hospitality and vendetta, the rituals surrounding birth, marriage, and death. It continued with some simple rules of behaviour: remember that you are a representative of the army and be worthy of your historical mission; know and respect the customs of the local people, even if they do not correspond with your own; be very careful to respect Afghan women; do not interfere with a Muslim at prayer and do not go into a mosque without a very good reason; beware of enemy spies; do not drink water from irrigation canals; do not leave camp or accept hospitality without permission. There were strict injunctions against trading, especially in narcotics. The booklet concluded: ‘Soldier, remember!… you are criminally responsible for military crimes under the Criminal Code, whether committed negligently, carelessly, or deliberately.’ Deliberate killing could be punished by up to ten years; the death penalty could be imposed if there were aggravating circumstances, which included being drunk. Robbery with violence and smuggling into the Soviet Union could both be punished by up to ten years in prison.
These were not idle threats. The Soviet military prosecutors in Afghanistan had to deal with the whole range of military crimes: murder, looting, rape, drug addiction, desertion, self-mutilation, theft, and random violence against the population. Those they found guilty were given harsh sentences of imprisonment, sent to disciplinary battalions back in the Soviet Union, and occasionally shot. At one time the notorious prison in Pul-i Charkhi outside Kabul held two hundred Russian soldiers accused of a variety of offences against the Afghan population, including murder. By the end of the war over two thousand five hundred Soviet soldiers were serving prison sentences, more than two hundred for crimes of premeditated murder.2
Until the files of the Military Prosecutor’s office are opened it is not possible to arrive at any reliable overall figures. Those that are available are very patchy. A senior general speaking to the commanders of the 40th Army in 1988 claimed that in 1987 the number of crimes went down to 543 compared with 745 the previous year. He named several units whose record was particularly poor: reconnaissance units, which were notoriously free and easy about discipline, the air force, the 108th and 201st Motor-rifle Divisions, the 66th and 70th Independent Motor-rifle Brigades, the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment. Altogether, according to another source, 6,412 criminal charges were preferred against soldiers in Afghanistan, including 714 cases of murder, 2,840 cases of weapons sales to Afghans, and 534 drug-trafficking offences.3
Despite the sanctions, soldiers committed many brutal acts individually or in groups. The excuse often was, ‘They did it to us, so we have a right to do it to them.’ Soviet commanders made a point of telling their men the stories of Russian prisoners being executed or tortured by the mujahedin, the mutilated bodies left for their comrades to find. The stories were not untrue: they belonged, after all, to an old tradition in Afghanistan, to which Kipling bore witness. One minor mujahedin leader boasted that he had made a practice of half-skinning Russian prisoners after a successful ambush, and leaving them alive, surrounded by booby traps, to catch the Soviet rescue teams.4 Varennikov described what happened when a raid by a company of the 22nd Special Forces Brigade ended in disaster in April 1985 in the eastern mountains of the Kunar province, scene of some of the Americans’ most vicious fighting twenty years later. The company had not expected opposition. They were ambushed and thirty-one were killed. In recovering their bodies, the Soviet forces lost three more men. It was clear that seven of the soldiers had killed themselves rather than surrender. The others had been mutilated or burned alive. Varennikov went to see the survivor, a sergeant who had lost his mind.5
The soldiers committed their crimes sometimes in cold blood, more often in the heat or aftermath of battle. ‘The thirst for blood… is a terrible desire,’ wrote one of them. ‘It is so strong that you cannot resist it. I saw for myself how the battalion opened a hail of fire on a group that was descending towards our column. And they were OUR soldiers, a detachment from the reconnaissance company who had been guarding us on the flank. They were only two hundred metres away and we were 90 per cent sure they were our people. And nevertheless—the thirst for blood, the desire to kill at all costs. Dozens of times I saw with my own eyes how the new recruits would shout and cry with joy after killing their first Afghan, pointing in the direction of the dead man, clapping one another on the back, and firing off a whole magazine into the corpse “just to make sure”… Not everyone can master this feeling, this instinct, and stifle the monster in his soul.’
Vanya Kosogovski, a soldier from Odessa in the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment, was a cheerful fellow, liked by everyone. His company was sent out by helicopter to follow up an intelligence report about a village some fifteen miles away from the regimental base. On the way the gunners amused themselves by machine- gunning a herd of oxen and sheep: their excuse was that they were denying the mujahedin their supplies. After shooting up the village itself, the soldiers landed to comb through it. In one house Kosogovski noticed a small door and heard people breathing behind it. Above the door was a small aperture. He took a grenade, pulled out the pin, shoved it through the hole, and followed the explosion with a burst from his gun. When he kicked down the door, he saw the results of his handiwork. An old woman lay dead, a younger woman was still breathing, seven children aged between one and five lay beside them, some still moving. Kosogovski emptied his magazine into the heaving mass and followed it up with another grenade.
‘I don’t know why I did it,’ he said later. ‘I was beside myself. Perhaps I didn’t want them to suffer. Anyway, I would have had the military police on my back.’ And indeed, he might well have ended up in a disciplinary battalion, had his officers not covered up the affair.6
On 14 February 1981 a reconnaissance patrol of eleven soldiers from the 66th Independent Motor-rifle Brigade led by a senior lieutenant broke into a house in a village near Jalalabad. There they found two old men, three young women, and five or six children. They raped and shot the women and then shot the rest, except for one small boy, who hid himself and survived to be a witness. General Maiorov, the Chief Soviet Military Adviser in Kabul from June 1980 to November 1981, immediately ordered an investigation. The perpetrators confessed and were arrested. Fearing that the mujahedin leadership would use the incident as an excuse to launch a countrywide jihad, Maiorov strengthened the security regime in the major cities. And he apologised for the incident to the Afghan Prime Minister, Ali Sultan Keshtmand.
He immediately came under pressure to change the story from the Soviet Ambassador, from the KGB representative in Kabul, and from the Ministry of Defence and the KGB in Moscow. The KGB claimed to have information that the atrocity had been carried out as a deliberate provocation by mujahedin dressed in Soviet uniforms. Why, demanded Ogarkov, the Chief of Staff, was Maiorov trying to blacken the good name of the Soviet army? Ustinov, the Minister of Defence, hinted that if Maiorov did not change his tune he would not be re-elected to the Central Committee at the forthcoming meeting of the XXVIth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Maiorov held out. He was not re-elected to the Central Committee. But Karmal complained directly to Brezhnev, who gave orders for condign punishment. The perpetrators of the crime were sentenced to death or to long terms of imprisonment. The brigade commander, Colonel Valeri Smirnov, was severely reprimanded. The brigade itself was on the verge of being disbanded, saved only by its glorious record in the Second World War.7
Even senior officers could be punished for allowing their troops to commit excesses. After the fifth Pandsher operation in May–June 1982, the commander of the 191st Independent Motor-rifle Regiment, Lieutenant Colonel Kravchenko, was court-martialled and sentenced to ten years for shooting prisoners. The commander of the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment, Colonel Alexander Shebeda, was dismissed in April 1986 after he had been in the job only six months. Twenty prisoners had been captured on a raid and brought back to the base at Faisabad. Shebeda put them into the overnight custody of the reconnaissance company. The company had recently suffered losses and was still smarting. The men killed the prisoners and threw the bodies into the River Kochka. There was a scandal and Shebeda was relieved of his command.8
These were individual crimes, which the 40th Army could try to prevent or punish more or less effectively. Others were inherent in the nature of the war against a determined but elusive enemy who could merge almost at
