Even in 1983 the government was still trying to maintain the fiction that the Soviet troops were not engaged in combat, but merely fulfilling their ‘international duty’ to help the Afghan people. So the coffins were delivered to the families at dead of night. It was a futile precaution. On almost every occasion the word got out in advance, and the relatives, neighbours, and friends were already waiting when the lorry drove up, the wooden box was broken open, and the zinc coffin delivered to the family.
That first night, Blinushov and his comrades carried the coffin—it contained the body of a helicopter pilot— up seven flights of stairs to the apartment where the man’s wife lived, white-faced, unable to cry, clutching her new baby. A neighbour came in to help find somewhere for the coffin to rest. And then the young woman started to scream.
The soldiers somehow slid away, hurtled down the stairs, and rejoined their officer. He had been unable to face the scene and had remained in the lorry.
As time passed, commanders in Afghanistan would sometimes allow an officer or a
One young captain, a helicopter pilot, came to deliver the body of a comrade from the same squadron. He showed Blinushov photos—taken illegally, of course—of life in the field: soldiers dressed in an odd mixture of uniform and civilian clothes, and Afghan villages reduced to ruins. The young officer said that the helicopters sometimes had to attack villages when they were operating against the mujahedin. Of course women and children got killed too: he tried unconvincingly to maintain that they had been killed by the mujahedin. He was so nervous about how he would be received by his comrades’ family that he asked Blinushov—a private soldier—how he should behave.
He was right to be worried. When he arrived at the house of the dead man with his escort—several soldiers and a
The soldiers unpacked the wooden box and slowly took the coffin up into the apartment. It was crowded with relatives and neighbours, the mirrors were veiled in black, the women were wailing and the men were drunk. The captain stood awkwardly in the entrance, kneading his cap in his hands. When Blinushov told one of the women that the man had come all the way from Afghanistan to accompany his comrade, she rushed forward, saying, ‘Please, forgive us: he was our only son.’ Nervous at the prospect of being left alone, the captain tried to persuade Blinushov—they were by now on first-name terms, despite the difference in rank—to stay behind while everyone drank tea. But it was time to return to base and the soldiers left.8
It was not only men, of course, who returned to their homes in the zinc coffins. Alla Smolina’s friend Vera Chechetova was making the short fifteen-minute flight by helicopter from her outlying base into Jalalabad when her helicopter was shot down on 14 January 1987. She had refused to wear a parachute because it wouldn’t fit and because it would have spoiled her dress. It was only by the fragments of the dress that they were able to identify her body. At least, observed Smolina, that meant that her family got the right body when the coffin was delivered to them—something that by no means always happened.9
If a soldier went missing in action, his family was entitled to no support until his fate had been established. A
On the final day of the war, 15 February 1989, the Soviet military authorities had still not fully accounted for 333 soldiers who had gone missing in Afghanistan. Thirty-eight were definitely identified as having been taken prisoner. Forty-four had joined the mujahedin: seventeen of these had subsequently returned to the Soviet Union. To judge by their names, about a quarter of the missing and a quarter of those who served with the mujahedin were Muslims. Nineteen of the missing soldiers had managed to get abroad, to Canada, Switzerland, and the United States. Twenty-four were believed to be dead.11
These figures were refined in subsequent years as the authorities continued to try to discover what had happened to their soldiers. A ‘Presidential Committee for Soldier-Internationalist Affairs’ was set up just after the attempted coup against Gorbachev in August 1991. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was jointly sponsored by all the newly independent former Soviet republics. Ruslan Aushev, who himself served in Afghanistan for four and a half years with distinction, was the first chairman of the committee, a post he still held in 2010. The committee was responsible for defending the interests of veterans of the Soviet Union’s (and later Russia’s) local wars. But one of its main priorities was to establish the fates of those who had gone missing in the Afghan war, to bring home those who had survived, and to find and return the remains of those who had perished.
In November 1991 the journalist Vladimir Snegirev with two British colleagues, Rory Peck and Peter Joulwan, travelled from Tajikistan over the mountains to make contact with Ahmad Shah Masud, and through him with Soviet soldiers living in Afghanistan. In the course of fourteen days Snegirev managed to meet with six former Soviet soldiers. Four of them had deserted voluntarily to the mujahedin because of the treatment they had received in the army. Two had been taken prisoner. Most had converted to Islam and several had borne arms against their compatriots. Most refused to return home.12
At the end of 1991 Andrei Kozyrev, Yeltsin’s Foreign Minister, visited Pakistan to discuss the release of prisoners.13 In March 1992 President Yeltsin (1931–2007) and President Bush established a ‘Joint Commission on POWs and MIAs [missing in action]’, partly as a result of domestic pressure inside the United States to investigate stories that US servicemen captured during the Vietnam War or even during the Second World War had been held in the Soviet Union. This commission was also given the task of establishing the fates of Soviet servicemen who had gone missing in Afghanistan. The Americans provided kits for the identification of human remains which were used, among other places, in the military morgue in Rostov-on-Don, which still contained the unidentified bodies of Russian soldiers who had died in Chechnya. After the Americans entered Afghanistan in 2001 US forces were put under standing orders to pass on any relevant information they picked up.14
In 1998 Ruslan Aushev held talks with Masud, and his committee organised several expeditions to Pakistan and Afghanistan. The remains of four soldiers were recovered in 2003. Six more bodies were found in 2006.15 In May 2008 a further expedition made contact with five former soldiers who were still living in Afghanistan. One was Gennadi Tsevma from the Donetsk region, who was captured in 1983 and served with the mujahedin in the province of Kunduz. Two earlier attempts to persuade him to return home with his Afghan family and children had failed because he feared what might await him.16
By the twentieth anniversary of the Soviet withdrawal, in February 2009, Aushev was able to announce that the broad figures of those still missing had been whittled down to a total of 270, of whom fifty-eight, or about one- fifth, were Muslims. Twenty-two former soldiers had been found alive and most of these had returned home to Russia or to other former Soviet republics.17
Few Russian soldiers surrendered to the mujahedin voluntarily: their officers told them that surrender was equivalent to treason, and that they would be routinely subjected to torture if they fell into the hands of the enemy. Many preferred to destroy themselves first. But prisoners did fall into enemy hands from time to time, often because they had been wounded or otherwise incapacitated. Sometimes they were indeed killed in horrible ways. But often the mujahedin either exchanged them for men of their own in Russian or Afghan government hands, ransomed them, or used them as slaves. A number opted to go to Western countries, and their fates were naturally exploited by Western agencies as another stick with which to beat the Soviet adventure in Afghanistan. Those who did return to the Soviet Union were treated with various degrees of severity. Some were sentenced by court martial to various
