Afgantsy

up for the truth, didn’t oppose injustice. No doubt all of us can draw up our own secret list.’³⁰

Nevertheless the news seeped through even this veil of self-censorship. Within little more than a month from the invasion, stories were circulating in Moscow that the hospitals in Tashkent were full of wounded soldiers, that aircraft were flying home with coffins, that mourning portraits were being displayed in several Moscow institutions that had sent their specialists to Afghanistan. Soldiers, journalists, nurses, and civilian officials were already returning; and they were gossiping despite the ban. Soldiers told their mothers, the mothers told their neighbours. The rumours spread like wildfire and were often exaggerated in the telling.³¹ Alexander Kartsev, the young intelligence officer who was then still a military cadet, heard at his sister’s wedding in January 1980 from a soldier who had taken part in the storming of Amin’s palace only a few weeks earlier. There was a relentless torrent of news about Afghanistan on foreign radio stations broadcasting to the Soviet Union. And once the zinc coffins started to turn up in small villages and towns throughout Russia, the cat was out of the bag. As one reader wrote to Komsomolskaya Pravda a couple of years into the war, ‘Don’t try to hush things up: a soldier writes home, and the whole village knows; a coffin comes home, and the whole region knows.’³²

The Critics Speak Out

Some brave spirits discreetly tried to bring their superiors to a sense of what was really going on. A Pravda correspondent called Shchedrov wrote to the Central Committee as early as November 1981 to say that the Afghan government was failing completely to take back the countryside from the rebels. People were willing to cooperate with the authorities, but on one condition—that they were adequately protected against retaliation by the government forces. This condition could not be met even in the vicinity of major Soviet bases: the authorities might control the territory by day, but the rebels controlled it by night. Even successful military operations, apparently, could not alter this basic fact.³³

A persistent critic was Colonel Leonid Shershnev. He made a habit of going into the villages, listening to what the inhabitants had to say and trying to understand their needs. It was he who had helped to write the pamphlet on Afghan traditions and culture which was handed out to officers and men of the 40th Army. In 1981 he was involved with the 190th Military Agitation Propaganda Detachment (BAPO), one of a number of units formed to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people.³⁴ The detachment contained a Soviet doctor, a cinema operator, a youth adviser, two or three political officers, a group of young Afghan artists, Party propagandists, and a mullah. The plan was for the group to go into the villages north of Kabul to hand out food, cure the sick, and show films to the peasantry. Some shine was taken off the enterprise because it had to be escorted by a couple of armoured personnel carriers and a flail tank to clear mines. The simple view of the cheerful tank commander was that the only good Afghan was a dead Afghan.

Shershnev concluded that the war was bound to escalate unless the army was involved not only in fighting, but in helping the local people. He wrote in a report to his superiors, ‘Since the end of March 1981 the military and political situation almost everywhere in Afghanistan has ground to a halt. The position in the country is now worse than it was in the same period last year. It is striking that the situation has become extremely serious even in regions where there were no large rebel bands, and where the geographical conditions are not conducive to their activities (the north, the plains, the areas bordering on the USSR). That means that part of the population which consists of national minorities related to peoples in the USSR (Uzbeks, Turkmens, Tajiks), who had previously adopted a wait and see attitude, have now joined in the fight against the people’s power [the Communist government] and the Soviet forces.

‘The enemy are striking in the most sensitive places: they are killing Party activists, patriots (including village elders), they are getting astride all the strategic lines of communication and interrupting transport, they are destroying important economic objects (they have blown up two drilling rigs at the Ainaksk copper mine each worth 200,000 roubles), schools (they have destroyed 1,400 already), hospitals, administrative buildings. Agriculture is suffering serious losses: the number of cattle is falling irreversibly… The rebels have succeeded in driving the people’s power out of a number of districts and regions which were liberated last winter, and have imposed counter-revolutionary organs of power (the so-called “Islamic committees”).’ He went on to criticise the Afghan political leadership and army. He praised the military skill of the rebels, and warned that they would not only be able to resist the weak Kabul regime for a long time, but would also be able to show a determined opposition to the Soviet forces.

When he put these ideas to his superiors, the deputy commander of the 40th Army told him that his job was to think of his soldiers, not the Afghans. He appealed to Akhromeev, who listened to him attentively, but then told him, ‘The army exists to fight. It’s not its job to get mixed up in politics.’³⁵

Shershnev was not alone. Even so senior a figure as General Alexander Maiorov, the Chief Soviet Military Adviser in the early part of the war, soon came to the view that the war in Afghanistan was unwinnable. He never abandoned the belief that the Soviet Union had followed its legitimate interests by intervening in Afghanistan: the intervention was a consequence of the Cold War logic which led each of the superpowers to try to steal a march on the other wherever it could. But Afghans he respected, some of them serving officers in the Afghan army, told him that Afghanistan could not be conquered; it could perhaps be bought, but the Soviet Union was not rich enough for that. Babrak Karmal, he could see for himself, was weak, and often drunk. He concluded that Karmal should be replaced and that the Soviet Union should withdraw its forces as soon as it could.³⁶

In 1984 Shershnev went further, and wrote a long and critical report directly to the General Secretary of the Party, Konstantin Chernenko. He said that military operations in Afghanistan had taken on the character of punitive campaigns, the civilian population was treated with systematic and massive brutality, weapons were used casually and without justification, homes were destroyed, mosques defiled, and looting was widespread. ‘We have got ourselves into a war against the people, which is without prospects.’

Surprisingly, Shershnev got away with it. Chernenko scribbled on his report, ‘Shershnev is not to be touched.’ Shershnev was not sidelined or expelled from the armed forces, partly because he was protected by like-minded senior officers such as General Dmitri Volkogonov, who at that time was head of the Main Political Directorate of the Armed Forces. But his promotion was delayed, and in the end his career came up against the buffers and he resigned from the army in 1991.

Another military critic, Colonel Tsagolov, was less lucky. In August 1987 he wrote a personal and highly critical letter to Yazov, the Minister of Defence. He said in round terms that the Soviet military effort in Afghanistan had produced no results: ‘Huge material resource and considerable casualties did not produce a positive end result.’ Najibullah’s Policy of National Reconciliation would not lead to a breakthrough in the military or political situation, since the regime was rejected in the villages, where most Afghans lived. The PDPA was a broken reed and past saving and the idea of a coalition between the PDPA and any of the seven party leaders in Pakistan was an illusion. Tsagolov recommended ‘radical measures’ to help progressive forces preserve democracy in Afghan society, and rebuild friendship between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan. These thoughts were too abstract to be of any use. After Yazov failed to respond, Tsagolov took them to Ogonek, the campaigning newspaper, and was sacked from the army.³⁷

There was dissatisfaction lower down the army as well. Rastem Makhmutov was a professional soldier, a praporshchik. He arrived in Afghanistan with the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment. Six months after he returned to the Soviet Union in the autumn of 1982, he resigned from the army in protest. Other officers who did the same had to apply several times to get out; there would be warnings and harassment, and some had to face a Court of Honour. Makhmutov was comparatively lucky. He got out of the army unscathed and was employed for a while as a test engineer in a factory building rocket engines, where he regularly gave talks about the war to his fellow workers, illustrated with the photographs he had taken in Afghanistan, much to the irritation of the authorities. Then for a while he lived an alternative lifestyle as a bearded goatherd on the Volga. Finally he settled down to run a small business in Moscow.³⁸

The main priority of the ordinary soldiers, as with most soldiers in most wars, was not to worry about the politics, or to change the course of events, but to fight as best they could, support their comrades in a scrimmage, and get home safe and sound. ‘The propaganda in the Soviet Union was very strong,’ said Alexander Gergel, the sergeant gunner from the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment. ‘However bizarre it may seem today and even