Afgantsy

At the beginning of September 2001 Arkadi Dubnov, a journalist from Novoe Vremya, was staying in a guest house in the Pandsher Valley, waiting for an interview with Masud, whom he had got to know well since he first started working in Afghanistan in 1993. He shared a room with two Arab journalists who also wanted to interview Masud. The Arabs got their interview on 9 September and killed Masud with a bomb concealed in their TV camera. They were said to be Moroccans from a news agency in London. Scotland Yard therefore investigated the affair and Dubnov was interviewed by them. But the investigation was apparently abandoned for lack of sufficient evidence.³⁰

President Putin (1952–) immediately telephoned President Bush (1946–). ‘I said that Masud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, had just been killed. I told my American colleague: “I’m very worried. Something big is going to happen. They’re planning something.”’³¹ The Twin Towers in New York were bombed two days later. Putin was the first foreign leader to express his condolences to Bush, and immediately took practical steps to support the forthcoming American campaign to destroy the Taliban and Al Qaeda. His people handed over a good deal of intelligence, including minefield maps—many of them inevitably inaccurate after the passage of time. He opened Russian air space to American military flights and persuaded the leaders of the Central Asian states to do the same. He met the leaders of the Northern Alliance, stepped up Russian military support for them, and convinced them to cooperate with the Americans. This collaboration did not flag. The northern supply route through Russia became increasingly important, as the Americans got into trouble with their supply route from Pakistan. The flow of intelligence continued. In October 2010 Russians provided support and advice for a US-led raid on four major narcotics factories, the first joint operation of its kind. Many Russians felt that the Americans were insufficiently grateful for what Putin had done to help them.³²

Once the Americans’ initial campaign was over and a new regime was installed in Kabul, the Russians continued to strengthen their links with the new Afghan regime, travelling to Afghanistan on open and confidential business as officials, journalists, and even tourists, as they had done almost uninterrupted since the end of the Soviet war.

Masud was buried in the Pandsher Valley, on a hill by his native village, Jangalak, and a monument was erected to him immediately. A substantial Russian delegation led by General Varennikov took part in the ceremonies at his grave on the second anniversary of his death. Over the years, as the cult of Masud grew more elaborate, the grave was converted into a massive mausoleum. The Russians continued to pay their annual respects. The Pushtuns looked on with resentment at this glorification of a man who was not one of them and who, they grumbled for years afterwards, had signed ceasefires with the Russians instead of continuing the struggle against them.³³

The 201st Division Fights On

For one of the divisions of the 40th Army the war never stopped. The 201st Division withdraw from Afghanistan to Tajikistan, and remained there after the country became independent on the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its headquarters were in the capital, Dushanbe, and its two regiments were deployed towards the Afghan frontier in Kulabe and Kurgan-Tobe. When civil war broke out in 1992 between the central government and Islamic rebels, the local Tajik conscripts deserted. The Russian officers and warrant officers withdrew to their barracks with their families and refused to surrender to the mob. Yeltsin took the division back under Russian jurisdiction. Its numbers were made up with Russian conscripts and contract soldiers on generous terms, and it formed the core of the peacekeeping force set up by the Commonwealth of Independent States, a grouping of former Soviet republics. The force was disbanded when the civil war ended in 1997, but the division remained in Tajikistan, its status undefined.

The war did not stop for the KGB’s frontier forces either. They too had their headquarters in Dushanbe, with detachments on the Afghan frontier. Some had been involved in operations inside Afghanistan, and some were among the 576 members of the KGB who had died there. Now they continued to guard the frontier between Afghanistan and Tajikistan against drug smugglers and the incursions of bands of fundamentalists anxious to support the Islamic rebels inside the country. They too were eventually brought under Russian jurisdiction. In May 1993 Russia and Tajikistan signed an agreement on friendship and cooperation which handed formal responsibility for the defence of the frontier to Russia.

Attacks against the frontier posts had already started. On 13 July a massive attack was launched in the early hours against the 12th zastava by about four hundred men, a mixture of mujahedin and soldiers from the 55th Infantry Division of the regular Afghan army. The garrison of the zastava consisted of forty-eight frontier force soldiers. Aroused by their watchdog, the garrison made for their battle positions as fire was brought down upon them from the surrounding hills and from the Afghan side of the frontier. The crew of the zastavas’ one BTR were the first to die, even before they could mount their machine. After the twenty-five-year-old commander was killed, his deputy decided that the survivors would have to make a break for safety. A small force from the 201st Division and the Tajik army, backed by a couple of helicopters, was put together to rescue the beleaguered garrison. It ran into mines and ambushes on the only approach road, and the Tajik troops turned back. When the Russian relief force finally got through, they found that twenty-five of the garrison had been killed and their bodies mutilated.

Six members of the garrison were made ‘Heroes of Russia’—four of them posthumously—to join the eighty- six men who had become ‘Heroes of the Soviet Union’ during the Afghan war.³⁴

– FOURTEEN – A Land Fit for Heroes

The soldiers who crossed the Friendship Bridge on 15 February returned to a country which had less than two years to live, a country which in its own way was as shattered as the one they had left behind them. A radical electoral process was under way which would see senior officers losing the parliamentary seats which they believed were theirs by right. The whisperings of discontent in the non-Russian republics of the union were becoming louder. The economy was in rapid decline. The press had always treated the military with respect: it now had free rein to criticise them unmercifully. There was much to resent, but the soldiers particularly resented a poem by the popular poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko, describing the thoughts of an Afghan ant as it crawled on the face of a dead Russian soldier.

The blows that then struck the Soviet army came close to destroying it as an effective military force.

The 40th Army had withdrawn from Afghanistan, in the eyes of its commanders, with its military reputation and its honour intact. It had achieved the limited tasks laid upon it by the politicians: to hold the towns, to keep open the communications, to keep the rebels at bay sufficiently for the government in Kabul to build up its military position and survive, at least for a time. The soldiers had done their duty, and they had not been defeated on the battlefield. The war had been a bitter experience. But from the military point of view at least, it had not been a humiliation. Now, within months, the 40th Army, one of the most powerful in Soviet history, was disbanded, its generals, its divisional commanders, and their deputies transferred or sent off to military academies, its regimental commanders dispersed to units throughout the Soviet Union.

When the Soviet Union fell apart less than two years later, many of these officers found themselves serving in the armed forces of what were now independent countries. They had sworn an oath to the Soviet Union; some of them refused to swear another and gave up their military careers.

The Bitterness of the Officers

In their bitterness and confusion, many of the officers turned to the older traditions of their country. They