Afgantsy

President Putin moved to restore a sense of pride in Russia’s history of the twentieth century, the history of the Soviet Union. There was a new emphasis on patriotism and on the glories of Russia’s military past. The war in Afghanistan began to be reinvented as a heroic episode in which the soldiers had done their military duty and defended the interests of the Motherland. On Putin’s instructions, a memorial was erected to the Warrior- Internationalists in 2004, in an alleyway of the grandiose war memorial complex commissioned by Brezhnev to stand on the Poklonnaya Gora, the shallow hill on the outskirts of Moscow where Napoleon waited in vain for the city fathers to bring him the keys of the city.³⁵ An infantry fighting vehicle, painted in desert camouflage, was placed beside it as a modest addition to the military hardware from the Great Patriotic War which was spread across the rest of the site.

The mood started to settle as the controversy over its causes and conduct began to die down. Russian commentators moved on from the endless argument about who was guilty for the Soviet debacle. A whole new dimension entered the discussion with the American invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 2001.³⁶ The veterans saw the Americans mirroring their own experience and their own mistakes. There was sympathy for the soldiers fighting over the same difficult ground. There was some inevitable Schadenfreude as the NATO campaign increasingly bogged down, much tempered by the thought that it was certainly not in the Russian interest to see NATO fail and leave an unstable Afghanistan to their vulnerable south.

The Internet

Four or five years into the new century, another important thing happened. The veterans discovered the Internet, which was beginning to penetrate deeply into Russian society and giving a voice to people who had previously been unable to make themselves heard. The Internet enabled the veterans to bypass the official organisations and make direct contact with one another, to seek out their former comrades. They posted their memoirs, their poems, their short stories, their novels on their own site, Art of War. The quality of many of the literary contributions was high and often remarkably objective: there was comparatively little macho boasting. And the messages did not come only from the intellectuals and the educated. Many came from simple people, whose grasp of spelling and syntax was not always entirely secure. Through the Internet, the veterans began to put together lists of those they had served with, to write a first version of their regimental histories, and to organise their own reunions. Among the most active were the men from the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment and the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment. In the summer of 2009 the veterans of the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment, who by now had tracked down over two thousand of their former comrades, held their third national reunion in a sanatorium outside Moscow. It was attended by men of all ranks, some of whom had been looking for one another for two decades and more. Many brought their wives and children. Colonel Antonenko, who had once commanded the regiment, was there. So were Private Kostya Sneyerov and his commander Yuri Vygovski, who had named his son Konstantin after his former subordinate. They drank the ‘Third Toast’ in memory of those who had not returned. And they vowed to continue their meetings in future years.³⁷

The Twentieth Anniversary

The twentieth anniversary of the withdrawal was celebrated all over Russia in February 2009. In Moscow the celebrations began with a vast ceremony organised in the Olympic Stadium by the Moscow branch of the Boevoe Bratstvo. Some five thousand people attended, veterans, wives and girlfriends, many teenagers, and a huge paratrooper, well over six feet tall and chunky to match. There were interminable patriotic speeches, endless noisy sentimental songs, and a dozen cars were given away as prizes to selected veterans—an ostentatious and very expensive display. Some thought the money might have been better spent on the many veterans still living in poverty.

Sunday, 15 February—the day of the anniversary itself—was cold, with wet sleet and snow falling thickly. The official wreath was laid at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier by the Kremlin, to the accompaniment of some fine marching and a spirited rendering of the old Soviet national anthem. Three or four hundred veterans, including Alexander Gergel and his comrades from the 860th Independent Motor-rifle Regiment, then carried the red banners of the 40th Army from the Kremlin through the snow and slush to the monument to the Warrior-Internationalist, the Afganets, on the Poklonnaya Gora. There they were addressed by their generals: Ruslan Aushev, who had fought his way up the Pandsher Valley, and become a Hero of the Soviet Union and Governor of his homeland, the North Caucasian republic of Ingushetia; and Valeri Vostrotin, another Hero of the Soviet Union, who had stormed Amin’s palace and led the 354th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment during Operation Magistral. The speeches were sober and mercifully short: Aushev joked that if the politicians had been to staff college and planned the thing properly, the withdrawal would have taken place at a more clement season, and the veterans would not now be standing in the snow. The soldiers, the speakers said, had defended the interests of their country and done what the Motherland had asked of them. They had gone to help the Afghans; and when the Afghans had wanted them no longer, they had left. Frants Klintsevich, the former political officer who was now the Chairman of the Russian Union of Veterans of Afghanistan, said that it had been a bad peace; but a bad peace was better than a good war. The mother of a fallen soldier made a restrained and dignified speech: the Afghan war should be the last war in which Russian boys died. She had forgotten Chechnya.

That evening a grand ceremony was held in the Kremlin. The veterans could feel that after two decades their service and their sufferings in Afghanistan were at last receiving some kind of recognition—even if the state for which they had fought no longer existed.

EPILOGUE The Reckoning

In December 1989 the Congress of People’s Deputies of the Soviet Union passed a resolution which said that the decision to intervene in Afghanistan was ‘deserving of moral and political condemnation’. In subsequent years right-wing politicians and leaders of veterans’ organisations such as Frants Klintsevich attempted to get the resolution formally overturned, or argued that it was not intended as an outright condemnation.¹ But however contorted the wording, it goes rather further than many other countries have done towards apologising for a failed war.

The death and destruction which passed over Afghanistan in the years after 1979 were not unprecedented. When a war of intervention is combined with a local civil war, and especially when one side has an overwhelming technical superiority, the disproportion between the casualties of the two sides is very large. The figures for civilian casualties in such wars are impossible to determine with any accuracy, so that the proportions cannot be accurately drawn. By no means all the blame can be laid on the foreigners: very many Afghans and Vietnamese and Algerians were killed by their own countrymen. But however imprecise the figures, one thing is sure. In a war of intervention the local people die at a much greater rate than the soldiers of the invading force; and the chances of winning hearts and mind—the core of all counter-insurgency theory—is much reduced (See Annex 4, ‘Indo-China, Vietnam, Algeria, Afghanistan: A Comparison’, page 348.)

For the Soviet Union it was nevertheless, by most measures, a comparatively small war; those who later argued that Russia had lost a whole generation of young men were greatly exaggerating.² Some 620,000 young men and a few young women served in Afghanistan in the course of nine years. Of these 525,000 were in the armed forces; the remainder were from the KGB’s frontier and special forces and the Ministry of the