Afgantsy

were still maintaining that the ‘Limited Contingent of Soviet Forces in Afghanistan’ was not engaged in war; the presence of Soviet prisoners of war in far-distant Pakistan could not be reconciled with that bland line. The Pakistanis were equally maintaining the fiction that they were giving no assistance to the mujahedin: they sealed off the area of the prison and neither journalists nor foreigners were allowed near the place. An issue of the Peshawar newspaper Safir, which had carried a report of the incident, was destroyed.

Despite the official reticence, the news did seep out, but the details remained fragmentary and disputed. Some of the Afghan prisoners escaped in the confusion, eventually made their way home, and were able to provide the only direct accounts of what had happened. An American satellite is said to have transmitted a photograph on 28 April showing that the training camp had been destroyed by an explosion which had left a crater eighty yards across. The American radio station Voice of America reported on 4 May that twelve Soviet and twelve Afghan prisoners had been killed in the blast. The electronic intelligence branch of the 40th Army picked up exchanges between the Pakistani helicopters and their base. On 9 May an official of the International Red Cross informed the Soviet Embassy in Islamabad that there had been a rising in the camp. On 27 May the Soviet news agency Novosti reported, ‘Kabul. Popular meetings are continuing across the country in protest against the death in an uneven fight with the counter-revolutionaries and regular units of the Pakistan army of Soviet and Afghan soldiers kidnapped by the rebels on the territory of the DRA [Democratic Republic of Afghanistan] and secretly transferred to Pakistan. Peasants, workers, and representatives of the tribes are angrily condemning the barbaric action of Islamabad, which is crudely distorting the facts in a clumsy attempt to evade responsibility.’

The records of the prison camp were destroyed in the explosion, and so there was no reliable list of names of those prisoners who had died. Confusion was compounded because such lists as existed gave only the Muslim names of the prisoners, and their original names could only be reconstructed on the basis of fragmentary evidence. After the war was over the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), the GRU and the Veterans Committee of the Commonwealth of Independent States all made it their business to piece the story together. The first breakthrough did not come until December 1991, when a delegation led by Rabbani visited Moscow to persuade the new Russian government to cut off aid to the Communist government of President Najibullah. The mujahedin refused to negotiate on prisoners until they had received satisfaction on the main issue. They insisted that, in so far as there were any Soviet prisoners in their hands, they were guests and free to return home or go elsewhere as they pleased. But a Pakistani Deputy Foreign Minister with the delegation gave the names of five of the Soviet soldiers believed to have perished at Badaber.²⁶

Badaber was visited in 1992 by Zamir Kabulov from the Russian Embassy in Islamabad, who subsequently became Russian Ambassador in Kabul. The search was given a renewed impulse in 2003, thanks to the efforts of the Veterans Committee under General Aushev. Over the years seven names were established fairly securely: several were awarded posthumous medals for valour. Applications for awards on behalf of three others, Igor Vaskov, Nikolai Didkin, and Sergei Levchishin, were turned down by the Russian Ministry of Defence in 2002 because the evidence was insufficient.

One mother continued to hope that her son would return, long after all reasonable grounds for hope were gone. Alexander Zverkovich was an apprentice welder in Minsk in Belorussia when he was called up in 1983. In March 1984 his mother, Sofia, heard from his commander that he had gone ‘missing in action while carrying out his military duties’. Even before the Soviet Union collapsed, she went with other mothers of missing soldiers to Moscow to ask the authorities to help find their sons and bring home those who had survived as prisoners of war; but without result. In the mid-1990s she appealed to the courts to rule that her son was dead, so that she could receive the benefits to which she was entitled. But in 2006 her hopes were revived when she learned that her son had participated in the rising in Badaber. ‘They say a monument has been put up in Moscow to those who took part in the rising,’ she told her local newspaper. ‘The radio said that some of them survived. Some people in the village even said that they had seen Sashenka [Alexander] on the television… I’ve even been to fortunetellers. Some say he died; others maintain that he is alive and living beyond the ocean. I’d give anything to know the truth, however bitter it was.’ Alexander Zverkovich’s name is one of the seven on the list of those who died at Badaber.

The whole truth—even the names of those who died—may never be known for sure. The Pakistani intelligence authorities refused to release whatever documents they may have had, and other accounts of the tragedy were based on circumstance, hearsay, and wishful thinking.²⁷

– TWELVE – The Road to the Bridge

Within weeks of sending the troops into Afghanistan, the Politburo was already talking about how to get them out again. After visiting Kabul in February 1980, Andropov reported that the situation was becoming more stable, although the Afghan government needed to overcome their domestic dissensions, improve the fighting capacity of their army, and strengthen their links with the people. Ustinov was cautious: it would be a year, or even two, before the troops could be withdrawn. Brezhnev agreed; and suggested that it might even be necessary to increase the numbers somewhat. Gromyko thought it would be prudent first to seek guarantees of Afghanistan’s security from China, Pakistan, and others.¹

The caution was entirely justified. The massive popular demonstrations in Kabul in late February, and the action which the 40th Army took to bring them under control, demonstrated beyond a doubt that the situation in Afghanistan was not stable at all. Major military operations started almost immediately in the Kunar Valley and in the Pandsher.

Brezhnev Looks for a Way Out

It took some time before the Soviet leaders were willing to recognise that their hope for a quick exit was vain. Brezhnev told the French President, Giscard d’Estaing, in May 1980 that he knew that the troops would have to leave: ‘I will make it my personal business to impose a political solution. You can count on me.’ A month later he ordered the withdrawal of units which were no longer needed in Afghanistan and told Andropov to discuss the details with Karmal.² In the winter of 1980–81 the Soviet Ambassador in Islamabad talked with the Pakistani President, Zia ul-Haq (1924–88), about the possibility of talks under the auspices of the United Nations. Ustinov, once a hawk, began to have serious doubts, and wrote to the Politburo saying that no military solution to the war was possible, and it was necessary to find a political and diplomatic way out.³ Andropov, too, had lost his appetite for foreign adventures: when the Polish crisis blew up later in 1980, he said, ‘The quota of interventions abroad has been exhausted.’⁴ In the autumn of 1981 he and Ustinov sponsored a paper by the Foreign Ministry proposing proximity talks between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Andropov succeeded Brezhnev in November 1982. At Brezhnev’s funeral he assured Zia ul-Haq of the ‘Soviet side’s new flexible policy and its willingness to bring an early solution to the crisis.’⁵ The only condition was that Pakistan stop its aid to the mujahedin. By then Gromyko had already chaired an interdepartmental meeting on plans for a Soviet withdrawal.

In February 1983 Andropov told the Secretary General of the UN with considerable force that the Soviet Union had no intention of keeping its troops in Afghanistan indefinitely. The operation was expensive; the Soviet Union had plenty of domestic problems; and the war had complicated the Soviet Union’s relationships with the United States, the Third World, and the Islamic world. Speaking very slowly and emphasising each word, he added that he sincerely wanted ‘to put an end to this situation’. The argument, commonly bandied about in the West, that Soviet troops had never withdrawn from any country where they had once been stationed was disproved by history. But others were interfering in Afghanistan’s affairs. ‘Soviet troops would have to stay for as long as necessary because this is a matter which concerns the security of the Soviet Union’s southern border.’⁶

Andropov’s good intentions were undermined by his own failing health and by the shooting down by Soviet