Afgantsy

PART III The Long Goodbye

Down from the heights which once we commanded,
With burning feet we descend to the ground.
Bombarded with calumny, slander and lies,
We’re leaving, we’re leaving, we’re leaving.

Farewell, you mountains, you know best
What men we were in that far land;
Now judge us fairly for what we did,
You chair-bound critics who stayed at home.

Farewell, you mountains, you know best
The price we paid while we were here,
What foes unconquered still survive;
What friends we had to leave behind.

Farewell, bright world, Afghanistan,
Perhaps we should forget you now.
But sadness grips us as we go:
We’re leaving, we’re leaving, we’re leaving.

Igor Morozov, May 1988¹

– ELEVEN – Going Home

The system in the 40th Army for bringing in new recruits and demobilising the veterans was shot through with its own rituals and conducted with that mixture of inefficiency, brutality, and creative flexibility characteristic of the Soviet system as a whole.

As professionals, officers could usually count on getting home leave at least once during their time of service in Afghanistan. Leave was not always a satisfactory experience, even for those who could get it. Wives and other female relatives expected presents from the exotic markets of Afghanistan, which you could not always get through the customs. And the men would ask you how many people you had killed. The contrast between the reality of the fighting and the almost total inability of the civilians to understand what was really going on was sometimes too much to bear. Like British officers who came home from the trenches in France during the First World War, Soviet officers would sometimes cut short their leave in order to return to the raw but familiar simplicities of the fighting.¹

Demobilisation

The conscript soldiers were not entitled to go home on leave, though they would be sent to the Soviet Union if they were sufficiently badly wounded, and could sometimes get back for compassionate reasons, such as the death of a very close family member. Their lives were subject to a different rhythm. Twice a year—usually on 27 March and 27 September—the Soviet press would carry a Prikaz, an order signed by the Minister of Defence, setting the date for the demobilisation of soldiers called up two years previously. The Prikaz for March 1985 read:

In accordance with the Law of the USSR ‘On universal military service’, I order:

1. Personnel who have completed the period of active military service laid down are to be released from the ranks of the Soviet army, the navy, the frontier and internal forces into the reserve in April–June 1985.

2. In connection with the release into the reserve of military personnel, as indicated in point 1 of the present order, male citizens who have reached the age of 18 before the call-up date are to be called up for active service in the Soviet army, the navy, the frontier and internal forces, as are older citizens of military age who no longer have the right to deferment.

3. This order is to be promulgated in all companies, batteries, squadrons, and ships.

Minister of Defence of the USSR,

Marshal of the Soviet Union S. Sokolov

The long-awaited publication of this order set off a flurry of activity among those due for demobilisation. These soldiers were known in army jargon as dembels, and the process of military bureaucracy and traditional ritual which accompanied them on their departure was obscurely named the dembelski akkord, which covered the period—perhaps three months, the stodnevka, or ‘hundred days’—from the publication of the Prikaz to the date on which the soldier actually left Afghanistan.

There was an understanding that the dembels should not be sent on dangerous operations during this period. Vitali Krivenko refers to an order to this effect by the Ministry of Defence, which he believed was a response to the letters the Ministry was receiving from the parents of soldiers who were killed on the eve of their return.² The understanding was often breached in practice. One group due for demobilisation in February 1987 spent the two previous months on an operation, and arrived back in camp at night, unshaven and dirty, hours before they were due to leave for the Soviet Union. They managed to scrub themselves down and shave, their comrades cut their hair for them, and by the morning they were on parade by the regimental headquarters, smartened up and ready to leave.

The rituals of departure varied. The dembel’s comrades would have a whip-round so that he could buy presents for the people back home. But there was an official rule that only goods which had been bought in the army shops could be taken back to the Soviet Union. Things bought in the Afghan shops— Japanese tape recorders, cameras, designer clothing, trainers, everything that the soldiers most wanted—risked being confiscated by the Soviet customs officials, who, the soldiers suspected, simply took them for themselves. This was true even of the modest things that were all most ordinary soldiers could afford: a scarf for one’s mother, cosmetics for one’s girlfriend, a Japanese watch, condoms, musical picture postcards, to say nothing of the pornography with which Afghanistan was by then awash. Some soldiers decided it would be simpler to buy their presents back in Tashkent. But there was a problem here too: the soldiers got hold of Afghan notes and Soviet military currency by a variety of means, most of them illegal. Rates of exchange varied and some notes had