Afgantsy

magnetic stripes which meant that their provenance could be identified. So there was a real risk that the customs officials would relieve them of their money as well.³

Then the dembel would have to prepare his dress uniform. The less fortunate would dig out their old parade uniform, crumpled and dirty as it was, and soak it for a week in engine oil to restore the dark colour, clean it in petrol, and hang it out for a month to air. The belt would be brought to a brilliant white, its buckle to a dazzling shine, and an aiguillette braided out of parachute cord.⁴ Luckier soldiers might have been issued with the eksperimentalka, a new kind of uniform which was being tried out in Afghanistan from about 1985 and looked better than the standard outfit.

The departing soldier would also put together a dembelski albom, a scrapbook covering his time in Afghanistan, full of photographs, stories, drawings, diaries, and other material. This was frowned on by the military authorities, who feared that the photographs in particular might breach security. But their attempts to suppress the practice were unsuccessful.

On leaving their unit the departing soldiers would be addressed by the political officer, who would tell them what they could and could not talk about when they got home. The line was that the 40th Army was ‘great, powerful and morally healthy’. There was to be no mention of casualties or the brutal nature of the fighting. All photographs and films were to be destroyed. Needless to say, many soldiers ignored all these injunctions: luckily, because a great many of their photographs have survived.⁵

Vitali Krivenko’s dembelski akkord lasted from May until August 1987. The convention that dembels should not go on dangerous operations was waived in his case too. He had prepared all his kit ready for departure, when his regiment was sent off in July on an operation to clear the mujahedin out of Herat. For the first time in his service, he and his company of the 12th Guards Motor-rifle Regiment were landed by helicopter in the mountains in an attempt to cut off the rebels’ line of retreat. Six men in his company were wounded and a fully loaded ambulance helicopter was shot down. Krivenko got a small piece of shrapnel in his foot: a nearby parachute captain cut it out and he was little the worse. The mujahedin withdrew in good order; so did the Russians, licking their wounds and carrying their dead. On their way back, Krivenko and his company were sent off on an unsuccessful attempt to intercept a caravan, shot up a couple of villages where the caravan might have been hiding, and got back to base on 1 August.⁶

He and the four other soldiers who were due to leave were up until midnight shaving, packing, sorting out their uniform, and scurrying round the base trying to raise money. He hid his money among some sweets at the bottom of his bag, and a couple of cakes of cannabis in a box of Indian tea, and was ready for the journey.

Next morning their officers thanked them for their service, wished them well, and sent them off by road to Shindand, and thence by air to Tashkent. There Krivenko was pleasantly surprised that the customs officials merely asked if they had any weapons or drugs; when they said, ‘No,’ they were allowed to go on their way. They were lucky. They met another group of returning soldiers who were so incensed by the behaviour of the customs officials that they refused to hand over their presents and started to smash them up instead. An ugly scene was averted only when an officer intervened and ordered the customs officials to let the goods through.

Tashkent was seething with returning soldiers, but Krivenko and his comrades were mystified that there was no vodka to be had: they had not appreciated the impact of Gorbachev’s ban on alcohol. They made do with cannabis instead. The police and the military patrols ignored them.

On the train, it turned out that the conductor did have vodka to sell. The soldiers settled down to drink, play their guitars, and tell their tales. The passengers at first seemed afraid of them, but then decided that they were not bloodthirsty murderers after all. There was only one unfortunate incident. As the bottles were emptied, the conductor put the price up outrageously. The soldiers went to his cabin, had a firm word with him, and relieved him of his remaining bottles. They heard no more from him and finished their journey in peace.

Black Tulips

The majority of those who served in Afghanistan returned home, safe, sick, wounded, or disabled. But many of them did not. The return of the dead was an altogether grimmer affair. The ultimate symbol of the war for many Russians was the Black Tulip, the big AN-12 four-engined cargo plane—the equivalent of the American Hercules— that brought the bodies of the fallen back from Afghanistan. For decades after the war Alexander Rozenbaum’s song ‘The Black Tulip’ could still bring a Russian audience to its feet in silent homage to the dead. There were several stories about how the planes got their romantic name, none of them authenticated.

The nightmare started back in Afghanistan, where the bodies were prepared in the regimental or divisional morgues for their journey home. The morgues were usually in tents or small huts, sometimes with a few more tents attached, on the edge of the garrison territory, under the command of a lieutenant. Inside the morgue there would be a metal table, where the corpse was be cleaned, repaired as far as possible, and dressed in its uniform. It was then placed in a zinc coffin and the lid soldered down. Marked ‘Not to be opened’, the coffin was placed in a crude wooden box, on which the name of the deceased was stencilled. The box was now ready to be loaded on to the Black Tulip.

The temperature, the humidity, and the stench inside the morgue made the work unbearable for the young conscripts sweltering in their rubber aprons and gloves, although it had the advantage that you did not have to risk your life out on an operation. The men were perpetually drunk and lived in a world of their own. It was bad luck to cross their path if you were going out on a mission and the other soldiers avoided them. They ate at their own separate table in the canteen, glad not to get on friendly terms with men whose torn bodies they might later find themselves piecing together in the morgue.

Indeed it was often difficult to identify the bodies, or to be sure that the right coffin had been given the right name. On his arrival in Afghanistan, Sergei Nikiforov was put in charge of a little medical unit on the strength of a half-completed medical training before the war. He was taken by the doctor, a major, to see the regimental morgue. It was a small hut surrounded by tents. The smell hit him even before he entered. Inside, two soldiers, completely drunk, were picking through a pile of body parts. Another soldier wheeled in a trolley on which there was a long tin box. The two soldiers filled the box with a collection of human bits and pieces which seemed to bear some resemblance to one another, then the box was sent off for the lid to be welded on.

‘How many so far?’ the major asked.

‘That was the twentieth. Five more to go.’

Once outside, the major poured so much alcohol into Nikiforov that his eyes nearly popped out. ‘Don’t worry,’ said the major. ‘You’ll see worse than that before you’re finished. Try not to drink yourself to death, though you’ll find it difficult. What you’ve just seen doesn’t happen all that often. A reconnaissance patrol was ambushed, the mujahedin chopped them to pieces, put them in sacks, commandeered a lorry, and sent them back to us as a present.’⁷

For the journey back to the Soviet Union, the boxes were given the neutral code name ‘Cargo 200’. Andrei Blinushov, a soldier from Ryazan in central Russia, who in later life became a writer and human rights activist, was called up in the spring of 1983 and sent off to serve in the headquarters platoon of the garrison in Izhevsk in the Urals. Late one night, some of the grandfathers were called out to pick up a ‘Cargo 200’. They barely looked up from their television sets, but delegated the task immediately to their juniors. And that was how Blinushov first came across the Black Tulip.

He and his comrades were taken by the political officer of the HQ platoon, an apparently self-confident lieutenant, straight to the local airport and right up to a large cargo plane standing in the darkness. The hold of the Black Tulip was packed with large boxes, crudely knocked together in wood, piled three high, each with a name scribbled on it. Inside was a praporshchik, blind drunk, who ordered them to load the boxes on to their truck and take them to the city morgue.

It was a small building and it was already full of corpses. So the boxes—by now Blinushov had gathered that they contained the bodies of soldiers who had died in Afghanistan—were piled in the corridor. No proper death certificates had been filled out before the bodies had been sealed in their zinc coffins and then cased in wood. So —without any means of checking whether the contents of the coffins matched the names on the boxes—the morgue officials solemnly wrote out the documentation without which the coffins could not be delivered for burial to the relatives of the dead.