Afgantsy

their sons from going there at all. The second was to protest against the abuses of dedovshchina and to minimise them where they could. The third was to discover the fate of those who had perished in Afghanistan, especially those who had gone missing in action. The fourth was to secure the return of those who had been taken prisoner. The mothers’ movement was one of the first effective civil rights movements to be organised in the Soviet Union, and gathered strength as the Soviet political system began to loosen up under Gorbachev. And after the war was over, the mothers formed themselves into more formal bodies, standing up for soldiers’ rights and helping the conscripts sent to Chechnya.

Alla Smolina worked in the office of the military procurator in Jalalabad for nearly three years from the autumn of 1985. Her task was to manage the archives and documentation which passed through the office, and it was for the most part a depressing business. She dealt not with the records of the heroic officers and men fighting in the nearby mountains, but with the files of murderers, looters, rapists, drug addicts, deserters, self-mutilators, bullies, and thieves, complete with photographs of suicides, mutilated bodies, and mass graves. She had been present at one exhumation where among the remains there was a child’s tiny foot still in the rubber boot which had prevented it from decomposing. After a while, such things became routine, and Smolina—with some assistance from tobacco and alcohol—no longer reacted to them.

From time to time the procurator’s office received letters from the mothers of soldiers who had fallen foul of military law. It was a strict rule that these letters should be filed away unanswered: the correct channel for enquiries about individual soldiers was through their immediate commanders. But one letter attracted Smolina’s particular attention. It was from a Ukrainian woman who had become a single mother at seventeen. She had brought up her son, Viktor, her letter said, to be a good boy, more interested in literature than in drinking and fighting with his mates. Now he had stopped writing home and his mother was determined to know what had happened to him.

Smolina got down the file. Alas, Viktor, in despair at the bullying to which he had been subjected by the ‘grandfathers’, was under arrest for shooting himself in the legs. Military commanders usually tried to cover up such incidents by reporting them as accidents or the result of military action. But the doctors treating the victims could usually tell whether wounds had been self-inflicted or not. Once they had cured Viktor, they reported their medical findings to his commander, who placed him under arrest pending investigation.

Then it all went wrong. A Tajik soldier threw a grenade into the sleeping tent of the soldiers who had been bullying him, took a gun from the armoury, and made off. He was soon caught and locked up in the same guardroom as Viktor. There he persuaded Viktor to escape and get to America on one of the programmes for helping Soviet deserters. They broke out successfully, were picked up by the mujahedin, and were lucky enough to survive. Viktor converted to Islam.

At that point Smolina got another letter from Viktor’s mother. She had tried to get a job with the 40th Army. But she had failed. Now she had sold her possessions to buy an air ticket to Tashkent. From there she would wangle a lift into Afghanistan. Smolina did not tell her that Viktor was no longer in the country. She wrote urging Viktor’s mother not to move until the investigation was over.

That was the end of the correspondence. But it was not the end of the story. Smolina picked up a rumour from some helicopter pilots that a crazy young Ukrainian woman had tried to cross the frontier to see her soldier son who was in trouble. She had smuggled herself aboard a column of vehicles preparing to leave for the south but was caught. She had cadged lifts on helicopters. She had in the end been locked up by the local military police in Termez.

The woman in question was indeed Viktor’s mother. After the war Smolina tried but failed to track her down through official channels. Then, more than two decades later, she succeeded in reconstructing the story from scraps of information on the Internet. Viktor never got to America. He trained with the mujahedin in Pakistan, went back to Afghanistan, but did not actually fight against Soviet troops. He then made his way to Iran, contacted the Soviet Embassy there, and eventually returned to the Soviet Union.

The Rising in Badaber

Stories about Soviet defectors and former prisoners of war continued to surface for many years. An officer from the GRU is said to have deserted to the mujahedin, taking with him the names of Soviet and Afghan government agents. The mujahedin rounded up the agents and the officer helped to execute them. He then led a band of fighters against his former comrades before making his way to the West. A group of GRU officers swore to punish him. They eventually tracked him down and killed him in Poland, more than a decade after the war had ended.²³ At the end of 2009 eight Soviet soldiers who had remained in Afghanistan were said to be fighting with the Taliban against the forces of the US-led coalition.²⁴ One incident was hushed up at the time, but later became a legend: the rising on 26 and 27 April 1985 of Soviet and Afghan army prisoners of war held in the prison-fortress of Badaber, just south of Peshawar in Pakistan.

Badaber had been home from 1958 to 1970 to a US Air Force secret intelligence listening post, the 6937th Communications Group. It was from there that secret missions were flown by U2 reconnaissance aircraft into the Soviet Union, whose frontier was only two hundred miles away. Gary Powers took off from Badaber on the ill-fated flight which ended when he was shot down on 1 May 1961 over Sverdlovsk, deep inside the Soviet Union, thus triggering off a major East–West crisis.

During the war the fortress at Badaber was used for the storage of arms and ammunition, and as a training base for the fighters from Burhanuddin Rabbani’s Jamiat-i Islami. According to Rabbani, the base was entirely under his control: the Pakistan government did not attempt to interfere with what went on there. From 1983 Soviet and Afghan government prisoners were taken there to work in the ammunition stores and in the nearby quarries. They were kept in underground prison buildings—zindands. In 1985 there were about twelve Soviet prisoners there—most of whom had been captured by Masud’s men in the Pandsher Valley—and forty Afghan government soldiers and policemen. The men were worked very hard and the non-Muslims among them were given Muslim names as a preliminary to their conversion. It was by these names that their guards addressed them and by which they were expected to address one another.

At about six o’clock on the afternoon of Friday 26 April, so the story goes, most of the mujahedin guards were at prayer on the drill square. Only two were left to guard the prisoners. They were overpowered by a particularly powerful Ukrainian named Viktor Dukhovchenko (whose Muslim name was Yunos) and placed in the custody of one of the Afghan prisoners and a Soviet prisoner called Mohamed Islam. The other prisoners then broke into the armoury and seized the weapons. Their original plan was to make a break for freedom. But at this point the remaining guards were alerted by Mohamed Islam. They surrounded the compound and prevented the captives from escaping. The prisoners then barricaded themselves into the armoury, setting up heavy machine guns and mortars on the roof. Detachments of mujahedin and Pakistani army units including tanks and artillery were brought up, but their initial attempts to recapture the fortress were repelled.

Rabbani arrived at the base in the late evening to negotiate with the insurgents, promising them their lives if they surrendered. They demanded instead that they should be allowed to see the ambassadors of the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, and representatives of the Red Cross. They threatened to blow up the armoury if their demands were not met.

Rabbani rejected these demands. He narrowly missed being killed by a rocket fired by the insurgents and some of his bodyguards were seriously hurt. The following morning he ordered an all-out attack on the fort, supported by rocket artillery, tanks, and helicopters. The outcome was never in doubt, but it was determined when the armoury blew up and the prison was practically destroyed. Some say the building exploded when it was struck by an incoming shell; others that the insurgents blew it up themselves. Three of the insurgents survived, badly wounded. They were finished off with grenades. The explosion destroyed many of the attackers as well: some Russian accounts claim that 120 mujahedin were killed, along with up to ninety Pakistani regular soldiers and six American instructors.²⁵ The story later circulated that Soviet special forces were preparing to free the captives when the tragedy occurred.

The following day Gulbeddin Hekmatyar, the most extreme of the mujahedin leaders, issued an order to his men that in future no Russians were to be taken prisoner.

Neither the Soviet nor the Pakistani government had any interest in publicising these events. The Soviets