Afgantsy

Nations representatives, who had decided to turn a blind eye. Then Yazov asked, ‘Why are you intending to leave last, and not lead the troops out, as a commander should?’ Gromov said that he thought he had earned the right after serving more than five years in Afghanistan. Yazov was obstinately silent.

All day the soldiers and officers checked their vehicles and cleaned up their best uniforms, while Gromov went to look at the transit base. It was so huge that he would have needed a week to explore it all. There were great stores of tractors, agricultural vehicles, roofing material, cement, sugar, flour. His Afghan guide showed him one container that had been sealed since it had arrived in 1979 until a few days earlier, when it had been opened. It was full of cakes and confectionery, which had all quietly rotted away.

On returning to his soldiers, Gromov paraded them to make sure they were fully prepared for the next day’s event. He had his own vehicle—BTR No. 305—inspected and checked and then inspected again. The last thing he wanted was for it to break down in the middle of the bridge.

He did not sleep well that last night. He felt emptied of emotion: the exhilaration of the previous days had evaporated. He dozed off at four o’clock, but woke up even before his alarm clock rang. By five o’clock the base was already coming alive. Soldiers were moving about and laughing, and the first vehicles were warming up their engines. Someone started to sing.

At nine o’clock Gromov called in his adjutant to check that his uniform was in order and at nine thirty he gave the order to move. The battalion’s armoured personnel carriers passed before him on to the bridge. Some of the soldiers were weeping. At nine forty-five Gromov followed them in his command vehicle, carrying the banner of the 40th Army. It was the last vehicle across. The withdrawal was complete.⁵³

The other side of the river was crowded with local Party and government officials, hundreds of Soviet and foreign journalists, and the relatives of soldiers who had not returned, hoping against hope to get news that they had perhaps been found safe and well at the last minute. Among the crowd was Alexander Rozenbaum, a young journalist from Severny Komsomolets, the Archangel youth newspaper. Fifty-nine boys from Archangel had been killed in Afghanistan and Rozenbaum’s moving report of the ceremony at the bridge ended with the questions which everyone was now asking: Why did we go in? Who are the guilty men? ⁵⁴

People embraced the soldiers, kissed them, threw flowers under the tracks of their vehicles. Gromov’s son Maksim was there, and ran to embrace him. Then there were speeches, a meal in a nearby cafe for the officers. Gromov phoned Yazov, who congratulated him unenthusiastically. And then, apart for the administrative chores, it was all over.

Even now the official press was still peddling the old myths. In those very last days Pravda wrote, ‘An orchestra played as the Nation welcomed the return of her sons. Our boys were coming home after fulfilling their international obligations. For 10 years Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan repaired, rebuilt, and constructed hundreds of schools, technical colleges, over 30 hospitals and a similar number of nursery schools, some 400 blocks of flats and 35 mosques. They sank dozens of wells and dug nearly 150 km of irrigation ditches and canals. They were also engaged in guarding military and civilian installations in trouble.’⁵⁵

But there was no one from Moscow to greet the soldiers at the bridge—no one from the Party, no one from the government, no one from the Ministry of Defence, no one from the Kremlin. Years later their excuse was that it had been a dirty war, that to have made the journey to Termez would have been in effect to endorse a crime.⁵⁶ It was an extraordinary omission—very bad politics, as well as very bad behaviour. The soldiers never forgot or forgave the insult.

– THIRTEEN – The War Continues

The men of the 40th Army who crossed the bridge were not the last Russian soldiers to leave Afghanistan, nor the last to see action there. Parachutists were stationed in the embassy grounds to guard the ambassador and his much diminished staff, who were now brought in from their outlying apartments in the microrayons and elsewhere. Soviet military specialists remained to assist the Afghan army to operate the more sophisticated equipment. And Soviet special forces and reconnaissance troops continued to operate in the outlying provinces, especially on the borders of the Soviet Union.¹

And some people were moving in the opposite direction, back to Kabul on planes that were by now half empty. When he returned at the beginning of January, Andrei Greshnov had more than 250 kilograms of hand baggage. Luckily there were no Afghan customs officers on duty as he arrived, so he did not have to explain that the jam jars and rubber-topped bottles he was carrying were full of alcohol. He and the other Soviet correspondents, who for the most part were hanging around with nothing to do, remained in their villas, but installed backup teletype machines in case something went wrong in their offices in town.

The austerity had its compensations. The embassy shop was stuffed with goodies, a rich and unfamiliar choice of food products and consumer goods: everything left in the army shops had been moved to the embassy. The spirit ration was raised to four bottles of Moldovan cognac and four bottles of white wine. The limit on beer was lifted entirely.

Before they left, the departing soldiers had sold everything that could possibly be sold: ammunition, food, blankets, sheets, consumer goods, corned beef, Greek juices, Dutch fizzy drinks, Polish and Hungarian ham, green peas, sunflower oil, tinned meats, tea, and cigarettes. So surfeited was the market that Soviet goodies remained on sale in Afghan shops for years afterwards.

One particularly imaginative racket was dreamed up by a group of warrant officers. The air force was abandoning boxes of plastic nose cones—nursiki—for their rockets. You could drink from them, but apart from that they were not much good for anything. The racketeers started by going round the shops and asking the traders if they had any nursiki for sale. The traders had never heard of nursiki and asked what they were for. ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ said the racketeers. ‘They are very useful, very scarce, and very expensive.’ After they had launched a few boxes of nose cones on to the market, the racketeers bought them back at inflated prices. The cupidity of the traders pushed the price sky high, and when demand seemed to be at its height, the racketeers sold off two lorry-loads and pulled out. When the traders complained to the Soviet Embassy, they were told, ‘If you can’t stand the heat, don’t go into the kitchen.’ Years later the traders were still wondering how they could have let themselves be so comprehensively fooled.

One thing in particular caught Greshnov’s eye in the Kabul of those last days. There was a T-62 tank on a pedestal as a monument outside the Central Committee of the National People’s Army in Kabul. It had been there for ten years at least: Greshnov had seen it at the time of the coup against Amin. He wondered whether it was still in working order. Three years later the tank was removed from its pedestal by the forces of Ahmad Shah Masud as they retreated from the capital. They filled it up with diesel, put in a new battery, and drove it off to the Pandsher Valley.²

The Civil War Continues

The 40th Army had gone, but the Afghan civil war continued with horrifying force. The morale of the mujahedin was high. Arms continued to reach them from Pakistan in contravention of the Geneva Agreements. These the Pakistanis had never had any intention of observing: President Zia ul-Haq told President Reagan that they had been denying their activities in Afghanistan for eight years, and that Muslims had the right to lie in a good cause.³ Most people predicted that the Najibullah government would soon be replaced by an Islamic, possibly fundamentalist, government which ‘at best’, the CIA observed gloomily, ‘will be ambivalent, and at worst… may be actively hostile, especially toward the United States.’⁴