These were not only the sophisticated attitudes of the urban intelligentsia in Moscow and Leningrad and the big cities. The veterans faced hostility in the small provincial towns as well. When Vitali Krivenko returned to his hometown in August 1987, people who had known him before treated him as if he was somehow abnormal. He broke with his girlfriend because she assumed he was a drug addict like everyone else who had been in Afghanistan. Drinking companions who had not been in the war would ask him if he was liable to go berserk if he took a bit too much. He learned to keep quiet about the fact that he had been blown up and suffered concussion when he applied for a job: employers did not like to hire Afgantsy, because they were regarded as difficult, always demanding the privileges they had been promised but had not received. He ended up briefly in prison for hitting a policeman.
The statistics are incomplete and hard to interpret. Something can be gained from the anecdotal evidence. In 2008 Alexander Gergel found that among those who had served with him in Bakharak, one had died of drug and alcohol abuse, one had been the victim of an armed robbery, and one had become a contract killer and was serving a ten-year sentence in prison. This was not a large proportion; the remainder had more or less adapted to civilian life. ‘But after a drink or two, as the evening wore on, one realised that something had broken in the soul of almost all of us. I think one might express it this way: life had forcibly transformed us after its own pattern, and none of us had become what we would have wanted to become if we had not passed through Afghanistan. Whether we were better or worse is another story.’31
Though there was no nationwide study, individual regions, local veterans’ organisations, and local newspapers began to set up their own websites about their young men who had served in Afghanistan. The newspaper
But the amount of psychological rehabilitation available for the soldiers was limited partly by the lack of resources and partly because the concept of trauma was alien. If the soldiers who fought against Hitler could survive without going to the shrink, why should the Afgantsy be different? ‘Trauma’ was an alien, perhaps an American idea.
Nevertheless, a thin but native Russian tradition did exist. The first work on soldiers suffering from psychological trauma was done in Russia after the Russo-Japanese war in 1904–5 by psychiatrists in the Academy of Military Medicine. The results were largely ignored in the Soviet period and the 40th Army took no psychiatrists with them when they went into Afghanistan. The first specialists went there in the mid-1980s. The symptoms they found among the Afgantsy were much the same as the Americans had identified after Vietnam: a sense of guilt at what they had done, a horror at what they had seen, the same self-reproach that they had survived while their comrades had died. Some specialists reckoned that as many as one in two Afghan veterans needed some sort of help. At first the symptoms were psychological: irritability, aggressiveness, insomnia, nightmares, thoughts of suicide. After five years many would be suffering from physical as well as psychological consequences: heart disease, ulcers, bronchial asthma, neurodermatitis.
The trouble was that, compared with the United States, there were nothing like the facilities available in Russia to treat the traumatised veterans. There were only six specialised rehabilitation centres for the whole of Russia, and these had to deal with people traumatised not only by Afghanistan, but by their experiences of dealing with the nuclear accident in Chernobyl in 1986, and by the fighting in Chechnya, and other places of violent conflict.33
One of those who tried to explain the phenomenon scientifically was Professor Mikhail Reshetnikov, the Rector of the East European Institute for Psychoanalysis in St Petersburg. He had himself been a professional military medical officer from 1972 and was posted to Afghanistan in 1986. He sent a paper to the General Staff, based on interviews with two thousand soldiers, which set out the problems from which the 40th Army was suffering: from the inadequacy of the army’s supply system to the moral and psychological training of the soldiers. The report had no effect, and he was asked by his superiors why he had deliberately set out to gather facts which brought shame on the Soviet Army. From 1988 to 1993 he directed several programmes for the Ministry of Defence on the behaviour of people affected by local wars, and man-made and natural catastrophes. After retiring from the military he became a member of the Association of Afghan Veterans.
In an article published on the Afghan veterans’ website in 2002, Reshetnikov argued that the way Russians surrounded their military past with an aura of heroic myth had a political, a moral, and a psychological function. It helped to compensate for the horrors not only of the Afghan and Chechen wars, but of the Great Patriotic War of 1941–5 itself, the foundation event in all modern Russian patriotic myths. He wrote of some of the dreadful things which had happened in Afghanistan: the rebel sniper captured and burned alive by the soldier whose comrade he had killed, the small boy hurled from a helicopter, the young girl raped by a whole platoon, the scores of peaceful civilians shot, the villages destroyed out of revenge. His conclusions were stark. All wars lead to an ‘epidemic of amorality’, he argued. Genuine heroism and self-sacrificial comradeship do of course exist. But they are always accompanied, in all wars and in all armies, by murder, torture, cruelty to prisoners, rape, and violent looting, especially when the army is operating outside its own territory. The sense of guilt, the need to atone for what they have done, comes to the soldiers later. It affects all their personal relationships, especially within the family. ‘Their memories are poisoned by their criminal and semi-criminal experience, and they become a real threat not only to themselves but to society in general.’ Not surprisingly, his article infuriated many of the Afghan veterans who read it. They deeply resented the implication that they had all been criminals to a greater or lesser extent, and they expressed their anger in colourful terms on their website.
Attempts after 1989 by journalists and liberal politicians to get at the truth of the Afghan war produced a furious reaction not only from the veterans, but from their families as well. When Svetlana Aleksievich published her book in 1990 about the men and women who served in Afghanistan, she was overwhelmed with criticism. ‘You wanted to demonstrate the futility and wickedness of war, but you don’t realise that in doing so you insult those who took part in it, including a lot of innocent boys.’ ‘How could you? How dare you cover our boys’ graves with such dirt?… They were heroes, heroes, heroes!’ ‘My only son was killed there. The only comfort I had was that I’d raised a hero, but according to you he wasn’t a hero at all, but a murderer and aggressor.’ ‘How much longer are you going to go on describing us as mentally ill, or rapists, or junkies?’
The veterans were particularly infuriated to be told that the war had been a ‘mistake’. ‘Why all this talk of mistakes? And do you really think that all these exposes and revelations in the press are a help? You’re depriving our youth of their heroic heritage.’ ‘I don’t want to hear about any political mistakes… Give me my legs back if it was all a mistake.’ ‘We were sent to Afghanistan by a nation which sanctioned the war,’ one woman said, ‘and returned to find that same nation had rejected it. What offends me is the way we’ve simply been erased from the public mind. What was only recently described as one’s “international duty” is now considered stupidity.’ ‘They put the blame on a few men who were already dead [Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko]. And everyone else was innocent—apart from us! Yes, we used our weapons to kill. That’s what they handed them out for. Did you expect us to come home angels?’ And more calmly: ‘Of course there were criminals, addicts and thugs. Where aren’t there? Those who fought in Afghanistan must, absolutely, be seen as victims who need psychological rehabilitation.’34
What the veterans had found almost the hardest of all to bear was the contrast between the way they had been treated and the reception—at least as it was preserved in popular memory—which their fathers and grandfathers had received when they returned as heroes from their victory over Hitler. That too began to change.
