence before the fighting actually began.

There are no reliable statistics about the extent of the drug-taking. Some veterans deny that it was widespread, at least in the elite units, and one has to aim off for the boasting of young men anxious to show how tough they were. Some soldiers became addicts, but most abandoned the habit when they were eventually demobilised. Two who did not were rescued from Pakistan in 1983 by the journalist Masha Slonim at the behest of the Daily Mail newspaper. Oleg and Igor both came from Ukraine. Oleg was a simple peasant and not at all bright. Igor was a Russian: he was comparatively sophisticated and wrote poetry. They had deserted because Oleg had accidentally killed a comrade and was under investigation, while Igor had heard that his girlfriend was going out with another man. They broke into the armoury of their unit near Kandahar, stole some weapons, and set out to walk to Pakistan. They had no map, hardly any water, and were soon captured by the mujahedin. They were taken to Peshawar, installed in a villa, and treated reasonably well. But they needed to shoot up, their captors gave them no syringes, and they ran away to get back to Afghanistan to find some. When they were recaptured, their captors chained them to a bed, and there they were kept, thin and unhealthy, until they were released to Masha Slonim. By then they were both in a dreadful state.

On the plane to London they suffered serious withdrawal symptoms and Masha barely managed to keep them under control. They were then taken to a villa in Surrey, where they were to be interviewed for TV. They were in too bad a state and had to go to a London clinic, where their addiction was successfully brought under control. They were placed with a Ukrainian family in London, where they frequented a Russian restaurant in London, the Balalaika. A constant visitor there was a nice man from the Soviet Embassy, who regularly bought them drinks. One fine day Igor and Oleg disappeared. They turned up at a press conference in the embassy, saying they wanted to go home and denouncing everyone they had met in Britain as intelligence agents—except Masha. After the two went back to the Soviet Union the Daily Mail reported that they had been shot. It was not so. Ivan wrote to say he was alive and well, though Oleg never surfaced again.⁵⁶

Guitar and Kalashnikov

The soldiers took their guitars to Afghanistan, and they wrote and improvised a great deal of music and poetry, some of permanent value. These songs and poems reflect the history of the war: from a confident belief in the rightness of the cause, through the sounds of battle and the loss of comrades, to the disillusion and bitterness of failure.

Some popular songs were written by established artists who visited the bigger bases from time to time. Alexander Rozenbaum’s song ‘The Black Tulip’, about the planes which flew the coffins of dead soldiers back to the Soviet Union, and ‘We Will Return’, about Soviet prisoners of war, remained popular long after the war was over. Enterprising Afghan traders imported from the West recordings of songs that were frowned upon in the Soviet Union: the music of the Beatles and ABBA, and the songs of the immensely popular Soviet singer Bulat Okudzhava (1924–97), whose pieces hovered just this side of dissent and were not much appreciated by the authorities.

But the soldiers’ attitude towards the professional singers was ambivalent. However eloquently these people sang, they had not seen battle themselves. Their music was artificial, constructed for effect, and over it, some thought, hung an atmosphere of commercial exploitation. For the real thing the soldiers made their own music on the guitars they had taken with them to the war. Or they listened to the songs of the soldier-bards, the people who had shared their trials, songs which became very popular, to the consternation of the authorities. The songs were banned by the political censorship, and the customs officers on the frontier cracked down heavily on attempts to bring taped versions into the Soviet Union. None of this stopped the songs from circulating throughout the 40th Army.

The Afgantsy were acutely aware that their fathers and grandfathers had fought gloriously in the war against Hitler and there are self-conscious overtones almost of rivalry between the generations in the earlier songs. They were influenced by the songs of Vladimir Vysotski (1938–80), who had not fought in that war but had caught its spirit in many songs. They fastened on the poems of Kipling and his picture of Afghanistan, its people, and the fighting there. The authorities were less enthusiastic because Kipling was, they considered, an apologist for British