Afgantsy

imperialism in Afghanistan. Around the middle of the war a new theme emerged: nostalgia and sympathy for the White Guards, the soldiers who fought on the losing side of the civil war after the revolution in 1917 and who had upheld the heroism and discipline of Russian arms even as their country fell apart around them. The bards picked up the romances of those days about love and war and honour even in defeat. ‘[W]hy in the years of my youth did nobody publicly speak of the self-sacrifice of the White generals?’ wondered Alexander Karpenko, a bard and military interpreter. ‘And at this point my thoughts about the White Army’s role in the fate of Russia came to mingle with what was happening in Afghanistan. The prohibitions and silence which surrounded the White idea also stimulated the creative energies of the Afgantsy, including my own.’⁵⁷ Towards the end, the mood of the songs began to change. Nostalgia was replaced by bitter songs about the sense of futility and defeat which settled on the 40th Army as the country in whose name it had been fighting began to fall apart.

Most of the soldier-bards were officers, many from the special forces. Sergei Klimov wrote one of the first songs, about the explosion in the Afghan government communication centre which triggered off the attacks in Kabul in December 1979.⁵⁸ But Yuri Kirsanov is often regarded as the dean of the bards. He served with a special forces group called Karpaty, an offshoot of Kaskad. He joined the KGB in 1976 and when he was posted to Afghanistan in 1980 he took his guitar with him. He was stationed in Shindand. He found—bizarrely—that travelling on operations in a BTR stimulated his creative ingenuity. He and a colleague systematically recorded the sounds of Afghanistan on a small tape recorder—the call of the muezzin, the rattle of armoured vehicles, the noise of battle and the cry of the jackal—and he used them as the introduction to his own songs. These he recorded in ‘studio’ conditions—in the regimental bathhouse, where he worked at night, when the electric current was more or less stable and the noise of war had died away. He composed to express the emotions of war and the soldiers’ hopes for a safe return. ‘Kirsanov’s songs succeeded in doing what the professional artists were unable to do,’ remarked one journalist. ‘They preserved the real and genuine truth of the Afghan war.’⁵⁹

Igor Morozov studied in the prestigious Bauman Technical University and then worked for a while as an engineer in the defence industry, where he helped to develop the improved model of the infantry warhorse, the BMP-2 infantry fighting vehicle. But then his father, who had been in military intelligence during the Second World War, persuaded him to go into the First Directorate of the KGB, the foreign intelligence department, which he joined in August 1977. He was sent to Afghanistan in 1981 after two months’ special training, served for a while in Kunduz, and was then posted to command the detachment of Kaskad in Faisabad in 1982. The team consisted of three officers and a handful of soldiers. They lived in a villa on the edge of the town guarded by KhAD. They had three BTRs, of which only one worked, three GAZ jeeps, two machine guns, two mortars, and three tons of ammunition. Neither the team commander nor his deputy spoke the local languages, and for three months they were without an interpreter. No one knew what the situation was in the province. The soldiers were members of the KGB’s frontier force (pogranichniki), and they were on the books of the 40th Army for pay and rations. But the three officers depended on headquarters in Moscow, who simply forgot about them. Their pay was six months in arrears and they had to scrounge their rations from the soldiers. They had to get their experience from the soldiers as well: the soldiers had been in Afghanistan for six months, they could speak a few words of the language, and had some idea of the situation.⁶⁰

By then Morozov was already a committed songwriter: ironically, ‘Batalionnaya Razvedka’ (Battalion Reconnaissance), which he wrote in honour of his father in 1975, later became one of his most popular ‘Afghan’ songs. He had quickly concluded that ‘the patriotic songs and music recommended by the authorities were not understood or accepted by the soldiers, because they absolutely failed to reflect either the spirit or the character of the war. The first signs of moral and spiritual decay were already beginning to appear in the Limited Contingent.’ He believed that ‘A country’s songs tell you what is ailing it.’ He began by playing Kirsanov’s songs to his soldiers, but soon began to compose for himself. When the fierce sandstorms whipped up by the wind which the soldiers called the ‘Afganets’ blew for days at a time, operations would be called off and Morozov would use the break to write. Soon his songs, too, were circulating throughout the 40th Army: ‘The Return’ and ‘We’re Leaving’, about the final departure of the 40th Army; ‘The Convoy from Tulukan to Faisabad’, ‘Rain in the Mountains of Afghanistan’, ‘The Song of the Bullet’, about the fighting; ‘Guitar and Kalashnikov’, about the relationship between art and war; songs from an earlier age such as the 1930s hit ‘The Blue Balloon’.

Morozov finally left Afghanistan over the Salang Pass with the parachutists of the Vitebsk Division in 1989. Valeri Vostrotin’s 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment, which was guarding the pass, is said to have started every day with Morozov’s bitter song ‘We’re Leaving’. Morozov and his friends, by now elderly colonels in retirement, were still performing their songs two decades after the war was over.⁶¹

Most of the soldiers of the 40th Army were, of course, only too anxious to get away from the monotony and the fighting, to return home as soon as they could, to resume the lives which had been disrupted when they were issued with their call-up papers. Some—Lieutenant Kartsev and Sergeant Sergei Morozov—were to remember the years in Afghanistan as the best of their lives. More than one felt a pang as they left for the Soviet Union. ‘Suddenly they understood with blinding clarity that over there, in the future, there was nothing. All was dark, impenetrable, a vacuum. If you shouted, there would be no echo; if you hurled a stone, you would not hear it land. Life was carrying them into that emptiness, unmapped, unstoppable. From now on, everything lay in the past.’⁶²

– NINE – Fighting

Fighting, like soldiering, differs little from time to time or place to place. It is something that cannot be properly understood by those who have not been there. Even among the soldiers themselves, there is ‘a gulf between men just returned from action, and those who have not been in the show, as unbridgeable as that between the sober and the drunk’. The Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan fought for the same reasons as the British soldiers on the Somme, the Russians on the Eastern Front, the French in Indo-China and Algeria, and the Americans in Vietnam and Iraq: to do a job, for the sake of their fellow soldiers, to kill rather than be killed. Sometimes they broke. Sometimes they preferred a firefight to the frustration and boredom of soldiering. They rarely cared about the wider political implications of their war—their horizons were bounded by their platoon, their company, or their battalion. They counted the days until they could go home; and when they got home, some missed the comradeship and the rush of adrenalin. Life in battle had a meaning which civilian life could not match. An American soldier who fought in Afghanistan two decades later said, ‘People back home think we drink because of the bad stuff, but that’s not true… we drink because we miss the good stuff.’¹

Most of the fighting in Afghanistan was on a comparatively small scale: minor operations commanded by lieutenants, captains, and majors. The nearest the 40th Army got to real old-fashioned war was when it conducted large-scale operations to clear out a rebel stronghold, relieve rebel pressure on a town, or close the border with Pakistan. This was where the colonels and the generals had their chance to exercise their skill in the art of war. These sledgehammer blows involved thousands of troops, hundreds of armoured vehicles and helicopters, massive air and artillery strikes. They continued for weeks at a time and had few lasting results.

The Weapons

The men of the 40th Army were generously equipped with sophisticated weapons. Some achieved the status of icons—the Kalashnikov automatic rifle, the infantry fighting vehicle, the BMP (Boyevaya Mashina Pekhoty), and the battle helicopter, the Mi-24. But the weapons, like the men, had been intended for use against the armies of NATO. They now had to be adapted to a quite different kind of war. Determined attempts were made to improve the weapons systems. Designers and engineers regularly visited Afghanistan to listen to complaints and suggestions from the soldiers.² Some of the weapons the Russians brought with them turned out to