Afgantsy

though I and my comrades knew that our country had got itself into a dead end, we never doubted the final objective—liberty, fraternity, and equality for everyone on the planet. Even the cynics believed in their hearts in the justice of their mission as “warrior-internationalists” in Afghanistan.’³⁹

For most soldiers, indeed, doubt and criticism were not an option. People have blamed the army and its leadership for going along with the criminal policies of the political leadership, wrote General Lyakhovski. ‘But when an army begins to choose which orders it will carry out and which it will not, it ceases to be an army. It is an old truth that an army does not act in accordance with anything except its orders. It bows neither to common sense nor to necessity nor to anything else. That is what distinguishes it from any other institution. That is what makes it vulnerable.’⁴⁰

People Turn against the War—and the Army

In 1982 a newsreader on the Soviet overseas broadcasting service called Danchev started inserting phrases into his English-language broadcasts such as ‘The people of Afghanistan are playing an important role in the struggle to defend their country against the Soviet occupiers’ and ‘The tribes living in Kandahar and Paktia provinces have joined the struggle against the Soviet invaders.’ Danchev’s words were played back into the Soviet Union by the foreign broadcasters. Surprisingly, he kept out of trouble for a year. But in May 1983 he overreached himself and attacked the Soviet invasion in three separate bulletins, one after the other. He was expelled from the Party, sacked from his job, and put into a psychiatric hospital.

By then, however, public opinion in the Soviet Union was also turning against the war, and criticism was becoming more vocal and widespread among ordinary people. Letters were coming into Soviet Party bodies and newspapers from all over the country, especially from those who had relatives fighting in Afghanistan or who had lost them there. Shershnev did an analysis of the letters reaching Komsomolskaya Pravda which was passed on to Marshal Sokolov, the head of the Ministry of Defence’s Operational Group in Afghanistan. The analysis showed how much ordinary people knew about the war even in the first years, and how little they believed in the official propaganda about the soldiers doing their ‘international duty’, defending the April 1978 Revolution, and helping the Afghan people.

Most of the letters were from mothers whose sons had been killed, or were serving in Afghanistan or due to be called up. Others came from soldiers’ sisters and fiancees, or from boys of military age. The letters touched on a variety of themes. There was grief for sons and contemporaries who had died in the war, and fear for those who might be sent there. Parents with only one son suffered in particular. Some correspondents roundly asserted that there was no justification for what was going on in Afghanistan: ‘The blood of our sons is being spilled in a foreign land for the interests of foreigners’; ‘He died without honour or glory in a foreign land’; ‘What right does our government have to keep our forces in Afghanistan?’ Service in Afghanistan carried no prestige: one writer compared it with being sent to forced labour in exile. Feeling against the war was growing: the Afghan Communist regime was supported by Soviet bayonets. ‘It’s their revolution, let them defend it.’ People complained about the indifference and callousness of the authorities’ attitude and the bureaucratic way they dealt with the relatives of those who had died. They made requests and suggestions for commemorating them. They complained about the inadequacy of official information: ‘How revolting it is to read the articles about Afghanistan in the newspapers, nothing but soothing rubbish!’⁴¹

Opinion turned not only against the war, but against the soldiers who had fought in it, even though most of them had been unwilling conscripts. Stories of the brutality of the war, the massive destruction of villages, livelihoods, and civilian lives, were now becoming widespread. Few seemed to pause to think that it was unjust to blame the individuals who had been sent to fight by their political leaders in a war of intervention which by its nature was likely to be particularly atrocious. One young woman from a middle-class background first heard about the involvement of Soviet troops in Afghanistan right at the beginning, when she was in a Komsomol camp in the winter of 1980. She was fourteen at the time. She and her friends knew that they were not meant to talk about what they had heard and they did not criticise what had happened. But nobody tried to defend it either. Two years later she feared her boyfriend might get drafted and told his father, who was in the military, that the war was a crime.

By the time she got to Moscow University in 1983 rumours were beginning to circulate about the terrible atrocities committed by Soviet soldiers. She was shocked by the story she was told by one of her fellow students, who had served in Afghanistan. A couple of shots came from a village his unit thought it had secured. By then it was dark, and instead of going into the village to find the sniper, the commander ordered it to be destroyed by artillery. The students were told that the mujahedin were using butterfly bombs supplied by the Americans to maim children, and blame the Soviet soldiers. But then in 1988 she heard on the radio that it was the Russians themselves who were using the butterfly bombs and she was sick at the thought of what was happening to the children.

She believed that the veterans who had been through such experiences could not have remained healthy and normal people, that they all took drugs, that all they knew about was killing, that they would all end up in the Mafia or the protection business, that they would never be able to integrate back into society. At that time she felt no sympathy for them: her impression of the Afgantsy was of a dark menacing force that was beyond help and needed to be managed.

By the late 1980s the Soviet press was full of stories about the war. For people of her education and age, who were in Moscow in good schools at that time, Afghanistan was a terrible crime, the invasion was inexcusable, and the war had to be stopped by all means. They compared it with the American war in Vietnam and the atrocities committed there. They looked for parallels in the American movies The Deer Hunter and Platoon. They were never impressed by the argument that the soldiers were only obeying orders. They found the entire concept of that war repulsive.

In the 1990s her attitude began to change. The only two Afghan veterans she knew well were very happy and friendly and normal. One was legendary for his happy and sunny outlook and his love for life. Another chose to interrupt his studies in MGIMO, the elite Moscow State Institute for International Relations, in order to serve in a special forces unit in Afghanistan. He too was an extremely happy person, very extroverted and artistic. She understood that the soldiers in Afghanistan were ordinary boys who had had no choice but to serve when and where they did.⁴²

The criticism of the army’s performance in Afghanistan grew manyfold once it became possible to publish such things openly after Gorbachev introduced a measure of freedom in the Soviet press. The contrast between the feeling that they had suffered much, but done their duty, and the attitudes of indifference or even hostility that they encountered among their own people was one of the hardest things the soldiers had to bear when they eventually got home.

The bitterness was forcefully expressed by Vladimir Plastun and Vladimir Andrianov, both of whom were in Afghanistan during the war: ‘We have to try to get at [the fundamental reasons why our policy got into a dead end in Afghanistan], even though it is painful. It is not pleasant to look at the evil you have done, even though you may have convinced yourself that you were proceeding from the best motives. But it is essential to do that, because the word “Afghanistan” will be associated for many years in the consciousness of honest Soviet citizens with the shame of the Russian people, a stain on the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the blood of our boys, and the incomprehensible tasks that were given to them (if indeed any such tasks existed), and with the hatred of those who sent us into the “Afghan quagmire” and raised up so much hatred towards us.’⁴³

These emotions did not swell into open anti-government protests, as feeling against the Vietnam War had done a decade earlier in America. The massive public demonstrations in the great cities of the Soviet Union still lay in the future and were directed not against the war, which by then was over, but against the fundamental tenets and pillars of the Soviet regime, the Communist Party, the secret police, the injustice, and the economic mismanagement. But they provided a political background which the country’s leaders were increasingly unable to ignore as they struggled to find a way out of the mess they had got themselves into in Afghanistan.