Afgantsy

the Netherlands in the sixteenth century, the Thirty Years War in Germany, the French occupation in Spain during the Napoleonic Wars, the Indian Rising in 1857, were all rich in such stories. Even the comparatively clean fighting on the Western Front in the First World War produced the stories, or rather the myths, of the Belgian nuns raped and murdered by German soldiers and the Canadian sergeant crucified with bayonets.

Atrocities are especially prevalent, and especially horrific, in civil wars, and in wars of intervention by a technologically superior force against a determined national insurgency. The figures can never be reliably established, and the facts are too easily twisted for the purposes of controversy. Western propaganda successfully portrayed the 40th Army as particularly brutal in its conduct of the war in Afghanistan. Accusations that the Russians used chemical weapons were common at the beginning of the war. They seem to have used some kind of tear gas at some time: but reports of the systematic use of lethal gases were never verified and eventually faded. There were stories that both sides used booby traps and explosive devices disguised to look like everyday objects such as watches and pens. Much play was made with the story, which figured in a UN report of 1985 as well as in Western propaganda, that the KGB deliberately designed mines to look like children’s toys, in order to sow a particularly vicious kind of terror among ordinary Afghans. The Russians countered with stories that this was a tactic of the mujahedin and published photographs to back their claim. The story may have had its origin in the tiny ‘butterfly’ mines made of brightly coloured plastic, which were scattered from helicopters along rebel trails and supply routes. They were supposed to deactivate themselves after a given period, but often the deactivation mechanism did not work. But these devices were not the product of the twisted imagination of the KGB’s engineers. They were directly copied from the American Dragontooth BLU-43/B and BLU-44/B mines, used in very large numbers in Indo-China. They were intended to maim rather than to kill, since a wounded soldier is more trouble to his comrades than a dead one. The official name of the Soviet version was PFM-1, but the soldiers called them lepestki (petals). It is not surprising that children should have found them attractive, and that they and their parents should have reported them to journalists as disguised toys. But the experts in the Mine Action Coordination Centre of Afghanistan, whose job it was to know about these things, believed that the story ‘gained a life for obvious journalist reasons—but it has we think no basis in widespread fact’.²⁴

Disillusion

Whatever overall judgement one comes to about the nature of the war in Afghanistan, one thing is clear. As the war progressed and devastation spread throughout the country, the politicians and generals who had looked for a quick resolution to their problem, and the enthusiasts who had hoped to contribute something to the future of Afghanistan, all began to despair.

The war in Afghanistan was supposed to be secret, and for the first few years the Politburo took drastic measures to ensure that it remained so. Soldiers posted to Afghanistan were told to keep quiet about it. Soldiers returning to the Soviet Union were not allowed into Moscow at the time of the Olympic Games in 1980, for fear that they would talk to the foreign visitors.²⁵ The local Voenkomats sternly ordered the families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan not to tell anyone of the circumstances of their death.²⁶ In the first few years of the war, the government made it as hard as it could for ordinary people to discover what was going on.

The official line was that Soviet soldiers were performing their ‘international duty’ in Afghanistan, but that this involved no fighting. The television carried endless programmes showing Soviet and Afghan soldiers locked in warm embraces, Soviet doctors treating Afghan children, military propaganda units winning hearts and minds, Soviet women meeting the women of Afghanistan, soldiers handing out food and medicine, smiles everywhere.

This led to many absurdities. In 1980, according to the writer Vladimir Voinovich, the censor objected to a passage in a film about Sherlock Holmes in which Holmes deduces that Watson has returned disillusioned from the Second Anglo-Afghan War: instead he was said to have returned from a war ‘in some Eastern country’.²⁷

As late as 1985, the year Gorbachev came to power, strict rules were still being formulated about what journalists could and could not publish about the war. A list drawn up by the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Ministry, signed by Kryuchkov and Varennikov, said that the media could report the death or wounding of Soviet military personnel in the execution of their military duty, the repulse of rebels’ attacks, and the execution of tasks connected with giving international help to the Afghan people. There was to be no reporting of military actions by units larger than a company, nor about battlefield experience. There was to be no direct television reporting from the battlefield. Journalists could report the heroism of soldiers who had been made Heroes of the Soviet Union, but not the details of the units in which they served.²⁸ Similar rules were applied by the British army in Afghanistan two decades later: journalists embedded with the military could be forbidden from reporting the composition of forces, details of military movements, operational orders, casualties, place names, tactics, names or number of ships, unit or aircraft and names of individual servicemen. The difference was that the later war was also covered by journalists operating independently of the British military, who could report as they liked if they were prepared to take the considerable risks involved.

Of course, once the coffins started coming home, it became practically impossible to maintain the fiction, despite the best efforts of the Politburo. The decision which they took on 30 July 1981 is a measure of how far out of touch these old men were with political reality, and how little they understood the real limits of their authoritarian power. It had been proposed that each bereaved family should be given a thousand roubles for a headstone on the grave. But Mikhail Suslov, the Politburo’s ideologist, asked, ‘[Is it] politically desirable at this point to raise memorials and write the whole story on the headstones? After all in some cemeteries there will be several such graves.’ Andropov agreed that, though of course the soldiers must be buried with honour, it was a bit too early to put up headstones, and the others concurred. Suslov concluded, ‘We must work out what to say in answer to parents whose children have died in Afghanistan. There should be no improvisation. The answers should be laconic and standardised.’²⁹

For years there were indeed no proper memorials. The fallen were not greeted on their return with military honour and municipal ceremony as—one soldier, Andrei Blinushov, bitterly noted at the time—they would have been in America. Instead they were returned to their families by night, buried in hugger-mugger, in a miasma of threats of retribution if the shroud of secrecy was broken. Official edict was tempered by individual acts of humanity, as it often is in Russia. But few government decisions were so bitterly resented as this one.

The government’s attempts to impose secrecy were futile from the start and began to fray almost at once. In July 1980 Andrei Sakharov reinforced his early call for the withdrawal of Soviet troops in an interview with American television from his place of exile in the Volga city of Gorki (after the collapse of the Soviet Union once again called Nizhni Novgorod). He backed the interview with an open letter to the Soviet leadership. ‘I am addressing you on a matter of the highest importance,’ he began. ‘The war in Afghanistan has already been going on for seven months. Thousands of Soviet people have been killed and tens of thousands of Afghans—not only partisans, but above all peaceful citizens, old men, women, children, peasants, and townspeople. More than a million Afghans have become refugees. There are particularly ominous reports of the bombing of villages suspected of helping the partisans, of the mining of mountain roads which threatens whole regions with starvation.’

Ordinary people may not have been as well informed or as courageous as Sakharov, and in later years many of them claimed that they had not realised what was going on in Afghanistan until Gorbachev opened things up with glasnost after 1985. It was not as simple as that. People were inhibited by the official news blackout and by a kind of self-censorship which was very widespread at the time. It was hard to break away from the conventions and conformities of Soviet life, especially for those who had originally supported the war. Many of those who knew what was going on—diplomats, politicians, scholars, advisers—were appalled by what they knew, but kept their mouths shut. ‘I’m ashamed to say that, until I learned better, I too divided everything into black and white, friends and enemies, revolution and counter-revolution. Now I remember that bitterly. But perhaps I didn’t want to think? Perhaps I was afraid to ask myself the difficult questions? Wasn’t it just easier to live that way? My consciousness had become set in concrete, and it was a lengthy journey from being imprisoned by dogma to understanding,’ the journalist Vladimir Snegirev wrote later. ‘One can hardly demand civic courage from people who lived in the [Brezhnev] era of stagnation and mouthed the standard phrases expected from them. Let everyone look into himself and, if he can, let him remember where, when, how, on what occasions he hid behind a falsehood, failed to stand