Afghanistan: The Soviet Union's Last War 0714645672, 9780714645674

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Maps and Tables
Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations
Preface
1 Introduction: Invasion
PART ONE: THE VETERANS
2 The Experience of War
3 Coming Home: Children of the War
PART TWO: THE VICTIMS OF THE WAR
4 Broken Bodies, Broken Minds
5 Parents, Workmates, Neighbours, Lovers
PART THREE: THE WAR AND SOCIETY
6 Veteran Society
7 Afgantsy and Politics
8 The War and Politics: Impact
9 The War and Politics: Consequences
PART FOUR: THE WAR AND THE PROFESSIONAL SOLDIERS
10 The Afghan Brotherhood
11 The Art of War
12 Russia's Next Wars
CONCLUSIONS
13 Anatomy of a Small War
Select Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

AFGHANISTAN

Mark Galeotti

AFGHANISTAN: The Soviet Union's Last War

AFGHANISTAN The Soviet Union's Last War MARK GALEOTTI University of Keele

FRANK CASS LONDON

First published in 1995 in Great Britain by FRANK CASS & CO. LTD. 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN and in the United States of America by FRANKCASS do ISBS 270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016

Reprinted in 2001 Transferred to Digital Printing 2005 Copyright© 1995 Mark Galeotti British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Galeotti, Mark Afghanistan:Soviet Union's Last War I. Title 958.1044 ISBN 0-7146-4567-2 (cloth) ISBN 0-7146-8242X (paper) Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Galeotti, Mark. Afghanistan, the Soviet Union's last war I Mark Galeotti. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7146-4567-2 1. Afghanistan--History--Soviet occupation, 1979-1989. I. Title. DS371.2.G3447 1995 958.104'5--dc20 94-25068 CIP All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of Frank Cass and Company Limited.

Typeset by Photoprint, Torquay, Devon

Contents

List of Maps and Tables Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations Preface

Vll

viii Xl

1 Introduction: Invasion

1

PART ONE: THE VETERANS

2 The Experience of War 3 Coming Home: Children of the War

25 45

PART TWO: THE VICTIMS OF THE WAR

4 Broken Bodies, Broken Minds 5 Parents, Workmates, Neighbours, Lovers

67 84

PART THREE: THE WAR AND SOCIETY

6 Veteran Society 7 Afgantsy and Politics

103 120

8 The War and Politics: Impact

139

9 The War and Politics: Consequences

155

PART FOUR: THE WAR AND THE PROFESSIONAL SOLDIERS

10 The Afghan Brotherhood The Art of War 12 Russia's Next Wars 11

171 190 207

vi

CONCLUSIONS 13

Anatomy of a Small War

223

Select Bibliography

234

Index

239

List of Maps and Tables

Map 1 Map2 Map 3

Afghanistan Invasion Successor States of the former Soviet Union

Table 1.1 Afghan requests for military assistance, 1979 Table 2.1 Casualties by nationality {February 1990 figures) Table 3.1 Komsomol'skaya pravda poll on Soviet involvement in Afghanistan Table 4.1 The wounded and the invalids Table 4.2 Afgantsy imprisoned for crimes committed while on military service Table 4.3 Main benefits for injured veterans Table 4.4 Constituent members of the Leningrad Fund for invalids and families of soldiers killed in the Republic of Afghanistan Table 5.1 SAAOR findings on sources of information on Afghanistan Table 5.2 Missing in action, as at the end of the war Table 5.3 Peacetime deaths: estimated numbers Peacetime deaths: causes Table 6.1 Afganets group survey results Table 6.2 Afganets groups in Leningrad within LAVV A Table 7.1 Supreme Soviet committee for soldierinternationalists' affairs, 1990 Table 7.2 Serving soldier-afgantsy elected as USSR Peoples' Deputies, 1989 Table 9.1 Countries where Soviet 'internationalists' were involved in combat, 1921-91 Table 10.1 The invasion team Table 10.2 Commanders of the 40th Army Table 10.3 Afgantsy in the highest military posts, 1979-91 Table 10.4 Soviet military operations, 1979-91

5 14 212 8 28 47 68 72 75

81 89 95 97 97 110 114 123 126 156 174 175 177 188

Glossary of Terms and Abbreviations

afganets blat BMP BTR CARB CPSU disbat DOSAAF DPKR DRA DShV DVO GRU GUVD HSU IMEMO ISKAN KhAD LAVVA LenVO MRD MVD MZhK OKSV OMON OMSN Opnaz

Veteran of the Afghan war (plural: afgantsy) influence, favours Infantry Combat Vehicle Armoured Personnel Carrier Combined Arms Reinforced Battalion Communist Party of the Soviet Union disciplinary battalion Society for the Support of the Army, Airforce and Navy (military-sports association) Democratic Party of Communists of Russia Democratic Republic of Afghanistan Assault-Landing Troops (helicopter-borne)- also DShB, for Assault-Landing Brigade Far Eastern Military District Main Intelligence Directorate (military intelligence) Main Internal Affairs Directorate (city police command) Hero of the Soviet Union Institute for International Economic Relations US and Canada Institute Afghan secret police (later renamed WAD when upgraded to a full ministry) Leningrad Association of Veterans of the War in Afghanistan Leningrad Military District Motor-rifle division Ministry of Internal Affairs Youth Housing Complex Limited Contingent of Soviet Forces (in Afghanistan) Special Designation Police Unit ('Black Berets') Specialised Designation Police Unit (anti-terrorist commando) Operational Designation Interior Troops

ix

PDPA PTU Spetsnaz Starshina SVA

svo

TurkVO VDV VLKSM

vo

Voenizdat voenruk voentorg VPV

vv vuz

WAD zampolit ZhSK

People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan Technical-Vocational School 'Special Designation' special forces Sergeant Major Union of Veterans of Afghanistan Central Asian Military District Turkestan Military District Air Assault Forces (paratroops) Young Communist League, Komsomol Military District Military Publishing House school VPV representative military trading services ('PX') Military-patriotic education Interior Troops Institutes of higher education Afghan secret police (formerly KhAD) deputy commander for political affairs House-building cooperative

Preface

This study draws extensively both on the Afghan war veterans' newspapers and correspondence and conversations with veterans and those working with, caring for and studying them in what was then still the USSR. Along with all those Soviet citizens who were prepared to fill in my questionnaires, answer my questions or merely vent their prejudices in my direction, I would particularly like to thank Aleksandr Karatetskii and Aleksandr Babin of the newspapers K sovesti and Kontingent, respectively, as well as Aleksandr Burbela of St Petersburg and Georgii Medved of Arkhangel'sk for their help. In the West, thanks are due particularly to Dominic Lieven and Howard White, as well as Roy Allison, Chris Donnelly, David Isby, Martin McCauley, Craig Oliphant, Mike Orr, Jim Riordan, Caroline Schofield, Pete and Laura Swartz, Mark Urban and Anne White. Grants from the ESRC and University of London's Central Research Fund were invaluable in supporting study trips to the USSR. It is traditional also to acknowledge those who kept one sane through one's labours, but after three years buried deep within combat reports and veterans' biographies, I am unsure how far I could confidently make that claim. I will settle for noting my grateful thanks to my parents, Bridget and Renzo, and Judith Fenn for helping put such arcane concerns into perspective. And Brutus, of course, but as he is a dog, I strongly doubt he will get to read this. A BRIEF NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

I make no particular apologies for pedantry. I have retained 'hard' and 'soft' signs in transliteration, while the Russian 'ye' is represented by 'e' throughout, except in cases such as 'Boris Yeltsin' where it seems futile to buck the journalistic trend. MARK GALEOTTI

1

Introduction: Invasion

War puts nations to the test. Just as mummies fall to pieces the moment that they are exposed to the air, so war pronounces its sentence of death on those social institutions that have become ossified. Karl Marx

When Soviet troops seized the main centres of Afghanistan on Christmas Day, 1979, there were those who saw it as proof that after the years of detente, the USSR was once again on the offensive. Headlines spoke of 'the empire striking back', of 'red legions on the march'. At the same time, a relatively unknown Party administrator from the sleepy and prosperous region of Stavropol had just been brought onto the Politburo, albeit as a non-voting member. Eventually, after Mikhail Gorbachev had become the Party's General Secretary, his decision to withdraw his troops from this 'bleeding wound' was to leave one of the most striking series of visual images of his revolution, proof not only that the USSR was no irresistible military colossus, but that its goal, far from expansion, was simple survival. The regime that was left in Kabul managed to outlive Gorbachev's Soviet Union, but not by long, and as of writing, the same guns and rockets are being used in civil war, not only in Afghanistan but in former Soviet Moldova, Tajikistan and Georgia. The war seems not so much to have 'Sovietised' Afghanistan as 'Afghanised' the whole USSR. Thus, for many, it looms large in explaining the downfall of the old order in Moscow. Many of its veterans, for example, find obscure satisfaction in the thought that the war that left them physically or mentally scarred, shunned or destitute, inflicted as painful a toll on the regime that sent them there in the first place. Others, especially in the Islamic southern republics, are keen to portray it as a purely imperial war, a chapter in the story of Russia's drive south in which its subject peoples finally came face to face with the truth about their despotic masters and began to resist the Muscovite yoke.

2

AFGHANISTAN: THE SOVIET UNION'S LAST WAR

Certainly the war was important in its effect on the people and government of the old USSR and, indeed, its successor states. It touched more than the veterans. It touched every mother whose son served there or whose prayers or cash managed to prevent that fate. It touched every bereaved sweetheart, wife, father, son or daughter. It still touches everyone who has to live or work with the afgantsy, the veterans of this war, or care for them, or speak on their behalf. It is a powerful image in the developing debate of the USSR's and Russia's future in the world, and for many a damning indictment of its past. Yet it did not destroy the Soviet Union. For this was a relatively minor, if ill-conceived and uncomfortable military adventure, eminently supportable, a negligible drain on the resources of the USSR. Its real importance is two-fold: as a myth and as a window. In the context of the collapse of the Soviet system, the war became used as a symbol for a variety of issues, from the cost of supporting such a huge and seemingly useless army to the arrogant foolishness of the old regime. Scattered, politically marginalised, ostracised, disempowered, the veterans and the other victims of the war could not make their views heard, and thus the mythological picture of the war, conjured from the prejudices, perceptions and political needs of a variety of journalists, politicians, academics and propagandists, came to dominate. For the outsider, though, the war also provides an extraordinarily rich source of insights into the Soviet Union of the 1980s and early 1990s and the new Russia which succeeded it. This book looks largely at central politics and Russia rather than the other republics. It will also perforce touch but lightly on the complex question of foreign policy. Yet above all, this analysis of the war is, inevitably, a case study of the political and social processes of the decaying late Soviet order, opening a window onto the forces at work. The war was by no means a critical factor and its realities became increasingly indistinguishable behind a thick patina of rum our, myth, sensationalism and wishful thinking, yet it did play a role in influencing a wide array of issues, from the spread of informal political movements through the shift away from conscription to the rise of Russian vice-president (and afganets) Aleksandr Rutskoi. Even for the military, for whom it had more direct importance, it was largely important in illustrating and emphasising other processes and pressures already at work, and the friendships and alliances formed in war could as easily be set next to or trumped by other affiliations based on ideology, comradeship or self-interest. Thus my image is of a small war, a squalid and trivial expression of imperial arrogance, swept up into the whirlwind of politics of the dying years of the Soviet Union, used as a political tool and symbol by one elite group or another, until it was superseded by other, newer, better,

INTRODUCTION: INVASION

3

bigger symbols. At this point it was largely discarded and those for whom it had real importance, the veterans, the war wounded, the bereaved, found themselves trying and largely failing to salvage something from the wreckage. By late 1992, a mere four years after the final Soviet withdrawal, the Afghan War has definitely become history, its victims stranded in its limbo. AFGHANISTAN IN CRISIS

If the revolution is put down, left progressive forces will sustain a crushing blow. If the revolution is successful, we will get a lasting headache. Colonel General Akhromeev, at the time of the 1978 'April Revolution' in Afghanistan 1

One of the shrewdest military minds of his generation, Akhromeev was quite right. As with so many 'people's' regimes, that of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan was established not by revolution, but by coup. This was, after all, hardly fertile soil for socialism. The educated, West European Karl Marx would no doubt be astonished and horrified to see what sort of groups and countries have since tried to wrap themselves vainly in the red banner of his ideology. For Afghanistan is an unruly country, with a tradition rich in war and unrest, a product of the perennial struggle between the centralising power of the kings and the cities, and the authority of the tribes, the villages and the local religious leaders, a struggle which the countryside usually won. The ethnic character of the country is dominated by the division between the Pushtu-speaking Pathans of the south and east, who made up around 42 per cent of the population before 1979, and the Turkic and Iranian minorities of the north, which include Tajiks, Uzbeks and Turkmen. Traditionally the Pathans have dominated the country, and their natural ties are with their fellow Pathans in Pakistan, divided by the wholly arbitrary Durand Line, the border imposed by Britain in the last century, whereas the Turkic and Tajik peoples looked to their ethnic brothers to the north, in the Soviet Union. Yet Pathan, Tajik and Turkic peoples did share the Sunni form of Islam, and there are other groups, most notably the Hazaras of the centtal mountains and Farsiwans of the west, who are Shia Moslems, who ultimately accepted the spiritual writ of the imams of Iran. The country is no less fragmented and hostile geographically. Afghanistan is largely a dry and rugged land, dominated by the high Hindu Kush mountains of the east and centre and by the plateaus and deserts of the west and south. In the mountains, a modern, mechanised

4

AFGHANISTAN: THE SOVIET UNION'S LAST WAR

army was limited to a handful of vulnerable, winding passes, and in the desert it was choked in dust and sand. The climate is one of extremes, and men and machines were stretched to their limits by cold, snowy mountain winters and dry, suffocating desert summers. Life is no less hard, with average life expectancy in the late 1970s of no more than 40, and only half of all children surviving beyond their fifth birthday. In such an environment, the local community had to develop and retain strong bonds to survive and such were the difficulties in maintaining communications in this land that these communities retained an independence and, indeed, exclusivity rarely matched in the modern world. Thus, the Soviets were to come to discover that the Afghans were not urbanised Westerners like the Czechs and the Hungarians, but a people still raw in warlike vigour, a people for whom blood feud and banditry were a way of life ('Have you an enemy?' goes the Afghan proverb, 'Yes, I do have a cousin.') and for whom civil war was as much a national sport as buzkashi, their distinctive form of polo, which tastefully substitutes a rotting sheep's carcass for the ball. A people, in short, with a will to continue the war that ultimately proved to be lacking in Moscow. Various forms of monarchy and a rough-and-ready constitutional republic all failed to tackle the underlying problems of the weakness of central authority and were thus expressions of the politics of the handful of cities and proportionally minute urban elites. In 1979, of a total population of some 15 million, the capital held no more than 700,000and the total urban population was estimated at around 1,700,000. Prince Daoud had seized power in a coup in 1973 and founded a republic with himself as president, but he too found himself unable either to impose his will on the countryside or satisfy the demands of the educated city intellectuals, for social, political and economic modernisation. They wanted to see Afghanistan with a literate population, sexual equality, factories and all the other trappings of a modern state, and when Daoud failed to deliver, many began to turn against him. One of the beneficiaries was the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), which began to build for itself a power base within the officer corps and civil service, and when Daoud began to round up their leaders in April1978, they themselves seized power in an effective and truly 'Leninist' counter-strike. The coup left the country in the hands of Nur Mohammed Taraki, Chairman of the Revolutionary Council, and Hafizullah Amin, his Prime Minister. The coup caught the Soviet Union by complete surprise. After all, the PDPA had never been rated that highly and the orthodox line at the time had been more pragmatic than principled. Regimes such as Daoud's had been perfectly acceptable to Moscow so long as they could be of use. There was a need

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Outline map showing main towns and cities. roads. rivers and contours

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6

AFGHANISTAN: THE SOVIET UNION'S LAST WAR

for a quick policy decision on this new regime in a neighbouring and allied country. Most political systems depend on the informal chat and the nod and a wink to some degree, but in the Soviet Union of the 1970s, the formal structures of power and bodies such as the Politburo (the Communist Party's 'cabinet') had become little more than rubber-stamps for the ad hoc gatherings of various grandees. In this case, the key group was built around the structure of the Politburo Commission on Afghanistan. Chaired by Foreign Minister Gromyko, this included as permanent members KGB Chair Andropov, Defence Minister Ustinov and possibly Chief of the General Staff Ogarkov and First Deputy Foreign Minister Kornienko; Mikhail Suslov (as Central Committee Secretary for Ideology and thus high priest of Brezhnevian orthodoxy) and Leonid Brezhnev himself were also privy to its deliberations. Following the 'April Revolution', the Commission met in an expanded session which also called in Boris Ponomarev, director of the Central Committee's International Department and his deputy, Rqstislav Ulyanovskii as well as Arkhipov, who represented the Council of Ministers. Thus, ten men, representing the Party, the military, the KGB and the civil service could meet and effectively dictate Soviet foreign policy on the spot. The decision was taken to recognise the new regime. How could they do otherwise? The PDPA was an avowedly pro-Soviet socialist movement. By seizing power, it had shown itself to be more effective and with deeper military support than the previous regime. There seemed no viable alternative; and Moscow could hardly afford to repudiate the new masters of a country on its southern and conceivably vulnerable borders. The decision may have seemed obvious, but in making it, the Soviets linked their fates with a regime lacking a real social base in this overwhelmingly rural, Islamic, even medieval nation. The urban intelligentsia of the PDPA launched a heavy-handed and insensitive programme, ranging from land redistribution to the education and emancipation of women, which violated religious laws, traditional customs and the very balance of power between the centre and the localities. Popular dissatisfaction mounted; by October 1978, this had become armed insurrection (in the Nuristan province), a classic product of what Fred Halliday called the 'malign marriage of exported Soviet bureaucratic and authoritarian political practices with ones already present in the political cultures and social structures of the countries concerned'. 2 Moscow - especially in the shape of the Central Committee and Nikolai Simonenko, the director of its Middle East divisiontried to counsel Taraki to take a more gradualist line, but he was both confident in his eventual success and aware that he risked being

INTRODUCTION: INVASION

7

outflanked by Amin if he seemed to be back-pedalling on previous commitments. Meanwhile, the PDPA was increasingly torn by internal disputes as the Khalq ('Masses') faction to which both Taraki and Amin belonged froze out Babrak Karmal's Parcham ('Banner') group. This began to tear apart the army, which represented the PDPA's main and vital source of support. Major General Zaplatin, a Soviet adviser to the Afghan army's political administration who had been asked by Ponomarev particularly to keep an eye open for such signs, found that even by May 1978, there was open discrimination against Parchamis in the military. In August, Babrak Karma! was effectively exiled to head the embassy in Prague, other colleagues being scattered to London, Belgrade, Tehran and Islamabad, and in November, he was accused of organising a coup against Taraki: the split in the PDPA had become open. In March 1979, the regime's bid to introduce education for women sparked a revolt in the western city of Herat. The bulk of the government's 17th Infantry Division supported the mutiny and loyal troops took a week to suppress the uprising. Amongst the approximately 5,000 dead were 100 Soviets, including the wives and families of military advisers, hacked to death by the mob. Herat was to prove decisive: it stimulated the first serious contingency planning for intervention (either to stabilise the country or rescue Soviet nationals) and conditioned attitudes in Moscow to the 'savages' of Afghanistan. The power of the regime - rooted largely in the armed forces - was draining away daily, not least given the role of the now excluded Parcham within the officer corps and the division of Khalq between supporters of Taraki and Amin. By the end of the year, desertions had more than halved the government army, from 90,000 to 40,000 as entire brigades began to join the rebels. The regime began bombarding Moscow and its agents in Kabul with a stream of requests for military assistance and materiel. In response, the commission sent General Epishev, head of the Military Political Administration, to assess the situation in April. Although Colonel General Volkogonov, one-time near-Stalinist and later born-again radical, exonerated him, it appears that, concerned with the political consequences of the fall of Kabul, Epishev felt assistance was warranted. As a result, arms transfers were stepped up and on 8 July, a battalion from the 105th Guards Airborne Division - the unit which eventually spearheaded the occupation - was secretly transferred to Bagram air force base, masquerading as air crew, to establish a secure airhead, whether for intervention or evacuation. In August 1979, the Commission met again to hear reports from the Chief Military Adviser in Afghanistan, Lieutenant General Gorelov,

8

AFGHANISTAN: THE SOVIET UNION'S LAST WAR

TABLE 1.1 Afghan requests for military assistance, 1979

14 April 16 June 11 July 12 July 18 July 19 July 20 July 21 July 24 July 1 August 12 August 20 August 21 August 25 August 2 October 17 November 20 November 2 December 4 December 11 December 17 December

15-20 combat helicopters with pilots 2 divisions battalion-strength Spetsnaz (special forces) units 'assistance' 2 divisions paratroop division paratroop division 8-10 Mi-24 helicopter gunships with crews 3-4 battalions Spetsnaz brigade 3 Spetsnaz battalions with transport helicopters anti-aircraft battalion 1,500-2,000 paratroopers Spetsnaz battalion for Amin's guard 'military assistance' special security battalion for Amin's guard special security battalion for Amin's guard reinforced regiment police units in the northern provinces garrisons in northern towns to protect road routes garrisons in northern towns to protect road routes

and the senior KGB officer in-country, Lieutenant General Ivanov. Gorelov counselled strongly against any deployments in Afghanistan, but Ivanov made a good case for the opposite. After all, Ivanov's career was somewhat becalmed, and to be at the centre of a major initiative receiving top-level attention would provide a potential opportunity for real advance. Besides, while in Kabul, he, like all the Soviets, had inevitably begun to 'go native' and to support one side or another. Ivanov had become a strong partisan of Taraki and they were both keen to agitate on his behalf. In this he received critical support from the Soviet ambassador, Puzanov. Neither an experienced diplomat nor with any prior experience of an eastern country, Puzanov was just the sort of second- or third-rater one would expect to find assigned to a country for which Moscow cared little. Yet such was the speed of developments, that it was this mediocrity who was to prove to have quite an important role. On the one hand, his amateurish and insensitive reports were to be one of the sources upon which Moscow based its decisions. Indirectly, his overt support for Taraki also soured relations still further with Amin, who demanded his recall and replacement.

INTRODUCfiON: INVASION

9

That month, the Commission dispatched another fact-finding mission, headed by General Pavlovskii, Commander of Ground Forces, while Soviet forces near the Afghan border began to be brought to readiness. Like Epishev, Pavlovskii had performed a similar role in preparations for the intervention in Czechoslovakia, but unlike Epishev, he came out against further involvement, primarily on the grounds of the lack of a clear military mission. But Marshal Ustinov just ignored his practical cautions, suggesting that a political decision had already been taken by his patron Brezhnev, despite the added protests of Ogarkov and his deputy, Colonel General Akhromeev. Arguably, though, the Soviets were pushed over the edge by the assassination of Taraki by Amin in September, dashing hopes that Taraki could eliminate the erratic and uncompromising Amin and rebuild the PDPA's legitimacy in the country by political moderation, or at least political unity. There had already been Soviet concerns about the powers being amassed by Amin, and a unit of Soviet Central Asians, drawn from the paratroopers and Spetsnaz special forces, had been formed by the GRU (military intelligence) in the Turkestan military district. Unable to assume its intended role as Taraki's guards, this 'Moslem Battalion' was to avenge him by assisting the KGB in the elimination of Amin. That same month, mobilisation of low-readiness units from the neighbouring Central Asian and Turkestan military districts began, with the 360th and 201st motor-rifle divisions (MRDs), followed by the 66th and 357th MRDs in November. Ivanov and Puzanov stepped up their own campaign in support of vigorous action against Amin. The assassination also strengthened the hand of Yurii Andropov, the Chair of the KGB. Although there was obvious political capital for Andropov after the event in distancing himself from the official line on Afghanistan, it seems clear that he had been at best lukewarm in his support, and critical of early suggestions of military intervention. This would certainly tally with his 'maximum results, minimum effort' strategy, refined during his tenure on Dzerzhinskii Square, relying on indirect controls and pressures rather than crude and physical methods, which he saw as frequently counter-productive. He had always felt that Taraki lacked the necessary political skills while Amin was dangerous and had championed Karmal from the first. Thus Andropov's personal views on Amin hardened, while renewed interest began to be given Karmal's Parcham faction, should there be the need or the opportunity to topple Amin. Under the guise of acceding to Amin's requests for military assistance, Colonel General Tukharinov - the first commander of the 40th Army, the structure established for the occupation, also sometimes

10

AFGHANISTAN: THE SOVIET UNION'S LAST WAR

the Limited Contingent of Soviet Forces in Afghanistan, or OKSVmet Afghan Major General Babadzhan and established a formal agreement for the arrival of his forces. A field command was formed at Termez under First Deputy Defence Minister Marshal Sokolov and Colonel General Maksimov of the Turkestan military district, while Colonel General Magometov replaced the 'dove-ish' Gorelov as Chief Military Adviser. A TIMETABLE FOR INTERVENTION

A preliminary political decision was reached in early December, but never committed to paper. On 10 December, Ustinov ordered that the 105th Guards Airborne Division be brought to combat readiness and reinforced by another regiment of paratroopers from each of the 103rd and 104th Guards Airborne Divisions. Two regular divisions from the Turkestan military district and a bridging unit also began final preparations for action, albeit still serenely convinced that they were to be used in nothing more than a realistic training exercise. That same day, Major General Zaplatin was hurriedly recalled to Moscow to brief Epishev, Ustinov and Ogarkov. Again, Ustinov apparently brushed away any advice which opposed the new line. Some 30 directives were issued by the General Staff, bringing fully 100 units to combat readiness, but most - including many of the senior officers concerned - were still encouraged to believe that this was merely a large-scale exercise. Meanwhile Suslov began preparing his new protege, Babrak Karmal, to replace Amin, whom the Soviets had come to regard as at best erratic, at worst ideologically unsound. Inside Afghanistan, preparations were also stepped up. On 10 December, a satellite communications link was established at Bagram. A few days later, a battalion of paratroopers from the 105th Guards Airborne Division moved from Bagram to secure the strategically vital Salang tunnel on the Termez-Kabul road, ostensibly in response to Kabul's security needs. Soviet advisers neutralised the Afghan 7th and 8th Mechanised Divisions by calling in ammunition for a 'stock check' and having batteries removed from tanks 'to prepare them for winter', while fuel was siphoned from tanks in the Kabul garrison. The 'Moslem Battalion', which had been brought to full combat readiness in September, was sent into Afghanistan on 9 November. On 18 November, it was transferred to Kabul, where it lived frugally and secretly in the south-west of the city until 27 December. The final political decision was made on 24 December at a meeting in Brezhnev's office. Unminuted, with all its participants- Brezhnev, Suslov, Ustinov, Andropov and Gromyko- safely buried, exactly what

INTRODUCI'ION: INVASION

11

was said is unknown, but one can draw some general conclusions. A variety of general reasons have been advanced for the intervention, most of which tend to come down to one or more of the following: 1

2

3

4

Expansionism: generally seen as part of a drive towards the oilrich 'rimlands' of the Middle East - whether out of the traditional Tsarist quest for warm-water ports or Marxist-Leninist expansionism - and necessitating determined Western resistance. A rather unconvincing line that ignored the facts of the essentially conservative nature of Soviet foreign policy while talking up (overwhelmingly exaggerated) military deployments and strategic infrastructural development in the region. It tends to come down to a gut belief in the essential acquisitiveness of the USSR. As one emigre put it: 'The Soviet government behaves like an ordinary Soviet consumer. He grabs anything which happens to be on the counter, even if he doesn't need it, knowing that tomorrow it may no longer be available.' 3 Brezhnev Doctrine: with an ally state about to fall to anarchy or outright hostile forces, intervention was an essentially defensive, reactive move to forestall such a humiliating and potentially dangerous outcome. On the whole, this is the most tenable line, as is discussed below. Fear of Americanism: a more extreme version of the Brezhnev Doctrine argument, that sees the Russians convinced - rightly or wrongly- that Amin is cutting secret deals with the USA, and even a CIA agent, and ready to let Washington use Afghanistan to repair the break in their 'chain' around the USSR left by the Iranian revolution. This was a line adopted by Soviet sources for a while and echoed by some of their more slavish supporters elsewhere, but soon fell into disuse until late in the Gorbachev era, when the KGB began resuscitating it, in a bid once again to stoke up the image of a foreign threat. Fundamentalism: Afghanistan became a cordon sanitaire to insulate Soviet Central Asia from Islam Resurgent. Certainly the Kremlin was fully aware of the potential danger that religion could pose - witness its concern to muzzle, suppress or tame organised religion within its own territory. Yet there is no evidence that it felt fundamentalism was some sort of moral plague, contagious through physical contact, still less that religion could be penned behind a wall of tanks and left to wither and die. What is more, had Islam been the main motive behind the intervention, then one could have expected some clear policy on relations with, or the suppression of,

12

5

AFGHANISTAN: THE SOVIET UNION'S LAST WAR

the faith in Afghanistan, or at least evidence of an awareness that it was a factor in the country's spiritual life. As it was, though, there was no such policy and briefings for political officers serving in the 40th Army contained literally nothing on Islam. Prancing Proconsuls: The Kremlin thought it was in command, but it was led about by the nose by Afghan Communists eager to use it to solve internal disputes and by local Soviet officials with a personal interest or prejudice at stake. Though in its 'pure' form this line does not really stand up, there is more than a little truth here. Soviet officers and advisers brought into Afghanistan apparently soon split into Khalq and Parcham factions and 'went native' in their immediate political interests. Certainly figures such as Ivanov, Puzanov and perhaps Karmal were very important in feeding Moscow information biased in certain ways, and the USSR would hardly be the only state to fall foul of the machinations of its pawns.

Ultimately, though, the answer probably lies in the instincts and prejudices of the handful of old men who took the decisions, all Russian oligarchs of the old order, whose careers dated back to Stalinism and the Great Patriotic War, and who combined a gut-level belief in the USSR's prerogatives as a superpower with a crude and manichean ideological world-view and a fair amount of simple racism towards the 'blacks' of Asia. Gromyko had built his career on rigid loyalty to the hierarchy, and the steady expansion of the USSR's role and authority beyond its borders. Suslov, unbending in his dogmatic adherence to a creed ossified into catechism, was locked into the world-view in which a country 'lost' to the Soviet bloc had been 'won' by the capitalist camp. If troops had to be deployed and people killed, that was a regrettable but necessary price to pay. Andropov reluctantly agreed: events had gone too far to ignore, and failure to act might appear as cowardice or weakness; this represented an opportunity to put right his colleagues' blunder in relying on the Amin-Taraki Khalq regime. Military force may not have been his preferred weapon, but it was better than inaction. Brezhnev, already nearly senile, faltering in his grip on power, aware of Andropov's increasingly contemptuous and confident campaign for the General Secretaryship, was confused. Through the dim mists of his memory, Brezhnev may well - admittedly, this is pure speculation - have harked back to Czechoslovakia '68, which he saw as an unalloyed success, and striven for a similar triumph. His henchman and ally, Ustinov, certainly anticipated such an outcome: a quick, neat show of military force, the installation of a docile new leadership and

INTRODUcriON: INVASION

13

prompt withdrawal. After all, there had been no planning for a lengthy occupation and the first wave of troops was neither structured nor trained for counter-insurgency operations. On 24 December, Ustinov called a meeting of the Deputy Defence Ministers and service chiefs which finally disabused those who thought they were planning for a combat exercise: zero hour- Vremya 'Ch'was set for the next day, 15:00 Moscow time. 25 DECEMBER 1979

Soviet-Afghan relations are a vivid example of relations of a new type among equal and independent states. TASS commentary, January 1981f

On 25 December, mechanised forces began crossing the Soviet-Afghan border, with the 356th and 66th MRDs occupying first Herat, then Shindand, Farah and Kandahar, the 360th MRD passing through the Salang to reach Kabul by 26 December, and the 201st moving to Kunduz, Badakhshan and Baghlan. Lieutenant General Mikhailov, Tukharinov's advance force commander, established a forward com· mand centre at Bagram, while a continuous airlift brought Soviet forces in Kabul to some 5,000 by 27 December. At this stage, the Soviets were busy placating Amin by presenting this as a massive and convincing response to his requests for aid; the troops were there to shore up his regime and crush the guerrilla strongholds. Yet after several failed attempts to assassinate him by poison and bullet, Amin's elimination and the capture of Kabul was to be the aim of Operation Shtorm, a coordinated plan involving the finest troops at Moscow's disposal, from its paratroopers to KGB and military intelligence commandos. On 27 December, the trap was closed. Colonel Ivan Ryabchenko led remaining elements of the 105th Guards Airborne Division as they deployed to Kabul and Bagram. Despite the loss of one aircraft (and 37 men) to an air crash, his paratroopers captured the Interior Ministry in Kabul that evening, while others blocked off the city to pro-Amin reinforcements. Meanwhile, a KGB Spetsnaz unit codename Zenit (drawn from the Border Troops Directorate) took the central radio and telegraph stations, post office and Pul-i-Charkhi prison. The 'Moslem Battalion' attacked the Defence Ministry and, along with elements of Zenit, stormed Amin's residence. Their orders were clear: Amin and his closest supporters were to be liquidated; no quarter was offered or given. In what seems characteristic behaviour for strong, ruthless leaders, used to dominating their environ-

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THE INVASION OF AFGHANISTAN. 1979

Map shows main

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INTRODUCTION: INVASION

15

ment and their situation, when events seem to go awry, Amin for some time refused to believe what was going on. The parallels would, after all, include Stalin's paralysis in the early days of the German invasion of 1941 and Hitler's in the last days of the war. At about 9:15 pm, a prerecorded broadcast was beamed from Soviet transmitters on Radio Kabul's frequency, in which Karmal announced that he had assumed power and appealed for Soviet military assistance. By the next day the city had been secured, Amin had been killed (the commandos lost only 12 men) and Soviet military police of the Commandant's Service were even controlling rush-hour traffic. The troops were followed by Babrak Karmal and a host of Soviet bureaucrats, teachers, technicians and secret police and within days, some 4,000 civilian administrators had been brought to Kabul. The KGB and Spetsnaz forces were withdrawn to the USSR by 7 January 1980- and the real war began. BREZHNEV'S WAR: TACfiCAL INNOVATION, POLICY STAGNATION

The Soviets had anticipated a quick operation to install a more stable and reliable leader, rebuild the Afghan army, enforce a new alliance on the various wings of the PDPA and overawe opposition to the regime. Once the new regime was secure - the Afghan 8th Infantry Division resisted until5 January- Soviet forces would simply be used to establish garrisons securing key lines of communications and support DRA units as, freed from this duty and backed by Soviet artillery and airpower, they inflicted a convincing defeat on the rebels. Life rarely runs so smoothly and, as the British discovered in the nineteenth century, Afghanistan is never so easily controlled. The Afghans did not prove - Western propaganda and their own macho boasts apart - to be particularly good warriors or insurgents, but Afghanistan's mountains and fertile 'green zones' are perfect guerrilla country and the rebels were possessed of an extraordinary will to resist, a passion for a fight and the traditions of jihad, holy war. The PDPA did not prove so easy to unite, the divide being not just political but also perhaps predominantly- ethno-cultural, between the urban, Persianspeaking intelligentsia of Parcham and the tribal and Pushtun Khalq. The DRA's forces proved unable or unwilling to fulfil their allotted role, and the Soviet army found itself forced to participate in a war for which it was neither trained nor equipped lest it be forced instead to withdraw. By the end of January 1980, there were 50,000 Soviet troops in-country; by the end of summer, this had risen to 80,000. As the stakes mounted, the USSR found itself locked into the war, and although Brezhnev toyed with the idea of withdrawal and even asked Chief of the General

16

AFGHANISTAN: THE SOVIET UNION'S LAST WAR

Staff Ogarkov to look into the possibilities of extricating the OKSV in time for the XXVI Party Congress in 1981, there was never the political will present to win or end the war. Instead, the Brezhnev era was marked by making do, by a series of often stop-gap measures to respond to the war's special needs in the absence of any strong mandate or guidelines from the political centre. Nor was there any serious notion of pushing on to secure Pakistan, as some Western analysts claimed, underlining the essentially reactive, conservative nature of the late Brezhnev-era leadership. In 1980, the end of the original reservists' tours of duty provided the OKSV with an opportunity to begin to restructure and it took the first steps towards creating specialised counter-insurgency forces, forming the 66th and 70th independent brigades as experimental prototypes. The 40th Army was expanded and more helicopters introduced, while periodic, if always clumsy and stereotypical conventional offensives were launched against rebel concentrations. Despite the fact that he had opposed intervention and then been given no clear political objectives, Pavlovskii was scapegoated, pensioned off into the ranks of the military inspectors in December 1981. He was replaced by the dynamic Marshal Petrov, whose experience, tellingly, had been in the Far East and then in another of Moscow's foreign adventures, having directed operations in the Ogaden 1977-78. Under Petrov, the Soviets began to emphasise the role of light infantry and air-mobile troops and evolve new tactics for the war. ANDROPOV'S WAR: WILLING SPIRIT, WEAK FLESH

Andropov, during his brief tenure as General Secretary 1982-84, had little energy to spare for Afghanistan, though he did make tentative moves towards sounding out chances for a negotiated withdrawal. Andropov's earlier reluctance to endorse military intervention in Afghanistan, as well as his experiences in rebuilding a safe Soviet satellite in Hungary after the intervention of 1956 (during which time he had been the ambassador in Budapest) would have led him to favour such an extrication. In addition, he was closely linked with Oleg Bogomolov, director of the Institute of the Economics of the World Socialist System, who had been a consultant to Andropov during his tenure as head of the Central Committee's international department in the 1960s. As will be discussed later, it was Bogomolov and his team who produced the first critical assessment of the war's impact. They also developed the thesis that Soviet influence would be best (and more cheaply) served by its spread 'by force of example' rather than force of arms, a catch phrase Andropov would adopt in November 1982 and

INTRODUCfiON: INVASION

17

Gorbachev in his turn. Most importantly, though, all his policy objectives, from improving relations with both Europe and China, to freeing up resources for internal economic investment, would have required it. Hence, he made genuine efforts to accelerate existing talks under the auspices of the United Nations, but in the light of his ill-health and the need to ensure the succession of 'his' team, Afghanistan was never a priority. A series of unfortunate incidents or coincidences - notably the destruction of Korean airliner KAL007 by Soviet fighters in September 1983 - served to hinder efforts at reconstructing detente. Andropov lacked the energy or will to concentrate efforts on what was still, after all, a relatively minor part of the problems facing him. What changes there were concentrated on tactics over policy. He ensured that the DRA built up its own equivalent to the KGB, the KhAD, which also took on an increasing role in operations and in expanding its network of informants and paid allies. Lieutenant General Leonid Generalov replaced Lieutenant General Viktor Ermakov in charge of the OKSV and continued the steady improvement in training and equipment and the expansion of the role of light, special and airmobile forces. CHERNENKO'S WAR: LIMITED ARMAGEDDON

It was Konstantin Chernenko, General Secretary 1984-85, who came closest to trying to win a military victory in Afghanistan, both owing to his personal inclinations and his desire to win for himself at least one triumph before succumbing to his emphysema. Once again, vanity clearly shows itself to have a role in the exalted circles of geopolitics. Still under Lieutenant General Generalov, the OKSV adopted far more aggressive and brutal tactics, from high-altitude carpet-bombing to massive major assaults such as attacks on refugee camps and the Panjshir 7 offensive of 1984, which involved some 15,000 Soviet and 5,000 Afghan government troops, as well as heavy bombing by Tu-16 aircraft flying from bases inside the USSR and large heliborne landings, reportedly of up to 2,000 men at a time. The aim appears to have been to win by shattering rebel morale and destroying their support infrastructure by, quite simply, encouraging mass emigration from rural areas outside Kabul's control: a policy of 'migratory genocide'. By mid-1984, there were an estimated 3,500,000 refugees in Pakistan and 1,500,000 in Iran out of a total population of perhaps 13 million. Soviet casualties increased during this period, but it is still important to stress how limited the war remained. There was no major increase in the size of the OKSV, nor was there much recourse to such measures as cross-border bombing, as practised by US forces in Vietnam. Neverthe-

18

AFGHANISTAN: THE SOVIET UNION'S LAST WAR

less, Chernenko's iron fist did not lead to a convincing military success, just temporary victories which, in turn, sparked a more assertive response from the USA and other backers of the rebels. The United States, which had provided the rebels with $400,000,000 worth of aid by the end of 1984, promised another $250,000,000 for 1985 alone. In April 1985, President Reagan signed National Security Directive 166, promising $470,000,000 for 1986 and $630,000,000 for 1987, while the US Agency for International Development provided another relief programme which reached $40,000,000 by 1988. The prevailing mood in Reagan's America seemed to be, as Representative Charles Wilson so delicately and elegantly put it, 'there were 58,000 dead in Vietnam, and we owe the Russians one.' 5 The war was escalating. GORBACHEV'S WAR: BRINGING THE BOYS BACK HOME

Gorbachev's obvious priorities included staunching this 'bleeding wound' (he used this expression at the XXVII Party Congress in 1986) so that the resources being ploughed into the war could be diverted to more productive uses, and putting an end to the fighting which was impeding Soviet efforts to build bridges not just with the West, but also with China and the Arab nations. The arrival of portable surface-to-air missiles, including the US 'Stingers', did not change the face of the war, but they were a powerful symbol of the continuing will of the West and the Arab world to support the rebels. Former Soviet policy had generally been framed within rather long-term policies, despite Chernenko's flurry, looking to the creation of Sovietised elites and the progressive elimination of the rural Afghan population. Gorbachev, though, needed not just to get out of Afghanistan, but to do so quickly. He raised the issue as early as October 1985, at talks with Karmal and a delegation which included the man later to be Moscow's ally in Kabul, Dr Mohammed Najibullah. Karma! allegedly replied that were the Soviets to withdraw, 'next time you would have to move in a million troops', but Najibullah used the opportunity to distance himself from his leader and hence make himself an attractive candidate to succeed him. Karmal's protests notwithstanding, by the end of 1985, a decision in principle to withdraw had been made by the Soviet leadership. With the mix of humanitarian reformism and cold-blooded ruthlessness that was to characterise his era, Gorbachev engineered Karmal's downfall and near-exile to the USSR in May 1986 and his replacement by the more sophisticated and flexible Najibullah. Formerly the head of KhAD, the DRA's secret police, Najibullah was prepared to accept that a victory would not be won by force of arms and gambled, instead, on a

INTRODUCfiON: INVASION

19

mix of co-optation and compromise, his 'policy of national reconciliation'. The OKSV's operations, although they were beginning to bear fruit, were scaled down as Gorbachev decreed that the priority was to limit casualties and concentrate efforts on building up the capabilities of the Afghan forces to hold their own after a withdrawal. Increased effort was concentrated on exploiting tribal divisions and suborning or simply hiring local militias; joint government/militia operations thus became a new and important feature of the war. While counter-insurgency techniques were refined and developed, the political underpinnings of the war had been removed. The success of the operation to withdraw and the longevity of the Soviet-retrained government forces they left behind attest to the fact that the General Staff was beginning to master this new style of war, for all the problems associated with getting a modern bureaucratic military machine to reform itself. Following a Soviet-Afghan summit in December 1986, talks were opened in Geneva to draw up some basis for Soviet withdrawal, while Najibullah's 'policy of national reconciliation' sought to heal divisions within the PDPA and provide an umbrella for deals and understandings with rebel and neutral leaders. There was certainly a mismatched opposition to the peace process, from fundamentalist Afghan guerrillas resistant to any compromises, fearful Kabul bureaucrats and Soviet conservatives and nationalists aghast at any retreat or 'betrayal'. Senior Gorbachev advisor Aleksandr Yakovlev claimed it took the reformists four years to overcome passive resistance in the Politburo to withdrawal. Similarly, there have been suggestions that attempts were made to hinder or sabotage negotiations, such as when new troops were deployed to compensate for most of the six regiments Gorbachev pledged to withdraw as a good-will gesture in 1986. Nevertheless, negotiations were finally concluded in Geneva on 14 April 1988. They envisaged complete withdrawal of all but advisers by 15 February 1989. Despite later dispute over the issue of 'symmetry', the mutual cessation of the provision of arms to Kabul and to the rebels by Moscow and Washington, on 15 February 1989, Lieutenant General Boris Gromov, last commander of the OKSV, walked over the Friendship Bridge back onto Soviet soil: the 40th Army had come home. ASSESSING THE IMPACf

The process of unravelling the Soviet Empire can begin in Afghanistan. Abdul Rashid, rebel field commander6

20

AFGHANISTAN: THE SOVIET UNION'S LAST WAR

One of the characteristics of local war is that its scope may expand manyfold as the war develops. Therefore, it is necessary to take any local war very [seriously] ... From the text of a lesson at the Voroshilov General Staff Academy7

The irony is that the Kabul regime outlasted the USSR, even if only for a few months. For this was a war which evolved over time, and its impact on Soviet - and, for the purposes of this book, predominantly Russian- politics and society was played out against the backdrop of the decay of the Brezhnevian order, the rise and fall of the Gorbachev revolution and the collapse of the USSR itself. As a result, this study cannot but be eclectic and often tentative: Afghanistan was not a critical factor, but it fed into a wide range of other processes, from the retreat from globalism in foreign policy to the rise of the 'informal' movements, the seeds of the political changes which eventually led to the postCommunist , if not especially democratic order. The veterans of the war, largely from the fighting underclass who fuel most such wars, left Afgan with a set of experiences which will be with them until their deaths. Yet their story is only a part, arguably a very small part, in the wider matter of the importance of the war to the Soviet Union. For they were relatively few and predominantly marginalised or forced to mimic the mainstream to avoid ghettoisation. In the true spirit of the kollektiv, the war became communal property, an image upon which the new generation of nationalist politicians could trade, a theme around which the newly liberalised journalists could build a reputation for gory populism, a cautionary tale for mothers to mumble to their draft-age children. In so many ways, study of the war's impact on the USSR and Russia through the 1980s and into the 1990s has very little to do with what actually happened 'over the river' - and everything to do with the collapse of the Soviet state and all the hopes, fears and potentials with which it had been vested. Historical developments are irreversible. To understand them, even more to assess them, is not possible in the square and at the meeting, nor from the podium, but only as a result of thoughtful historical analysis . . . Anatolii Gromyko, son of Andrei Gromyko8

NOTES 1. V. Cherkasov, 'Afghan war: the beginning', Soviet Soldier (May 1990). 2. F. Halliday, The Making of the Second Cold War (1983), p.153. 3. G. Orinova, comments, Forum for a Healthier American Society 3,1 (1981).

INTRODUCfiON: INVASION

21

4. Quoted in S. Singleton, 'The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan', Air University Review (March-April 1981). 5. Charles Wilson was quoted in the Daily Telegraph (14 Jan. 1985). 6. A. Rashid, 'An Afghan resistance commander looks at the war and its strategic implications', Strategic Review (Winter 1985). 7. G. Turbiville (ed.), 'Lessons from the Voroshilov General Staff Academy: Ch. 1: Principles and content of military strategy', Journal of Soviet Military Studies 1,1 (1989). 8. I. Belyaev and A. Gromyko, 'Tak my voshli v Afganistane', Literaturnaya Gazeta (20 Sept 1989).

Part 1

THE VETERANS

2

The Experience of War

There you mustn't think . .. The first to think, dies. If you want to stay alive, keep moving. Move and shoot. Above all, never turn back. afganets 1

Non-combatants cannot really understand the experience of war. That we can is a persistent myth born of increasingly pseudo-realistic war films and programmes, the seductive emotional resonances of war literature, and the often rather forlorn attempt to make it comprehensible by drawing analogies to more homely experiences like the thrill of the hunt. One can at least try to cut through some of the myths and preconceptions that surround any war, and this 'hidden war' in particular, by looking at how it intruded into the conscripts' lives, and what experiences and situations they faced. For these are important. They provide insights into the USSR from the senescence of the Brezhnevian system to its dissolution, from the interaction between the State and a new, post-Khrushchev generation to the relationship between women in war and a patriarchal society. But in addition, the experiences of military life provide a guide to the 'field ideology' developed by those who lived it, and hence the political culture they brought back to the collective farm and shop floor. WHO FOUGHT?

You could never trust the blacks fie, Central Asians]. We had some of them lying around, but the real work was always done by the Russians and the Ukrainians. Yurii, afganets

Hah! You know who really did the hard work? We Georgians! My cousin was a scout, and he said all the best scouts were Georgians. Without the scouts, their eyes, the Russian tanks were useless. I know. Georgian taxi driver in Moscow

26

PART ONE: THE VETERANS

All sorts, we were, all sorts. None of us were ever going to get onto the nomenklatura [lists of elite Party members], though. Bastards. Andrei, afganets

I'll tell you something. That country was dyed red with our blood. By the end, there must have been a hundred thousand of our boys who gave up their lives. Blood red. Kostya, afganets

One of the most bitterly debated questions about the war was that of who actually participated in it or, more to the point, who was forced to do so. Myths, allegations and suspicions abound, ultimately all revolving around the central question of justice, fairness. Were 'unfair' numbers of Slavs sent, to offset the inherent disloyalty of Soviet Central Asians? Or were 'excessive' proportions of Baits sent, to cull the ranks of their young men? Or was it just the common folk who fought on behalf of an elite which kept its sons well away from the war? It is important to realise that these are political questions. All told, there are three key reasons for looking at the composition of the 0 KSV. First, to provide an insight into the political considerations behind the selection of soldiers for Afghanistan. Do they go some way towards showing the balance of power in the USSR (in other words, who were the unlucky souls at the bottom of the heap sent to fight), or the Kremlin's perception of the relative efficacy and loyalty of its various subjects? Secondly, people certainly believed that gross unfairness was at work, and this played a part in the sort of gut-level assessments of social justice and morality that came to the fore in popular reactions to the Communist Party and the USSR's history in the light of glasnost' and a taste of democracy. Were these beliefs justified? If not, if people were basing their decisions on a myth rather than the realities of the war, this already tells us something about the nature of late Soviet politics. Finally, the social and geographical distribution of the veterans also determined the nature of the exposure of different groups and people to the war. How far were some areas or classes exempted from participation and hence dependent on the indirect sources of mass media and grapevine for their knowledge of the war, how far did others play a disproportionate role and hence develop an unbalanced perspective? Hence, there are three basic questions initially to address:

1 2

Was it a Slav war? Was it a proletarian war, fought by an underclass while the nomenklatura, the members of the Soviet elite, bought and stringpulled their way out of the war they started?

THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR

3

27

Was it a mass war? How great was the penetration of the war into the Soviet population? Can one characterise 1980s Soviet youth as the 'Afghanistan generation'?

WAS IT A SLAV WAR?

Certainly, the question of the ethnic composttwn of the forces in Afghanistan aroused much controversy. Many Western sources, for example, insisted that after the first few years Central Asians were no longer being sent since they were proving all too easy prey for the contamination of rebel fundamentalism. After all, around this revolves the question of whether Islam in the USSR was essentially a subversive force, and whether it could unify the 'Islamic Midlands'. This question of the ethnicity of the soldiers also had relevance to nationalist outrage at being forced to fight a 'Russian imperial war'. The Baits, for example, proved particularly energetic and prolific producers of samizdat critical of the way the flower of their youth was dying in distant mountains on Moscow's behalf. Such images could and, to an extent, did become powerful engines or idioms for nationalism and Russophobia. In the absence of more specific statistics, the best hard evidence for the composition of the afgantsy lies in casualty figures, broken down by nationality. There are problems in their use, of course, and there may, for example, have been some fudging of the figures. One obvious case relates to those soldiers dying of injuries back in the USSR. This may be at the heart of the upward revision of the casualty figures in 1990, when they crept quietly from 13,833 through 14,163 to around 15,000. Nevertheless, the Soviet Ministry of Defence's decision to produce complete biographies of the dead would seem to preclude major disinformation; there would be just too great a risk that outraged families or pedantic researchers would spot any discrepancies or names omitted from the list. In addition the predominantly Slav composition of elite units involved in the heaviest fighting distorted the casualty figures, making them only approximate indices of involvement, while the use of reserve forces from Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan in the initial invasion inevitably meant that their casualties were disproportionately high. But since the period 1979-80 only accounted for 1,570 deaths, no more than 10 per cent of the total, this is not too great a problem, especially since, once again, the actual assaults were spearheaded by non-reserve elite units. The figures show that the brunt of the fighting was borne by soldiers from the Slavic republics and Turkmenistan - Baits, Kirghiz and Transcaucasians are especially underrepresented. More than anything else, these figures reflect the ethnic topography of the Soviet armed

28

PART ONE: THE VETERANS

TABLE 2.1 Casualties by nationality (February 1990 figures)

Nationality

Total Total Pop. Dead/ Youth Dead/ Index of Deaths (Millions) Million Cohort lOOk Involve(lOOk) ment

USSR Overall 13,833

285.7

48.4

221.8

62.4

0

6,879 2,374 611

145 44.1

47.4 53.8 60.9

105.7 30 7.3

65 79.1 83.7

+ 2.6 +16.7 +21.3

1,067 361 281 239 102

16.7 8.1 2.7 4.2 2.5

63.9 44.4 103.4 56.7 40.3

18.2 8.4 2.9 4.2 2.7

58.6 43 96.9 56.9 37.8

- 3.8 -19.4 +34.5 - 5.5 -24.6

195 98 81

6.8 4.6 4

28.7 21.2 20.3

7.2 4.2 3

27.1 23.3 27

-35.3 -39.1 -35.4

Lithuanians Latvians Estonians

57 23 15

3.1 1.5

}

}

3.7

25.7

-36.7

1

18.6 15.8 14.6

}

}

Moldavians

195

3.4

58.1

72.2

+ 9.8

Slav republics:

Russians Ukrainians Belorussians

10

Centra/Asian republics:

Uzbeks Kazakhs Turkmen Tajiks Kirghiz Transcaucasian republics:

Azeris Armenians Georgians Baltic republics:

} }

2.7

1,255 27.9 45.1 21.5 58.4 - 4.0 Other The index is a simple guide to the approximate casualties per hundred thousand cohort that nationality suffered, relative to the national average, with variations of ±10% in bold.

forces. Elite, spearhead units had always been predominantly Slav and bore the brunt of the casualties, while the second-class, second-echelon units in which non-Russians were more likely to serve were used for the less dangerous duties such as garrison work. This alone accounts for much of the variation in participation in the casualty figures and hence only serves to underline the multiethnicity of the Soviet war effort. Even the Tajiks, a people living on both sides of the Soviet-Afghan border, among whose number was Ahmad Shah Masud, certainly the finest of the rebel commanders, showed little sign of unusual disaffection. Indeed, Colonel V G Safronov, in the first authoritative Soviet military

THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR

29

study of the war, claimed that the presence of Uzbeks, Tajiks and Turkmen in the intervention forces actually worsened the situation due to a long heritage of tribal and ethnic disputes. One can, therefore, safely discount tales of Central Asians galvanised, as a whole, into resistance by the thought of fighting their co-religionists, just as these figures put Bait plaints into context.

WAS IT A PROLETARIAN WAR?

So if the war effort was a Soviet one, this still says little about the social origins of the conscripts. Given that corruption was endemic, almost implicit, under Brezhnev, it is unsurprising to find the Soviet press using glasnost' to highlight the use of blat (influence) to exempt wellconnected sons from service in Afghanistan. One particularly blatant case that the media brought to light was the case of the editor-in-chief of the newspaper Sovetskii Uzbekistan, who arranged for his son to be exempted. Blat was usually exerted through the voenkomat, the local draft board, which could ensure that a conscript avoided Afghanistan or exempt him from service altogether. There the senior officer would expect a hefty bribe. At first this was at least 2,000-3,000 rubles, although other figures ranged from 1,000-8,000, at a time when the average annual wage was around 3,000 rubles. In part this reflects variables from regional incomes through the venality of voenkomat staff and the number of people they, in turn, had to pay off, to simple 'inflation'. It was also an indication of the fact that the basic currency was influence rather than simple cash. The money was often almost a token, a visible manifestation of the deeper workings and interconnected networks of influence. Again to take the example of Uzbekistan, one voenkomat there even went so far as to draw up a formal list of 'privileged youths' not to be called up. The result was visible in the backgrounds of those serving in the OKSV, with a marked skew towards young men from the countryside, small towns and the low-prestige industrial cities. Even the partial and patchy figures available, from both official and unofficial sources, support this. Compared with the overall ratio of one veteran per 393 head of population, politically powerful Russian cities like Moscow, Leningrad and white-collar Novosibirsk clearly did well, with ratios of one in 500, 765 and 815, respectively. But this was as nothing to the streetwise ethnic capitals of the Baltic republics and Transcaucasia, such as Estonia's Tallinn (111,593) and Georgia's Tbilisi (1/2,000). The burden of the war fell largely on such cities as Dnepropetrovsk (1/131),

30

PART ONE: THE VETERANS

Arkhangelsk (1/122), Lyubertsy (1/160) and Tula (1/235), the grim and grimy smokestack towns, the politically marginalised blue-collar centres of the Slavic proletariat. Institutionalised corruption helped 'proletarianise' the war and hence confine the suffering to an underclass of those lacking the necessary cash, class or connections and, as a result, those also with the least input into national politics. Thus was born a gulf between the political classes on the one hand, and the fighting classes on the other, later to develop into a post-war concern that military service, from being a universal obligation was increasingly becoming another duty levied by the new middle and upper classes on the workers. Conservative soldier and afganets, Colonel General Krivosheev acidly noted that at this rate they could as well resuscitate 'the old romantic name of the armed forces- the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army'. 2

WAS IT A MASS WAR?

Participation in the war could be controlled since it was, relatively, such a small-scale operation. At most 120,000 soldiers were committed in-country at any one time, making a total of something like threequarters of a million afgantsy, some 3.6 per cent of the entire military establishment of that decade, to which one would add perhaps 200,000 civilian specialists and other 'honorary afgantsy'. The final figure according to the chair of the Supreme Soviet Committee for SoldierInternationalists' Affairs, was 730,000, though this too may well be a slight underestimate. In context, three-quarters of a million or so is not that many. Out of a population of 286.7 million it is a mere quarter of a per cent, compared with 1.7 per cent of Americans experiencing Vietnam. Out of the 135.5 million male population, it is just over half a per cent. Even focused down to the males turning 18 over the period of the war, some 22,200,000, it is only 3.4 per cent. The dead represent tragedies, but in one year almost five times as many Soviets died on the roads as in the whole war. This is not to devalue the impact of war on those young men; it is, rather, to put it into context when trying to assess the role of the war on the system and society as a whole. What is clear is that this was a war directly touching only a tiny minority of the Soviet population, and little understood by many observers and participants. Beneath glib talk of a 'lost generation', the truth is, on the one hand, much more varied and specific, and, on the other, rooted in public preconceptions that themselves reflect wider currents in opinion and mood. In other words, myth.

THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR

31

THE POWER OF MYTH

By myth I mean the stories containing a people's image of themselves in history. Extreme simplifications, myths may always be debunked as falsifications of reality. But simplification is their strength, since only by ignoring the great mass of infinite data can we identify essential order. A people cannot coherently function without a.myth. John Hellman, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam 3

Myths are extremely important in a complex and morally ambiguous world. They allow societies to solve conflicts and work out internal contradictions in an artificially clear environment, dealing with symbols on which everyone can agree even if, in reality, they bear little resemblance to the objective facts and dilemmas which spawned them. The relatively small overall proportion of the population involved in the war ensured that myths would be important. But it was not just a question of how many served in Afghanistan, it was also clear that the soldiers were drawn from the politically disenfranchised and inarticulate. Not only were they deprived until relatively late in the war of the means to tell their tales of kak eto bylo, how things really were, they were actively squeezed out of the public consciousness by the two great engines of Soviet public consciousness. The mass media never really shook off state control, and the grapevine inevitably distorted what little real news was fed into the system with the overbearing weight of public prejudices, conventional wisdom and a natural tendency towards extremism and sensation. While it is clear that geographical participation in the war was uneven, the small numbers involved, and the multiethnicity of the war, prevented more than a few, very local concentrations of veterans reaching what might be considered a critical mass, sufficient to allow enough genuine information into the local system to counteract these rival mythologising forces. As will be examined in more detail later, the impact of the war thus reflects tendencies present within the Soviet people at least as much as the contingencies of the war. To an extent, of course, this did change. As glasnost' and grass roots and central democratisation spread (and more and more young men returned from the war), there arose new freedoms to articulate views and communicate them, from independent presses to speeches in the new elected chambers. But it becomes an open question as to whether a few years of limited pluralism, accompanied as they were by their own distorting factors, from an immature political culture to the instrumental

32

PART ONE: THE VETERANS

gambits of a new generation of public figures, could do much to counter early years of unopposed myth-building, and how far they merely revitalised and reflected them. For what was this real experience that the afgantsy had faced 'over the river'? 'WELCOME TO THE ARMY, IV AN IVANOVICH!'

Defence of the Socialist Motherland is the sacred duty of every citizen of the USSR Article 62, Soviet 1977 Constitution

Life is a book, and the army is two pages torn out of it. Russian proverb 4

Conscription is literally hell. For those of us who knew what we could expect, it was the lowest circle of the inferno. Boris, afganets

Induction into a conscript army is never much fun, but Soviet practices and the looming threat of Afghanistan combined to establish patterns of brutality and hierarchy, fear and disaffection that maximised the initial trauma of the Afghan experience for conscripts exposed to it at a critical, formative moment in their lives and forced them to find new bonds and support systems, often at odds with the military system. Caught in the midst of post-adolescent identity crisis, raised in a communal, still largely insular and uncosmopolitan society, they quite possibly had never travelled beyond the nearest town, met people of different cultures or coped with anything like the responsibilities and duties soon to be heaped on their scrawny shoulders. Nor did the military authorities have a clue how to deal with them. The patterns and propaganda used in training had not changed in essentials for decades, and drew on images and concerns now alien and often positively demotivating to many of the young draftees. Soviet youth had become increasingly educated and sophisticated, acquiring the combination of leisure time and freedom from all-embracing political control to develop its own cultures and attitudes. Visible symptoms included the spread of distinctive youth subcultures on the street, from khippy ('hippies') and pacifists to heavy metal rock fans metallisty- and lyubery, right-wing 'bovver boys', products of the late 1960s and 1970s. The majority of Soviet youth had drifted outside the ken of the Party and its Young Communist League, the Komsomol, and although Afghanistan helped the authorities to begin to come to terms with the change in Soviet youth, this was far too late. The army's

THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR

33

training programme, for example, presupposed a draft intake thor~ oughly prepared for military discipline, physically fit and already possessing basic military skills courtesy of an interlocking trinity of programmes developed for this purpose: the Party's youth movements, school Basic Military Training and voluntary military sports through the DOSAAF organisation. But this whole edifice was manifestly crumbling and in disrepair. An average of nine rounds fired over two years at school firing ranges do not, for instance, constitute adequate small arms training, but there was not the money for any more. Just as serious was the decline in the ability of the system to socialise Soviet youth, symbolised by the eclipse of the Komsomol by street culture. There were over forty million Young Communists in 1987, but most joined just to use the sports clubs and discos, or because they had to, to go to university or get on. In the next three years, as the social clubs became commercial ventures and the political controls decayed, membership fell by a quarter and was slipping at an ever faster rate, until the collapse of the Soviet Union delivered the final, fatal blow. Hence the particular trauma experienced when, as in any army, the first stage of induction sought to strip the conscript of every trace of civilian identity, shearing off lyuber crew cuts and flowing khippy locks alike. Apprehensive, sullen, probably hung~over, draftees were trans~ ported to their new units where they faced a gruelling basic training course, after a distinctive set of rituals - getting atrociously drunk and changing into one's worst clothes, sure that anything decent would be stolen by older and larger soldiers, being searched at the voenkomat for knives and sharp implements which could be used in a fight or to commit suicide. All of which gives some idea of the enthusiasm with which national service was greeted. Recruits ultimately bound for Afghanistan would typically receive their initial training of 8-10 weeks before being posted to their units or, more often, staging billets in Central Asia. Shaven headed, identically uniformed, marching in unison and subject to the impersonal scorn of their officers, they were forcibly torn from their old lives in a 'welcome' seemingly fit for a labour camp prisoner, not a 'young warrior'. Nor was this unintentional. For the army, as any army does, then sought to reconstruct their identities in its own image. It rewarded achievement in approved directions with a sergeant's stripes, merit badges, lighter duties. It savagely penalised nonconformity, through both the formal channels of authority and the informal ones of the dedovshchina, a seniority~based culture of 'hazing' rights that cut across class and ethnic boundaries, enlisting senior conscripts to keep newcomers in line by bullying and beating, while promising the victims eventual access to the same privileges in return for acquiescence (another charming practice brought

34

PART ONE: THE VETERANS

from the labour camps). When, after initial training, they finally took the military oath, this was elevated with the full force of military pomp to a rite of passage into a new life. COMING TO AFGHANISTAN

So where next? As special training for Afghanistan began to be introduced after 1982, some could work out their likely destination. Others claim that it was possible to decipher one's eventual destination from the serial number on call-up papers, though this is apocryphal. There were also draftees who actually volunteered for service in Afghanistan, attracted by the macho, glamorised picture presented in the earlier years' press coverage (and often ending up in elite units, such as the paratroops, assault landing troops and scouts). Others, according to some defectors, were convicted criminals for whom it was an alternative to prison, or soldiers sent to Afghanistan as punishment. Four of the 35 defectors or emigres interviewed by Alexander Alexiev of RAND had this experience: two who had broken military laws (one going AWOL, the other trading cattle for drink) and been transferred to the OKSV as an alternative to court-martial and the penal battalion, one for 'bad behaviour', and another for falling foul of a superior: I had a very bad relationship with one of the officers in my platoon. We did not get along at all. I hated this officer so much, I told him 'If I ever get out of the army, I'll kill you.' And he said, 'Well, I'm going to send you to a place from which you will never return.' afganets5

But for many (and most, in the early years) it came as an unwelcome bolt from the blue, heightening the trauma of arrival into this unfamiliar environment and war. They were rarely told their destination even when in flight, being spun a line about being sent somewhere like Poland. Or maybe they would be told at the last moment; not, frankly, that it would probably have made much difference since they were generally sent under guard: frightened, halftrained boys, kept behind barbed wire, pacified with vodka until the armed military policemen came to herd them to their plane like convicts. In the night they take us in carriers to the airport. And only after take-off is the official announcement made that we are flying to

35

THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR

fulfil our internationalist duty in the DRA ... After two hoursKabul. afganets6

LIFE IN AFGHANISTAN

When they got there, though, life was perhaps not quite as bad as might be supposed. Certainly quarters were often ramshackle or makeshift. In the early years many soldiers lived under canvas, even in garrison duties; overcrowded and offering little shelter to the extremes of hot and cold that characterise the Afghan climate. More seriously, hygiene remained a problem throughout the war. Soldiers would often go a month without a shower, and water- especially drinking water- was universally scarce. Not surprisingly, the primitive conditions and the (especially at first) cavalier attitude of the army towards hygiene favoured the spread of a variety of infectious diseases, gastric disorders, lice and parasites. It is worth putting this into context, however. A recurring theme of the war is that Afghanistan brought little that was new to the Soviets. Barracks throughout the USSR were atrocious, even by comparison with Soviet civilian housing, and the gripes of the afgantsy can be set against equivalent, but perhaps less publicised ones from other servicemen. Since 1976 dysentery, hepatitis and other infectious intestinal disorders had been an increasingly common aspect of conscript life, due to improper refuse disposal, inadequate sewage, sloppy food handling and contaminated water, such that the incidence of hepatitis in large units in 1975-82 was three times the figure for 1968-75. The army even had to set up Extraordinary Antiepidemic Commissions as an emergency measure. As for rations, Alexiev's RAND study produced mixed results as to whether they were worse or better in Afghanistan, and the overall consensus - inadequate in quantity, indifferent in quality - is borne out by study of the standard field ration. While afgantsy would complain about the lack of food, recalling feeling hungry every minute of the day, emigres who served in the Soviet army in peace were also almost unanimous in citing hunger as a feature of army life. So while everyday life in Afghanistan was hardly easy for the conscript soldiers, it was probably not much worse than life in any comparably extreme-climate and primitive part of the USSR. Indeed, there were some special opportunities for the troops, from loot to kill bounties in hard currency vouchers and a good supply of Western goods in the local shops. Goods bought at voentorg (military shop) prices could also be sold at premium rates to the Afghans - while the more

36

PART ONE: THE VETERANS

enterprising could find a healthy market for pistols (18,00~20,000 afganis apiece . . . when a woman for the night could be had in Kabul for 100) or Kalashnikov rifles (100,000 afganis). 'BUILDING SOCIALISM IN AFGHANISTAN': MORALS AND MORALE AMONG THE 'INTERNATIONALISTS'

Of course, if you were caught selling guns, you could face the firing squad, but all this underlines the fact that if the physical conditions of barracks life were no better or worse in Afghanistan than other, more peaceful postings, then the moral conditions were far more distinctive. Again, though, the problems were very much of degree, of existing tendencies and inadequacies magnified when put to the test of war. Corruption, crime, bullying, drug and alcohol use and abuse, all played a part in the afganets' experience, and not just for the conscript. The military system that had tried to dehumanise and reprogramme them was sometimes akin to a nineteenth-century mass army in its lack of understanding of and sympathy for the urges and interests of its components, especially given the dramatic social changes of the past fifty years and the concomitant evolution of a generation ill-disposed to the crude 'barracks socialism' imposed upon it. Denied any freedom from the rigid codes of military life (no leave, precious few recreational facilities, no chances to fraternise with the population without risking an Afghan knife in the ribs or a reprimand from a superior officer), the inevitable result was a retreat within, to the oblivion of drugs or alcohol or to the creation of a social world, however limited or brutal, which allowed the individual to count for something. This had been the significance of dedovshchina throughout the military, for with its arbitrary duties and privileges it did construct an inner hierarchy with opportunities for interaction and progress of its own brutal kind. You may not have enjoyed it, but at least you knew where you were and probably had someone below you on the ladder. In Afghanistan it was supplemented with and sometimes replaced as a situational response by a 'them and us' afganets mentality - the 'Afghan brotherhood' against the world, with its own slang, shared experiences and rituals to mark out its social boundaries and give it greater cohesion. This was an important development in the psychology of the Soviet military. The previous dominant pattern had been dedovshchina and, perhaps, the ethnic self-help of gruppovshchina, ethnicity's answer in that whereas the former involved older conscripts bullying, beating and mistreating the younger, the latter saw conscripts of various ethnic groups bullying, beating and mistreating other such groups. These were essentially selfish, zero-sum mores, stressing the need for personal

37

THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR

advancement and profit, using groups and group structures as far as possible, but always ready to ignore them where the opportunity for gain existed. They provided advantage, but only at someone else's expense. In Afghanistan, though, there were issues at stake more important than who got to clean boots and who sat back and had a smoke. Salagy ('little fishes', conscripts with less than six months' service) ended up doing the fatigues meant for stariky ('old timers'). Throw your weight around and you could find your comrades a little slow on the trigger when it came to supporting you in some lonely mountain pass, or when you fumbled open your first aid kit you could find someone had replaced the dressings with shredded copies of Pravda. Nor could officers rely on the murderous majesty of military discipline to shield them from the consequences of their actions: Many officers assumed it was the same here as back home, that they could hit and insult their men as much as they liked. Quite a few who thought that way have been found dead in battle, with a bullet in the back. The perfect murder! afganets7

Just as dedovshchina had evolved as a specific situational response, so too did a new pattern emerge in the face of new needs. Units involved most heavily in the fighting generally suffered least from bullying and interethnic friction. The soldiers needed an atmosphere of trust and mutual support, and not just support in the practical sense, but also psychological. Deprived of 'normal' human contact, the soldiers were having, at a time of extreme emotional fragility, to come to terms with a war that was often hard fought, frequently brutal and always dangerous. Bonding within groups for mutual support became a real necessity. As one soldier put it: In Afghanistan, I went into battle shoulder-to-shoulder with Russians, Armenians, Estonians, Georgians. We were united by a firm bond of brotherhood in arms. In battle, it cannot be otherwise. afganets8

THE TWO-HEADED ARMY: VARIED COMBAT EXPERIENCES

This correlation of fighting with internal harmony reflected the very clear distinction within the OKSV between those units which bore the

38

PART ONE: THE VETERANS

brunt of the fighting and those which spent most of their time in garrisons hoping to avoid it. The former were primarily made up of relatively elite formations: paratroopers, Spetsnaz commandos, the DShV helicopter-cavalry, reconnaissance forces and certain specialised mechanised (motor-rifle) units. Better trained, with a disproportionate share of professional soldiers and volunteers, an esprit de corps all their own and given first pick of new equipment, these 'operational forces' made up perhaps 20 per cent of the overall military contingent, with the remaining 80 per cent lumped together as 'occupation' and 'support' forces, usually only seeing combat in self-defence, convoy duties and when used to support the operational forces in major set-piece assaults. Overall, Soviet sources claimed that only 40 per cent of troops were involved in combat operations. Hence their combat experiences were extremely varied. Many occupation force soldiers would have faced the constant and draining tension of convoy work. With most supplies for Afghanistan having to be brought in from the USSR over land, the 'road war' became a critical element of the conflict. Convoys of some 100-300 vehicles would form up at either the Kairaton Transshipment Complex at Termez or at Kushka for the trip south. About one-third of each convoy would be security vehicles, but all the same they faced rebels who became increasingly adept at ambush, mining and sabotage. Given that a driver could make up to 80 Termez-Kabul-Termez round trips in the course of a two-year tour, the award of pennants 'for courage and valour' every 20 trips was more than just a hollow military courtesy. Whereas operational troops would conduct aggressive operations to secure potential ambush points along the route and counter any rebel attacks, occupation forces were limited to a rather more reactive role. You just sat in your lorry or personnel carriers and waited: waited for the mine that you might just be about to drive over; waited for the ambush round the next bend; waited for the end of the day, so that you could wait for dawn and the start of another day spent waiting. Garrison duty was similarly passive. Ordinary Soviet troops would not carry out the active night patrols that some elite forces began to develop, and their role was usually confined to sitting tight until being attacked and then blazing away with every weapon to hand. In most garrisons, as in garrisons throughout the world, boredom was probably a worse problem than the threat of attack. Soldiers were often confined to their unit outpost for months on end, although by the latter years of the war attempts had been made to improve conditions. In 1988, British journalist Mark Urban visited a company's base which boasted not just the ubiquitous Lenin Room full of improving pamphlets and library but a sauna and satellite TV. So, boredom and isolation were often the main

THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR

39

enemies; many of the posts were little more than platoon bases watching stretches of roads or villages. The most extreme examples were the socalled 'eagles' nests', mountain-top observation posts which had to be built from materials flown in by helicopter and supplied the same way, despite the fact that they often lacked even the space to construct a proper landing pad, just a small 'shelf' large enough for a hovering helicopter to touch down a couple of its wheels. Groups as small as a dozen men could find themselves incarcerated in such posts for a full 18 months, without leave or remission for good behaviour. Combat itself tends to be far less traumatic in the long term than either participating in or witnessing atrocities or, more relevantly, periods of sustained tension and isolation. Like US troops in much of Vietnam, the French in Arab Algeria, or the British in parts of Northern Ireland, this was 'bandit country'. No native could be trusted, safety could never be taken for granted. Even Kabul was never adequately pacified, something even the relatively sanitised pre-glasnost' media admitted:

Circumstances change with the approach of night. Streets and alleys become empty. The footsteps of guards echo hollowly in the quiet that sets in, and patrol vehicles move around slowly. And now and then their headlights will suddenly pick up a sinister form, the barrel of a sub machine gun will flash out like a wolfs eye and a shot will ring out. 9 Besides which, the addition of substantial quantities of inaccurate but long-range unguided rockets into the rebel armoury from 1985 meant that danger existed even in the most secure garrison. On the other hand, the operational forces led a much more active and high-adrenaline existence. By the latter years, they often operated in small units, out of direct contact with their command, and were frequently used either to preempt rebel attacks or as quick-reaction forces to respond to them. Paratroopers were often used as elite infantry to spearhead attacks, inserted by helicopter or airdropped into rebel territory alongside the increasingly independent reconnaissance troops to ambush supply caravans, release prisoners or simply launch surprise attacks. The helicopter-borne assault landing troops of the DShV fulfilled a similar role, albeit with a greater emphasis on rapid-response operations, rushing to the scene of any sabotage or attack. Theirs was a life of greater immediate danger but also one cushioned both by preferential treatment (including the odd showing of Western videos such as The Deep and, appropriately, The Deer Hunter) and the closer intra-unit ties and support engendered by combat.

40

PART ONE: THE VETERANS

AFGANKA: WOMEN IN THE WAR

A theatre nurse was crying out 'I have never seen such things in twenty years of life'. This sergeant was dancing with her just yesterday. And today he was brought down from the mountains Barely half alive. 10 The divisions were not just between operational and garrison troops, for this was not an exclusively male war. The 'afganka', the female survivor of the war, has received relatively little attention, not just because of her relative scarcity but also because of the entrenched patriarchy of Soviet society. What references were made quite dripped with patronising surprise at her pluck - she could almost be a chap, don't you know? For if mass mobilisation wars tend to expand the role of women in the military and its support system, limited wars tend to the opposite. The few women involved, already perceived as 'different' for infiltrating a male preserve, return traumatised and isolated by their experiences. Facing general incomprehension, they often retreat into the company of those few who can understand them, strengthening outsiders' - male and female - perceptions that the sort of women who would join the ranks are at best a breed apart, at worst a social aberration. Judith Stiehm has identified three useful myths that serve to bar women from 'legitimate violence': that their role is to give the men a reason to fight; that military women are whores and lesbians; that even military women need male protectors. All three myths appeared in the context of Afghanistan. Women serving in Afghanistan (as opposed to the carefully protected wives of officers) performed a wide range of functions, but all reflected traditional male perceptions of the proper role of women. Whatever they did, they were locked within a military and civil culture in which women's biological function of child rearing set the tone, their involvement being confined to 'nurturing' or 'support'. Many, for example, served as nurses, others filled a variety of support/nurture roles either within the military (as cooks, for example) or the contingent of Soviet advisers and specialists (such as teachers). Others were relegated to more obvious support roles, such as clerks and shop assistants in the voentorg shops or entertainers. Even as soldiers, women were typically either medics or involved with paperwork or communications. After all, despite nominal guarantees of equality from the early days of the revolution, Soviet society stood as unabashed testimony to Engels' acid dictum that 'in the family he is the bourgeois; the wife represents the proletariat'.

41

THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR

In Afghanistan, women faced additional burdens. Not only did they face the same worries, anxieties and pressures as other afgantsy, they also had to do so within an army which, like all barely post-adolescent conscript armies, served as an initiation rite for its young men into patriarchal society. Hence, with their biological and social functions conflated by cultural diktat, women acquired additional burdensome roles, not just sex-objects but also mother-figures: You can't imagine how pitiful the lads are! The first time, I cried, thought I wouldn't be able to bear it, would go home. But whom can you forsake? They are still virgin boys . . . You have a good cry and then once again you go back into the ward with a smile. afganka nurse 11

So they had to be protected; they could be pursued; they were the source of constant youthful attention ranging from jocular romanticism to rape. At least half the conscripts had already had experience of sex by draft age, and worth noting is that when figures were released in spring 1990 of prisoners serving sentences for crimes committed in Afghanistan, fully 11.8 per cent were rapists. For comparison, the most frequent crime, hooliganism, accounted for only 12.6 per cent. This is particularly important in what it says about the morale of many soldiers there. Rape is War's traditional boon-companion, a product of the passions, tensions and male isolation that flow from it. But more than a relief or spoil of war, rape tends to be used as a form of catharsis and is most evident in an army feeling itself defeated, and hence looking for a way to reaffirm its tarnished masculinity. In characteristic sexist doublestandard, the role thrust upon the afganka even doubled as a stick to beat her as evidence suggests many women in Afghanistan became stigmatised as whores: 'You fulfilled your internationalist duty in a bed' . .. My mother proudly announces to her friends: 'My daughter was in Afghanistan.' My naive mother! I want to write to her: 'Mother, be quiet or you'll hear people say your daughter is a prostitute.' afganka 12

Of course, there were also professional camp followers, nicknamed bochkarevki after the officers' railway carriage-like houses (giving some notion of their main market), but overall this was clearly a very sensitive issue. When Svetlana Alekseevich published an early excerpt from her work Tsinkovye mal'chiki, a compilation of veterans' experiences, recounting the tale of a female army clerk who refused a summons to her superior's bed ('The commander wants you') and was then threatened

42

PART ONE: THE VETERANS

with posting to the Kandahar battle zone, this prompted a furious reply from the woman in question in the army's newspaper, denying many of the allegations. Whether these were her real views or whether she had been leant on to express them, when Tsinkovye ma/'chiki was later published in full, Alekseevich, while retaining that section, no longer attributed it by name. Whatever the truth of this specific case, it certainly reflected the plight of many of the female afgantsy. This reflects the way sexism in the Soviet Union was built on a cultural bedrock so solid that even the 'feminism' of such courageous and outspoken examples as Tat'yana Mamanova was still helplessly compromised with the instincts of submission. Mamanova herself accepted that different biological roles preclude equality and preached rather pride in the 'womanly' role, hence 'feminism is based upon the natural altruism of women; the giver of life is the custodian of life' .13 Ghettoised both within society as a whole and within the military- even her rank was largely treated as a courtesy brevet title - no wonder the afganka faced problems defining an identity independent of that imposed by a patriarchal environment. In any circumstances, the social pressures would have been burdensome. But the women in Afghanistan also faced genuine physical danger. Concepts such as 'the front line' mean little in guerrilla war, with the omnipresent threat of random bombardments, mines, undetected anti-aircraft missiles. Many performed duties which necessarily kept them near the fighting, female nurses being issued bullet-proof jackets and rifles to work under fire evacuating casualties. While facing the traumas common to other military paramedics, these army nurses faced an extra fear: that rebels meted out an especially bloodcurdling fate to Soviet women was an established part of afganets folklore. The Herat rising of March 1979, critical in shaping Soviet attitudes, left 100 Soviet advisers and their families dismembered and burnt. It may or may not have been true that the afganka needed the protection of her brothers-in-arms: the important fact was that it was certainly believed, such as by the nurse given a grenade by a soldier before going off to a regimental aid station. 'Anything may happen, you know', she was told.

I remembered one young Afghan woman. She had trained as a teacher. The bandits caught her and raped her and cut her skin. I thought, if they do that to one of their own, what would they do to me? afganka, geologist

Finally, most were volunteers; some came out of a desire to test and satisfy their professionalism, some to find husbands, some for extra pay.

43

THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR

Yet there they found lots of work, few of the professional satisfactions and fewer still of the privileges of the officers (many, for example, received only a 50 per cent salary increment plus hard currency vouchers - where professional soldiers were receiving upwards of 10~200 per cent). The result was often disillusion or, more volatile yet, anger: We went there to save lives, to help, to show our love, but after a while I realised that it was hatred [for Afghanistan and the Afghans] I was feeling. Nurse, afganka 14

AFGHANISTAN AS A MIRROR

So from the generalisations that can be made about the war and the composition and distribution of the soldiers who served in it, one can draw some conclusions about the formal and informal political culture of the late Soviet Union. The importance of blat and corruption, for example, is clear, reflecting the way influence-corruption (ultimately, after all, it is all based on influence: money can buy influence and, more to the point, it is usually influence that gets you into a position to obtain money) had become institutionalised in the Soviet state as a humanising and regulatory mechanism, permitting the satisfaction of those with power and influence, the sort of people the regime needed to keep happy. At the same time as it socialised the active, though, corruption alienated the nizi, the influence-poor ordinary people at the bottom of the heap, those unable to operate in either the official or the 'shadow' world. A keen awareness of the gulf between the haves and the havenots was a constant feature of late Soviet press articles and simple conversation on the streets. The recruitment of soldiers for the war also provides an interesting snapshot of the geography of influence in the USSR, with its clear emphasis on drawing conscripts from rural communities and lesser industrial centres and belies some of the conventional wisdom about the Kremlin's relations with its various subject nationalities. As for the soldiers, they learnt some hard lessons. After all, in so many ways the 'Afghan experience' was wholly at odds with the propaganda. Soviet soldiers arranged tacit cease-fires, which allowed them to sit back safely as their Afghan allies fought and died. Inadequate training and preparation produced a new generation of superstitions, from the widespread possession of amulets to the absolute ban on the use of the word 'last' (an old air force custom, the word being replaced with 'ultimate' or a similar synonym) or shaving, shaking hands or being photographed before a mission. From the bland, deceptive

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PART ONE: THE VETERANS

headstones on their graves ('died during military service') to the clumsy disinformation of the early years when Soviet soldiers could crouch in their foxholes and read in their newspapers that they were distributing loaves of bread and medicine to happy Afghan peasants, the whole episode was a case-study in duplicity, the moral bankruptcy and the practical failings of the Brezhnevian order. The war was a perfect paradigm of late Soviet politics, from the crude and unimaginative decision to intervene to the unselfconscious cynicism and corruption of the war effort. Yet the actual exposure of people and leaders alike to the war was minimal, and hence it became a vessel for other, underlying concerns and disputes, a metaphor for a series of unresolved problems. Those men and women who fought and died in Afghanistan - patriotic, disgruntled, volunteers, conscripts, heroes and criminals - could not even claim their own war for themselves. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

V. Coulloudon, Generation Gorbatchev (1988), p.126. G. Krivosheev, '0 voinskoi povinnosti', Krasnaya zvezda (31 August 1989). J. Hellman, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam (1986), p. ix. C. Schofield, Inside the Soviet Army (1991), p.76. A. Alexiev, Inside the Soviet Army in Afghanistan (1988), pp.9-10. 'A N', 'Strashno khotelos' zhit' .. .', Komsomol'skaya pravda (21 Dec. 1989). S. Alexievich, Zinky Boys (1992), p.41. V. Bogdanovich, 'My odnoi strany synov'ya', Krasnaya zvezda (9 Sept. 1989). Krasnaya zvezda (28 Dec. 1982). C. Walker, 'Glasnost gives soldier poets liberty to voice disillusion', The Times (10 Feb. 1988). P. Studenikin, 'Afganskie madonny', Pravda (29 Oct. 1987). S. Alekseevich, 'Tsinkovye mal'chiki', Komsomol'skaya pravda (15 Feb. 1990). T. Mamanova, Russian Women's Studies (1989), p.148. Alexievich, Zinky Boys (1992), p.23.

3

Coming Home: Children of the War I've left Afghanistan, but I am an afganets, and always will be. I can't walk away from what I have seen and done. Boris, afganets

You never really come home. Lev, afganets

So the soldiers were nizi, disempowered plebeians of the Soviet social order. Stranded in an alien institution, the military, and in an alien land, they all the same experienced very different wars. The result was that they were a far more varied group than the use of the neat little tag 'afgantsy' suggests, with its implicit assumption of a single, distinct and unified subculture. Of course, this illusion was reinforced by the veterans' own jargon and customs. All close groups create their own vocabularies of various degrees of opacity to outsiders, from management consultants' 'cash cows' and 'poison pills' to nuclear war-game theorists' 'collateral damage' and 'cee-cubed-eye'. Soldiers are no exception, and every service and every war has its own lexicon. 'Vietspeak', for example, was an eclectic amalgam of US Army acronyms and official designations, garbled loan words from Vietnamese, French, Chinese and Japanese, and transposed and often mutated 'street-slang'. These are argots, springing from lifestyles, rather than mere jobrelated jargons, and tend to involve new meanings being given to old words and the creation of a new vocabulary operating within standard grammar. As for 'afspeak', it bears the marks of a different heritage, sometimes quite disconcertingly poetic, with its 'black tulip' (the aircraft that carried bodies back to the USSR), sometimes straightforwardly descriptive, such as bronya, armour, for an armoured personnel carrier. Worth noting is the relative absence of loan words from Afghan tongues: Soviet soldiers never fraternised to any great extent with locals, bar those thoroughly Russified Afghan interpreters, scouts and Party workers. Since this was important in conditioning Soviet soldiers' attitudes towards the Afghans and hence the war, this is an interesting example of the insights such argots provide into subculture mindsets.

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Such a tongue can serve to exclude outsiders. Consider, for example, a passage both en clair and rendered into Anglicised afspeak: We went into the cultivated area in an operation to surround the rebels, with tanks and personnel carriers up front. It was nearly a massacre when the tanks hit mines, until the officers called down MiG-21s and a helicopter gunship. Still, we needed paratroopers in transport helicopters to finish the job. We went into the green for a blocking against the spooks, with elephants and armour up front. It was nearly a meatgrinder when the elephants hit cans, until the dogs called down happies and a hunchback. Still, we needed landers in bumblebees to finish the job.

With experiences, concerns and even a vocabulary all their own, it is not difficult to see how outsiders may assume that the afgantsy form a single, cohesive unit. But this is patently a crass oversimplification, if for no other reason that they were not all fighting the same war. Between the Russian spetsnaz who went on to command a regiment, the unwilling Uzbek draftee who drove a truck along the Salang highway, the bored Ukrainian conscript who spent his war watching an ammunition dump in relatively quiet Kabul and the Moldavian bomber pilot whose war was seen largely on his cockpit displays, before returning to debrief and a refreshing plunge in the unit's swimming pool, there is only so much common ground. Though they spent a year, two, maybe four in the same war, they were also divided on grounds of education, nationality, political outlook, experiences and peer groups. It made a very real difference if you came back from a war with the Order of Lenin or an artificial leg, if your most powerful memory was of a punitive raid or of guarding a medical unit dispensing supplies to villagers.

THE ATTITUDES OF THE AFGANTSY

While the afgantsy shared a common language, this was contingent on their experience in war and did not necessarily imprint a common identity upon them able to survive until the end of the war. Besides, many of the services and units had their own variant of the common argot, based on professional duties or mere tradition. In her book Inside the Soviet Army, for example, Carey Schofield notes the twee playfulness of 'para-speak' and their habit of referring to even the most lethal or monstrous equipment or training courses in familiar diminutive: rukopashnyi boi, their murderous form of unarmed combat, becomes

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47

rukopashka. Elite forces, after all, tend to thrive on such macho postures. This plurality in experiences and backgrounds reflected itself in the range of opinions to be found within the afgantsy, both in terms of conscious and explicitly argued views and deeper assumptions and inclinations. This was to be important, since it helped ensure that they never represented a united, coherent force and were thus deprived of a single, audible voice. The key question is, of course, how they felt about the war. In an interesting survey, the youth newspaper Komsomol'skaya pravda solicited the views of afgantsy and non-afgantsy alike on a series of issues. When questioned about how they would assess Soviet involvement in Afghanistan, the results showed some clear differences. Of the veterans, some two-thirds opted for essentially positive assessments, compared with only a third of the non-veterans. TABLE 3.1 Komsomol'skaya pravda poll on Soviet involvement in Afghanistan Assessment

Afgantsy

Non-Afgantsy

It was our internationalist duty

35%

10%

'Internationalist duty' is clearly discredited A difficult, but necessary action I am proud of the afgantsy It is our national shame

19 19 17 17

30 19 6

46

Source: Komsomol'skaya pravda (21 Dec. 1989). NB: figures add up to over 100 per cent, since some gave more than one answer.

It is hardly surprising that the veterans needed even more to feel that their efforts and endurance had not been wholly in vain. There were also other issues commanding overwhelming support among afgantsy across the board, such as the conviction that their privileges and benefits were inadequate or only on paper (88 per cent) or that afgantsy had been through a hard school (66 per cent), men one could count on in hard times (72 per cent). But for all that, there existed clear differences in opinion and emphasis within the afgantsy. The key questions were: 1 2 3

Was the war an evil or stupid adventure or a just act of national security or international friendship? Did it make men or break them? Did it activate or turn off, a force for reform or reaction?

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This is quite an eclectic collection, which itself suggests that the war did not have a single 'influence' or weight of its own, but rather that it stimulated, developed and heightened existing tendencies and opinions. WAS IT A GOOD THING?

You remember that mother who lost her son. She kept repeating 'he fulfilled his duty to the end. He fulfilled his duty to the end.' That's the most tragic thing. What duty? ... She hasn't yet realised that it was all a ridiculous mistake. I'm putting it mildly. Ivan, afganets 1

Certainly the dominant opinion in the USSR was that the intervention was a tragedy, a foolish, even criminal act, and for the soldiers caught in this ugly and pointless war such views could have real relevance. The Komsomol'skaya pravda poll showed 19 per cent denouncing the whole concept legitimising Soviet intervention and a further 17 per cent prepared to characterise the war as a national shame. What is more, it is striking how often contact with veterans leads to individuals who have turned to God or otherwise sought to escape a burden of guilt they feel.

I shed blood, sweat and tears in Afghanistan ... We did what needed doing. Never forget that. Vadim, afganets2

One should not assume that all or even most veterans necessarily shared the jaundiced assessment of the war that became the received opinion of the journalistic and political intelligentsia. Many needed to feel their suffering had not been in vain. Others still clung to their ideals or the darker solace of nationalism and racism and felt no reason to share in the angst of the metropolitan chattering classes. Remember, the Komsomol'skaya pravda poll found 71 per cent of afgantsy expressing an essentially positive view of the decision to intervene, compared with 35 per cent of non-veterans. Nor is this without precedent: a poll of US soldiers who fought in Vietnam revealed the veterans both more bullish on future military interventions in the Developing World (29 per cent in support, as opposed to 17 per cent of non-veterans) and more prepared to countenance the thought of their sons serving in such a war (38 per cent to 20 per cent). Nor is it by any means proven that the Soviets lost the war. Ultimately, the intervention was to prevent a notionally friendly regime

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from collapsing or selling out to the USA, and Najibullah's Kabul regime was to outlast the USSR. WHO SAYS WE LOST THE WAR?

Here's where we lost it, back home in our own country. afganets3

It is also quite possible for a belief that the war was wrong to coexist with the view that the soldiers conducted themselves well in the situation, just as one could feel that the war was a mistake but one made for the right reasons. After all, Afghanistan was a poor country and it cannot be denied that during their occupation, the Soviets did expand the education system and literacy programmes, as well as build 25 hospitals, four power stations, 84 schools, 35 bridges and so forth. Of course, this was not just out of altruism - the Soviets had hearts and minds to win, and those hospitals, bridges, roads and wells also had strategic value- but afgantsy could still feel they were helping Afghanistan emerge from the dark ages without this totally being a comforting self-delusion:

I had the greatest respect for the Afghan people, even when I was shooting and killing them. I still do . . . but the fact is that I, personally, truly believed that their nomadic tents, their yurts, were inferior to our 5-storey blocks of flats, and that there was no true culture without a flush toilet. afganets4

The rebels could, indeed, prove to be bloodthirsty fundamentalists and mercenaries. Their open and widespread use of torture against captured Soviets (notably 'the shirt', cutting off the skin above the waist and tying it over the head, and using bound captives as the 'ball' in a quick game of buzkashi, Afghanistan's answer to polo) also allowed veterans to deem them worth destroying, while glossing over the Soviet and Kabul regimes' use of torture and indiscriminate violence: We were no angels. But we were fighting devils. Nikolai, afganets

DID IT MAKE BOYS MEN?

That's where I learned what life was about. I tell you straightthey were the best years of my life. Life here is rather grey and petty: work-home, home-work.

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There we had to work everything out for ourselves and test our mettle as men! afganets5

There is an established series of assumptions about army life and the way it 'makes a man out of you', ranging from the undoubted confidence that surviving a range of new, difficult, even lethal challenges imparts, through the new physical presence provided by stodgy army food and relentless drill to the natural propensity to look back fondly at past nightmares. In addition, the heightened companionship of war provides a rich fund of memories at least, friends for life at best. Many veterans, needing to believe their times not wholly wasted, found this need satisfied by a sense of personal development. Wars also test a whole series of skills, traits and aptitudes that rarely surface in civilian life, and those possessing them often find the experience of soldiering liberating or fulfilling, at last developing potentials long latent. There is also a different aspect of the way the war developed the warriors. Given the age of conscripts, national service usually coincides with the period of establishing a post-adolescent persona. For the afgantsy, part of this maturation involved coming to terms with some rather sobering facts about Soviet policy, the systematic deception of the regime's media and the blind and uncaring arrogance of the system in its treatment of the individual. This should not have been news to any of the soldiers, but war gave it a distinctly dramatic and striking setting and impact. Valentin Finogenov, secretary of a parliamentary committee on the veterans, highlighted the way an afganets 'usually looks at the society which sent him to his death through different eyes', and it is probably fair to say that this was perhaps the only genuinely common denominator of the veterans: whether they supported or decried the war, they felt it played a critical part in their formative post-adolescent years. To some, this was a positive development, albeit one bought at a terrible price:

No, it's not a bad thing it ended the way it did, in defeat. It opened our eyes. afganets6

DRINK, DRUGS AND DEATH

Before they went to Afghanistan, they were just normal guys. They drank, like everybody else, but that was all. They learned that in Afghanistan, life was impossible without drugs. They needed them there, because of the heat and because they had to

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51

carry 40 kilos up and down hills. Then there was the fear- drugs helped with that. 'Eddy', afganets and heroin addicf

Perhaps the most enduring image in this debate over the impact of the war on the veterans was the notion that it created a generation of young drug and alcohol addicts. After all, the link between war and drugs is hardly an invention of the Vietnam conflict, while the use of alcohol to numb the sensibilities predates Roman legionaries and Viking berserks. War is inherently traumatic, terrifying and at the same time stimulates and gratifies some of the baser, animal passions many would rather not rouse. Drugs and alcohol are classic forms of self-medication when other options are denied, and have the undeniable virtue of portability and proven efficacy. They also provide indirect support since their use is often social, an aid to group bonding. This is not just psychologically reassuring, it enhances the survival prospects of members of the group by developing trust and their ability to work together. Yet while some looked to drugs as a vital crutch to tide them over the shock of an end to the fighting, this should not be exaggerated. Given the prevalence of alcoholism in the USSR, it is no surprise to find it in the military. Alcoholism in the Soviet Union had reached epidemic levels, with 40 million medically certified alcoholics in 1985 and the consumption of alcohol per capita increased 20.4 per cent from 1950-79. Cheap Cuban sugar had a lot to answer for. In the country at large, this manifested itself in a marked and growing taste for hard spirits, but with Gorbachev's anti-alcoholism drive of 1985-90, the use of samogon (highly alcoholic and often toxic moonshine) and such drastic alternatives as alcohol-based cologne and antifreeze increased dramatically. In the barracks this manifested itself in the habitual misuse of radar coolant fluids and rough-and-ready jerry-built stills, but these 'below stairs' options were rather less feasible in the combat conditions of Afghanistan where lives genuinely depended on, say, the aircraft's radar working, and there was less tolerance for such soldierly customs. Social drinking was certainly firmly established in Soviet officer traditions, from 'washing' new insignia in vodka on promotion to escape to the bottle from poor living conditions. As such, it was especially a vice of the professional NCOs and warrant officers, those with the money and access to indulge, without the better conditions and careerist caution of the full officers. For the other ranks, though, drugs seemed to offer a more accessible, portable and effective escape. War is miserable without anasha [marijuana] . .. Anasha helps me understand Asia afganets and convict8

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As recently as 1984, the USSR's senior expert in the field, Eduard Babayan, publicly claimed that the Soviet system had eradicated all causes that could induce drug abuse. Nevertheless, it is clear there was already official concern in the early 1970s when a series of new laws were passed. In 1977, a ground-breaking survey was completed in Georgia, which concluded not only that there was a problem, but that it was beginning to spread, with women increasingly involved in this hitherto male-dominated activity. For all this, Soviet sources at first confined themselves to noting Islamic traditions that endorsed the use of opiates in medicine and prohibited drink, but not drugs. But public concern and debate followed, and in the space of a single year of unprecedented glasnost', the problem grew from being discounted as 'small, almost unnoticeable' in June 1986, to being accepted as a grave social problem. It became clear there was no such neat correlation. The impact of Islamic tradition should certainly not be underestimated; Turkmenistan, for example, a republic accounting for 1.3 per cent of the Soviet population, tended to head the league tables, with 6,500 addicts in 1988, some 13 per cent of the official national total of 50,000 Yet alarmist press reports began to come in from elsewhere, from Moldavia, Kuibyshev and finally, symbolically, Moscow, where Boris Yeltsin, then first secretary of the city Party, admitted it was a 'serious problem'. Hence the issue of cultural forces behind narkomaniya spread to include the cultural impact of deprivation, alienation and service in Afghanistan. Like education (still the most likely place for addicts to have been introduced to drugs), military service generally tended to throw people of different backgrounds together- even given gruppovshchina and the relegation of so many of certain nationalities to the construction battalions - and combat service further eroded the barriers between them. Hence the war may well have introduced new types of people to drug use as a concept.

There wasn't a single person among us who did not try drugs in Afghanistan. You needed relaxation there, or you went out of your mind. afganets9

One defector claimed that 50-80 per cent of all Soviet troops in Afghanistan used narcotics, while Soviet surveys reported that up to 20 per cent of soldiers begin using drugs while serving, mainly opiates and marijuana, though chejir, a concentrated tea, could produce a 'high', especially when mixed with wine or vodka. Yet how to quantify the longer-term impact of war? Certainly awareness of drugs on the part of

COMING HOME: CHILDREN OF THE WAR

53

the Soviet authorities as well as potential users increased markedly in the period of the war. But this was also to a large extent contemporaneous with glasnost', and it is the latter which was the greater force behind the three-fold growth in registered drug addicts (including, as Soviet figures do now, chronic alcoholics) in 1985-88. On the one hand, the statistics were catching up with events, as greater candour and a new emphasis on treatment rather than punishment induced more to register. On the other, they definitely charted an increase. But the spread of drugs does not reflect participation in the war, which was skewed towards the countryside. Instead it was a specific feature of the cities and, especially, the smokestack cities of Russia, the Ukraine and Belorussia, with their growing underclass of disaffected youth. These young men were being sent to Afghanistan, but this does not necessarily suggest a direct link. The impact of the war on drug use in Soviet youth culture was more subtle than many would suggest. First, it was a contributory factor to the alienation process, the cultural gap that opened between the Soviet State and Soviet youth, and a reflection of their anomie, their sense of isolation and rootlessness. Starved of other outlets for constructive rebellion, for creativity, for disposable income and recreational time, drugs became an attractive option. Soldiers may have been introduced to locally grown marijuana in Afghanistan, but if they continued to use it back in the USSR or moved on to heroin or amphetamines, that was because of social factors present in Soviet society rather than physical addiction. There was also a more subtle 'shadow socialisation' of wartime users of both drugs and alcohol. As a habit it was expensive, and necessarily involved illegality, whether in draining radars' supplies of coolant to drink, or selling equipment and even weapons to locals for drugs. This was common practice, and cannot but have eroded any vestigial belief in the inviolability of regulations and laws. For even if the veteran no longer wanted drugs, back in civilian life he certainly wanted something, whether food, cigarettes or spare parts for his car. If unable to satisfy his needs legally, his experiences in Afghanistan may have inclined him to act illegally. In the light of the 54 per cent increase in drugs-related offences in 1989-90 alone, the link between drugs and criminality was an important one. Overall, it is clear that there was no mass 'narcotisation' of Soviet youth. Drugs and drink, like songs and reminiscences, helped them through the terrors of war, but for the majority it stopped at that, selfmedication in response to a specific and distinct problem. For the minority who did return addicted or damaged, this was a symptom, a reflection of deeper psychological wounds and they will be discussed in their proper place, among the other casualties of war.

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DID IT TURN ON OR SWITCH OFF?

Soldier! Soviet power sent you to Afghanistan under the slogan, 'Fraternal Assistance'. They lied to you ... You see how the Afghan peasant strikes against you, with what kind of eyes every youth looks at you. Didn't your grandfather-partisans strike against Hitler's occupation forces in this way? Didn't your father burn the enemy soldier with such a gaze? . .. ISN'T IT TIME TO STRIKE THE CRIMINAL POWER OF THE CPSU IN THE NECK? From an underground leaflet distributed among soldiers by the NTS, a Europebased anti-Soviet emigre organisation10

Thus it is clear that, for some, there could be no return to the quiet and shabby compromises of Soviet life, the Brezhnevian 'little deals' which traded lax supervision by the state for an abdication from political life. In the light of the harsh lessons learned from the experiences of war, many felt the need to play their role in the unfolding fate and dissolution of the Soviet Union, whether in central politics or centrifugal localism. In December 1989, veterans from Kaunas and Vilnius gathered a pile of decorations and merit badges, including two Orders of the Red Star, six 'for bravery' and ten 'for combat merit' awards, and handed them to the Chair of the Lithuanian Supreme Soviet in protest against the war. In 1991, the Lithuanian Union of Veterans of the Afghan War told tlie USSR Supreme Soviet Committee for Soldier-Internationalists' Affairs that it would organise an 'armed rebuff, were Soviet forces to move to occupy the country. Elsewhere, afgantsy joined and led Armenian and Azeri militias in their private wars, while in 1992 they joined the 'Russian national legion' in South Ossetia or Chechen-Ingush insurgents or the Dniester Guard or the new Cossacks or any one of a dozen other military or paramilitary nationalist groupings. In the August Coup, afgantsy came out onto the streets to resist the putsch: one of the three who died in Moscow was a veteran of the war, while in Leningrad the afgantsy established a committee to support Mayor Sobchak's authority and in all over 250 manned barricades. On the whole, though, political views reflected not sudden inspiration but a response to the practical circumstances in which the veterans found themselves on coming home. This began even as the conscripts prepared to return, for just as a gradual acclimatisation both to Afghanistan and the idea of serving there would have been of psychological advantage, so too would a gradual return to civil life after the increasingly tense time, when the soldier's 'personal calendar' was crossing off the last days to be spent in the OKSV. Most soldiers served in Afghanistan until the end of their terms, and demobilisation and

55

COMING HOME: CHILDREN OF THE WAR

getting out of the war were thus virtually one and the same. This clearly did not allow for much of a 'cooling off' period, and hence was psychologically unhelpful, despite the informal rituals and send-offs provided for the dembely, the soldiers about to be demobilised. The only positive note to make is that characteristic inefficiency did sometimes gum up the machinery of demobilisation and hence inadvertently introduce some delay. This is, however, typical of the lack of attention granted the soldiers, and even when they were not transferred directly to civilian life (such as those, for example, who had served only a while in Afghanistal} before taking part in the final Soviet withdrawal), they could find themselves in conditions hardly aiding their rehabilitation from the traumas of the war: There is one thing I do not understand: why, when they returned to the Union, did they not promise them that they would complete their service in usual and not field conditions? ... They were greeted as heroes, having fulfilled their duty. But does heroism really rule out clean bedlinen? 11 WELCOME HOME

Obviously when, for example, a son comes home, the first thing a mother does is see for herself that he is alive and well and that it really is him. afganets 12

Mothers always loomed very large in Soviet life, and the first greeting, scrutiny and welcome by the mother seems the one absolute constant in all afganets tales of return. But then they faced a series of challenges in settling back into civilian life, of which three most effectively illustrate their status and fate: finding work or entering further education, hunting somewhere to live and thirdly, and most intangibly, learning to live with their experiences, either submerging or taming them or finding environments which recreated or neutralised them. These questions are of more than passing interest. For readjustment, the veterans needed recognition and acceptance. They could count on neither. The lack of adequate military recognition by the authorities, for example, even in the Gorbachev period, provides an interesting little case-study of the evident unwillingness of the bureaucratic state to provide for these veterans' psychological needs. Although matters had progressed since the times when soldiers could not even have 'combat operations' marked in the voennyi bilet, their military record, in 1988 the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet finally decided that the afgantsy would receive not a campaign medal but a diploma and

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PART ONE: THE VETERANS

badge for 'fulfilling their internationalist duty'. In the stratified, prestige- and status-conscious world of the USSR, this represented a clear devaluation of their experiences, since a badge rated far less than a medal, and such prominent afgantsy as Heroes of the Soviet Union Boris Gromov and Ruslan Aushev had appealed against this decision. Although the Defence Ministry made great play of the more useful and glorious afgantsy, especially those Heroes of the Soviet Union, there was no general care lavished on them except for specific propaganda purposes. In all, 200,153 medals and orders were awarded to afgantsy, 10,955 posthumously, including 71 Heroes of the Soviet Union, yet many veterans awarded decorations had to campaign long and hard and often in the pages of the newspapers or magazines to receive them. The authorities' seeming inability to award the medals which they had promised even brought to light the startling fact that there were still hundreds of thousands of medals and decorations dating back to the Great Patriotic War which had yet to be given out: 236,000 in Leningrad alone. There was a general feeling that this reflected an active desire to do down the afgantsy, but this is probably unfair. Rather, it reflects one of the basic realities of the Soviet system: there was no law-based state, no effective rechtsstaat. Instead, the fuel of the system was influence from below and priority allotted from above. The afgantsy, like most politically marginalised groups, lacked either, and thus had no standing within this caricature of a Weberian bureaucratic state. If they could not be reintegrated and honoured within Soviet society as afgantsy, they had to take some other route - characteristically by leaving behind the war-time persona. Just as the pre-draftee had been deconstructed and then recreated as a soldier, so too did another metamorphosis take place, as an afganets once again became a Soviet civilian. Some Afghan war veterans made use of the preferential status they were granted for entering further and higher education, which included extra grants and lower entrance requirements. Although too many notional benefits were never effectively implemented, the evidence suggests that this element of the system really did work. Where it did grind to a halt, though, was in getting veterans into the prestigious institutes recognised as the fast tracks to success. Here veterans' paper privileges often counted for little when stacked against the mighty machines of personal corruption and political favouritism. Even so, anecdotal evidence suggests that veterans in education, for all their entitlements, tended to make little of their experiences. In part, this was no doubt a result of a generally hostile attitude to the war and the veterans among the other students. Although such scapegoating seems, as prejudices fortunately so often do, to have been more general than specific, breaking down when brought into contact with a genuine

COMING HOME: CHILDREN OF THE WAR

57

combat veteran, who proved to have neither forked tail nor cloven hoof and not to be drenched in the blood of Afghan babies, it nevertheless would have been a powerful incentive for the veterans to keep their heads down. But perhaps more importantly, afgantsy in continuing education would generally have come to terms with the war if they were able to consider long-term plans and win admission, and would thus have a desire to work within the system and rejoin the social mainstream. In other words, these were young men (and women) who had coped with Afghanistan and either wanted to forget it or, conscious of being a member of an outcast minority, were keen to fit in. Similarly, the majority of veterans returned and found work without particular problems, and without finding their experiences an undue barrier to a normal life. Many veterans did not go through an astonishingly traumatic time in Afghanistan, and for most of those who did, memories faded and a natural equilibrium reasserted itself. In this respect the veterans were aided by the way they had been drawn from a wide range of groups and locations, such that they had to adjust, had no significant circle of local fellow-veterans to permit ghettoisation. In addition, they were assisted by another of the few elements of the benefits package for afgantsy which does seem to have been successful, grants for professional training and retraining. Besides, they sometimes found themselves able to use skills taught in the military - which had always been, after all, one of the rationales behind universal conscription - in their employment, such as the former Construction Troop afgantsy later hired to establish the 'Friendship Bridge' ferry link between Klaipeda and Eastern Germany. It is not possible to come up with any reliable breakdown of veterans' careers and skills. A number, as one would expect, moved into the bloated sphere of 'military-patriotic' work, as voenruki attached to schools to provide legally required pre-draft training and the like. But anecdotal and fragmentary evidence places them in all sectors of the job market, from lawyers to factory hands to bus drivers. Circumstantial support comes from the job advertisements in the veterans' press. Study of the All-USSR Union of Veterans of Afghanistan newspaper, Pobratim 1989-91, reveals a split of roughly one-third of advertisements for military-related work (teaching sports or martial arts, for example), one-third for sales/entrepreneurial opportunities (such as becoming a regional sales representative for a music cassette firm) and one-third conventional blue-collar (drivers, machine operators, etc.). Indeed, the afgantsy were lucky in that they avoided the unemployment of the early 1990s. The experience of soldiers from other such wars - again, the obvious parallel is Vietnam - is that they often face disproportionate problems, owing to negative public perceptions, the

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psychological or perhaps physical traumas of their service and the simple fact that if they lack the pull to avoid service, they also lack the pull to get a job in a high-unemployment economy. The afgantsy, though, had already had time to find their feet and become resocialised by the time unemployment genuinely began to bite, and there is no evidence of disproportionate joblessness. COPING WITH THE MEMORIES: LOOKING FOR A SLICE OF AFGHANISTAN

Do you know how difficult it was for us to get used to a peaceful way of life? There during the fighting, you can see straight away who is who. White was white there, and black was black. Yurii Zobnin, afganets and police commando 13

Most afgantsy returned home socialised to an extent into an artificial world of violent answers, lethal potentialities and ever critical decisions. They had been drafted from provincial towns and villages. They were still trying to cope with the emotional acne of late-adolescent identity crises. The army provided them with a largely unsatisfying, often terrifying or repulsive, but nevertheless exclusive series of role models and formative experiences. Human beings can cope with a surprising amount, though, and most were able to submerge or tame the conditioning of war and return to 'normal' life. Yet others could not leave Afghanistan behind. With the daily struggle of Soviet life an unendurable drudgery, its issues and priorities seemingly empty, its perks and dreams - the dacha, the occasional furtive liaison, the petty blat - trivial and demeaning, they either immersed themselves in the clubby machismo of military-patriotic work or sought jobs most closely recreating their adrenaline-rich (and often mythologised) memories of the war, such as the army, perhaps, or the emergency services, or the often violent and symbiotic juncture of private enterprise and private crime, as investigators, bodyguards, robbers or racketeers. There was no lack of jobs in the emergency services. Yet the afgantsy did not flock to them, and no more than 20,000-22,000 were ever employed within the emergency services as a whole. Adding in the 70,000 within the army, and around 14,000 in other services, this comes to no more than 106,000, out of more than three-quarters of a million, and at a time when all the services were recruiting desperately and heavily under-strength. This helps put into context the numbers of afgantsy unable to relinquish the discipline or adrenaline habits of their soldier days. There were many, but by no

COMING HOME: CHILDREN OF THE WAR

59

means a majority. Nevertheless, it is worth looking at this group, for although they represented a minority of the veterans, themselves a minute proportion of Soviet society, they were the most visible of afgantsy- important for the image projected- and in times of social and political change small, activist groups can sometimes prove to have disproportionate moment, especially when, like these, they were members of armed and disciplined services. Could these have been the Freikorps or Squadristi of 1990s Russia, extremist shock troops akin to Hitler's and Mussolini's?

THE MILITARY AND EMERGENCY SERVICES

The army certainly needed to attract experienced, professional soldiers. Nationalist protests were bringing the conscription system to its knees in many republics, and as there was an increased likelihood that Soviet troops would be deployed inside the country, the General Staff needed a kernel of reliable men. Besides, new generation weapons systems were increasingly just too complex for the average draftee, and the term of service not long enough to train them properly. Although at first the military proved rather unsuccessful at luring the afgantsy back into uniform, by 1991 there were 70,000 afgantsy within the regular armed forces (2 per cent of the total), plus those serving within the security units of the Interior Army and KGB Border Troops. Yet the military was having to compete with the police force, the 'militia', which saw veterans (and paratroopers) as its natural constituency. Only 10,000 afgantsy were serving within the Ministry of the Interior (MVD) in 1989 out of a total establishment of some 475,000 police and 225,000 security guards, prison warders and the like: some 2 per cent of the whole. They were, however, especially strongly represented amongst the 'beat cops' of the Patrol-Guard Service and the rather macho, action-centred emergency units, both out of preference and because these units were most assiduous in recruiting veterans. The Moscow police command, for example, had under its command one of the special and shadowy OMSN anti-terrorist units, first established in 1977-78 to provide security for the Moscow Olympics. All their members had at least Candidate Master of Sport rating in martial arts and marksmanship and they obviously were always on the look-out for battle-trained veterans, such as Sergeant Major Zobnin, whose views are cited earlier on the virtues of a place where 'white is white'. He found his half-way house in the militia. Within two years he had been promoted, graduated from militia college with a red diploma, applied

60

PART ONE: THE VETERANS

for a place at MVD Academy and was being cited as a model policeman. In 1989 he reappeared behind a pseudonym in a newspaper article about the Moscow anti-terrorist strike force. Afgantsy were not, however, originally recruited to the new riot police units, the OMON, although this changed over time. Lieutenent General Anikiev, head of the ministry's political and personnel department, had said that he felt the afganets' 'youthful maximalism' could be a disadvantage for such service. He preferred to recruit older, more experienced and mature men. After all, a riot policeman needs not just to be able to wield a mean truncheon, he should know when to act and when to stay still, all the while ignoring taunts, threats or appeals until his orders are given. As a result, the average age of the Moscow OMON on formation was 33. Yet this caution was by no means universal, and began to change as the duties of the OMON themselves changed. The Kirghiz OMON recruited afgantsy from the first, and when ethnic disturbances broke out in June 1990, its heavy-handed and undertrained young members turned a rowdy protest into a full-scale riot. This rather inauspicious case reflected a new policy: riot policemen increasingly became the centre's arm against nationalists and their sympathisers in the local militia. In January 1991, it was the OMON, nominally a local force, but in practice under Moscow's control, that spearheaded individual acts of punitive repression in both Lithuania and Latvia. In both these republics, the OMON had been recruiting not just Russian nationals, but afgantsy. Elsewhere, afgantsy were recruited to join a variety of alternative law enforcement agencies. These ranged from the unpaid volunteers of the druzhina, to the ham-fisted 'Workers' Detachments' which conservative local authorities set up to break up strikes and radical protests. With the rise of a new approach to policing under Interior Minister Vadim Bakatin in 1990, which supported local police forces, afgantsy began to be hired by these 'municipal militias' in Togliatti, Dushanbe, the Ukraine and ultimately even Moscow. Others were attracted to the fire and medical services. After all, in many ways these emergency services provided a life comparable with that of quick-reaction troops in Afghanistan. Consider, for example, firemen: a period of waiting, the sudden call-out to a life-threatening emergency, a frenzied burst of dangerous yet significant activity and then the camaraderie of the all-male team burning off adrenaline back at the barracks; the transition from helicopter or armoured personnel carrier to fire tender is not that difficult. Such was the experience of one afganets in the film Is it Easy To Be Young? After drifting aimlessly, as often drunk as not, he ended up as a fireman. 'It's a bit like "down there"', he explained, 'Saving lives, facing risks, answering emergen-

COMING HOME: CHILDREN OF THE WAR

61

cies.' In a similar way, men and women who had served in Afghanistan as doctors, surgeons and nurses often gravitated towards trauma paramedicine when they returned: casualty wards, motorway emergency services, disaster relief teams.

PRIVATE LAW ENFORCEMENT AND PRIVATE LAW BREAKING

The decay of the state, heightened expectations and increased cases of genuine hardship all contributed to a considerable growth in the crime rates and a disproportionate increase in public concern. Coupled with the new economic freedoms, this resulted in the growth of a private security business, providing bodyguards, private investigators, security experts and even computer data crime specialists, culminating in the founding of the Independent Society of Private Detectives in 1991. Yet the wariness felt by some policemen about the afganets' 'youthful maximalism' was also evident among their new, private counterparts. The most famous and professional of the new investigation agencies, Leningrad-based A leks, simply refused to hire them, and although N. Georgadze, chair of the Society of Private Detectives, was an afganets, there seems to have been a general divide between the more professional and sophisticated firms, which looked to experience within the MVD or KGB, and the shadowy world of bodyguarding, which so often shaded directly into criminality. Hence, afgantsy acquired a reputation as bouncers and bodyguards. The Union of Veterans of Afghanistan even set up its own firm, Soyuznik Ltd, providing security for both property and persons. Groups and individuals of every political complexion took to finding afganets minders, from the liberal Apre/' group (protected by volunteers from the Union of Democratic Afghan War Veterans) to the Russian nationalist icon, leather-clad TV crime reporter and friend of the KGB Aleksandr Nevzorov. In the Baltic, the local Party supported the formation of the Viking cooperative, whereby loyal afgantsy would moonlight and protect Party buildings from nationalists at the taxpayer's expense. Afgantsy seem to have occupied a similar position within the underworld. As open criminality soared during the Gorbachev era, there was a thriving market for bouncers, hitmen, enforcers and bodyguards. Whereas none of the major criminals caught or identified was an afganets, they often had a respectable proportion of veteran 'soldiers', and although the MVD's organised crime group has tried to underplay their role, it has admitted that the afgantsy were often the Soviet mafiosi's first choice.

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PART ONE: TilE VETERANS

YOU CAN COME HOME

Thus, while one can catalogue specific instances of activism, they must be put into perspective. Anecdotal and media-based evidence will invariably (and often wilfully) accentuate the dramatic, the exceptional, the newsworthy. The human psyche is resilient, though, and the human mind an effective agent of self-censorship, dulling a memory here, distorting a perception there. The majority of afgantsy were not turned into psychotic vigilantes or pacifist drop-outs. Most, like any soldiers, just 'did their bit' in the war and then came home and 'did their bit' to fit back into civilian life. Whereas studies by Moscow University may have revealed that 60 per cent of veterans felt it had a psychological impact, of whom for onethird this was 'acute', the point to make is that for a surprisingly high 40 per cent it did not. The 20 per cent with 'acute' problems were the victims, but formed a relatively small minority, especially as compared with the US experience of Vietnam, where 20 per cent of all veterans (and 60 per cent of combat veterans) became psychiatric casualties. Instead the majority learned hard lessons about what it meant to be part of the politically marginalised working class of the self-proclaimed 'workers' state', yet without necessarily seeing it in such terms. Their existing preconceptions and prejudices overlaid their experiences, and with time largely came to dominate and distort their memories. In this way, the afgantsy merely reflected the impact that the war was going to have on the whole Soviet system. What happened could hardly be described as irrelevant, but was certainly to take second place to what people thought had happened, should have happened, or could have happened. The war was to become a symbol for the moral ills and political tensions gripping late Soviet society, a symbol far more powerful than prosaic reality. Thus, the welcome home of the afgantsy attests to the power of the kollektiv in Russian and hence Soviet society. You could come home, adjust, keep your memories but not let them dominate your life, not feel the need to contest the widely held misapprehensions of the war, collaborate in the construction of the mythical Afghanistan. Or you could be unwilling or unable to do this, insist on separating yourself from the collective - and be marginalised, pushed into various semipariah professions or activities and thus, safely in your ghetto, equally unable to contest the will and views of the mass. Perhaps the veteran could not conform owing to physical or psychological damage, perhaps he insisted on retaining his identity within the movement of afganets clubs or groups. Either way, the fate visited upon him was indicative of the power of the kollektiv leviathan. This was no Freikorps, just a

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COMING HOME: CHILDREN OF THE WAR

collection of society's scapegoats, the state's victims and the poor saps at the bottom of the heap; scattered, shattered, silenced, cowed, bought or marginalised.

You are studying the afgantsy? There is no such thing as 'the afgantsy'. Anyway, who cares? afganets

NOTES 1. J. Steele, 'Ivan, we hardly knew you', Guardian (13 Feb. 1989). 2. Yu Shchekochikhin, '0 "lyuberakh", i ne tol'ko o nikh', Literaturnaya Gazeta (11 March 1987). 3. S. Alexievich, Zinky Boys (1992), p.161. 4. Ibid., p.34. 5. Ibid., p.78. 6. Ibid., p.36. 7. N. Traver, Kife (1989), p.161. 8. A. Ekshtein, 'Soldaty posle voina', Ogonek, 41.91. 9. 'Strashno dlya rebyat . .', Kontingent 3-4 (1989). 10. 'Afghan psywar', Soldier of Fortune (May 1981). 11. A. Ganelin, 'Vstrechali kak geroev', Komsomol'skaya pravda (11 March 1989). 12. S. Dalziel, 'Assignment Afghantsy', BBC CARIS Report 22/89 (28 July 1989). 13. P. Studenikin, 'V chas ispytaniya', Pravda (4 April1987).

Part 2

THE VICTIMS OF THE WAR

4

Broken Bodies, Broken Minds

I'd be better off dead, then they'd have put up a memorial plaque at my old school and made a hero out of me. afganets 1

Some of the most impressive veterans of the 40th Army, with the most poignant tales to tell, are the doctors, nurses, sanitars, fel'dshers and orderlies of the medical services. For this was perhaps the first time the Soviet military had ever established a modern, effective medical structure. Armoured ambulances and aircraft were in constant use evacuating the dead and wounded, with nine out of ten casualties being whisked away by specially modified Mi-8 Bessektrisa ('Indiscretion') helicopters to a network of medpunkty, medical companies and hospitals, similarly linked by air. Some 93 per cent of wounded troops received initial medical aid within 30 minutes and the attention of a specialised doctor within six hours. This 'casevac' was just the first stage, though, and having braved the bullets and rockets of the battlefield, the medics then had to cope with shoddy equipment, shortages and the usual red tape. Still, somehow, they managed. Nurses would spend their free time preparing bandages. Officers on leave would return with suitcases of supplies and drugs bought on the black market. Where possible, they would spend the precious hard currency vouchers which would otherwise have bought them foreign luxuries on Japanese disposable syringes (Soviet ones were often broken or packaged in 'sterile' paper that was frequently already torn), Italian plastic plasma packages (instead of the heavy, fragile Soviet glass bottles) and inflatable British splints instead of cumbersome Soviet 'skis'. Sometimes, they would don flak jackets and helmets and join commandos raiding rebel supply convoys simply to loot the caravans for Westernsupplied medical goods. The result was the rather mixed blessing common to all modern wars. Many are saved from death, but at the cost of lifelong mental or physical disability. While the number of physical and psychological

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PART TWO: THE VICfiMS OF THE WAR

casualties of the OKSV is still uncertain, it is clear that the effect of the war in creating a pool of living victims not only was taken by many, afgantsy and observers alike, as a depressing indicator of the lack of public interest in the veterans' plight, it represented a long-term drain on an already inadequate and brittle health system, and a telling casestudy of the failings of the structures of late Soviet society and the way ordinary people conspired and combined to make what they could out of it.

THE INVALIDS

Officials organizing aid for afgantsy and their families in 1990 were told that 50,000 had been wounded in action, of whom 11,500 were invalids, and this probably represents the best current estimate. But there were also those veterans who became disabled after their service in Afghanistan as a direct result of the war, another 6,500, of whom 1,480 were in the 'first' (most seriously disabled) group. Even so, this is almost certainly an underestimate, reflecting the generally low official figures for disability in the USSR. Instead of the overall government figure of seven million (less than 2.5 per cent of the total population, compared with, for example, France's 6 per cent), one estimate has suggested there were actually 28-30 million invalids in the Soviet Union as of 1990. TABLE 4.1 The wounded and the invalids Total number wounded

49,985

Discharged from service due to injuries Failed to return to work

7,381 11,371

Registered invalids of whom: Category I (most serious) Category II Category III

6,669

1,479 4,331 879

Source: A. Lyakhovskii and V. Zabrodin, Tainy afganskoi voiny (1991), p.213.

Everyone needs psychotherapy. Because the 'Afghan syndrome' is not a phantasm, we have it here. Sergei Shabodo, Chair, Leningrad Afghan Veterans' Association 2

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BROKEN BODIES, BROKEN MINDS

Whereas physical disability is relatively easy to prove and attribute to a cause, psychological damage is far more complex in its diagnosis and treatment. The whole science of combat psychiatry is a relatively young one, and the First World War was the first in which combat stress began to be regarded as a genuine phenomenon rather than malingering. But modern counter-insurgency wars (and those in which soldiers are fighting without faith in their cause) reveal a particularly high incidence of psychological damage, generally Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD), symptoms of which include flashbacks, emotional numbness, withdrawal, jumpy hyperalertness or over-compensatory extroversion. There is a variety of reasons for this, including, again, the way advanced medical techniques and casualty evacuation reduce the death rate, ensuring the survival of many more casualties who have just been through the critical stresses of combat and injury. But such conflicts are also characterised by their lack of clear fronts and zones of control and hence of 'safe zones'. How should one react knowing that any ten-year-old could carry - and use - a pistol? Where can one relax knowing that an unguided rocket could penetrate almost any security perimeter? Everyone was part of it over there: men and women, young and old, kids. One time, our column was going through a kishlak [village] when the leading vehicle broke down. The driver got out and lifted the bonnet- and a boy, about ten years old, rushed out and stabbed him in the back . .. We turned the boy into a sieve. If we'd been ordered to, we'd have turned the whole village into dust. afganets 3

Hence, there is a blurring of the borders between civilian and noncivilian, 'hard' and 'soft' targets, legitimate and illegitimate. Reprisal and atrocity become increasingly not just natural responses, but viable strategies: pre-empting further 'treachery', a warning and a threat. After all, exposure to or participation in atrocities is far more stressful than simple combat. The dangers of PTSD have also been heightened by modem transport. Whereas once units had to be moved en masse, and demobilisation could take months on a boat or in a transit camp, modern soldiers can now be transported in ones, twos and squads, and flown home to arrive at their parents' front door, whether in Minsk, Manchester or Milwaukee, mere days after being in the middle of a war zone. The demobilisation process becomes unnecessarily and counterproductively brief. There is a very real and important advantage in permitting the soldier to 'wind down', to adjust to the idea of peace, and to peace itself.

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PART TWO: THE VICI'IMS OF THE WAR

All the same, two points must be stressed. These victims of the socalled 'Afghan syndrome' were a minority, perhaps 20 per cent and quite possibly even less. Second, the psycho-social impact of the war was neither uniform in content nor strength and worked on many levels, depending on the sort of unit in which the soldiers served, the experiences they went through, their own characters, their home and social environment and a host of other variables. For some, it bred zeal, a compulsive need for action and approbation. But at the other end of the scale, it produced violence, maladjustment and suicide. THE URGE TO KILL

Sometimes, when death is behind and before you, you will shoot, you will fire, and in this savage storm you will yourself begin to scream as if you have lost your mind ... All this can produce some kind of ecstasy, so that you cannot give any account of yourself, you think of nothing, but only volley upon volley. afganets4

The dehumanising potential of war is well-known, but appears to have to be relearned afresh each time. Perhaps it is hard for people fully to accept emotionally the fact that in war, humanity is rarely a survival trait. This is especially true when fighting guerrillas; not only is every 'native' a potential threat, but there is no battlefield, no clear and regularised procedure to drain the emotional content from the fighting. Nor does it provide structure and ritual to the avenging of colleagues' deaths - except by counter-atrocity - breeding 'survivor syndrome', an irrational guilt at surviving. For many soldiers even the very bedrock, that is, conviction in the justice or inevitability of the war, was either shaky or non-existent. This moral confusion was heightened by training and tactics which capitalised on terror methods to make up for an inability to come to grips with the rebels and to impose adequate controls on the countryside and rural population in what was a dirty war on both sides. The result was to imprint the soldiers with a code of values at odds with civilian ethics. For some, after all, war is liberating. It brings with it freedom from the petty, mundane codes and manners of normal life, a refreshingly clear 'us' and 'them' divide. Although the Soviet authorities were draconian in their enforcement of military law in cases of individual crime - both to maintain discipline and minimise friction with the Afghans- this was often an uphill struggle. One soldier recalled the case where three men were charged with killing a shopkeeper and looting his shop: two were shot by firing squad, the third received an effective life

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sentence in a hard-labour camp. Yet the prevailing reaction amongst the troops was anger at so much fuss over just some Afghan. This is another situational response: give a man a gun and the licence to use it, and the power of life and death can be a heady one. The problem, as ever, is when the soldier cannot lose that feeling once he has left his gun behind. For a number, this became a real problem. Some, unable to square the demands of the war with the demands of their conscience, were stamped with amorality. Others became compulsively violent. Certainly studies suggested a trend towards criminality in a significant proportion of the afgantsy. As has already been discussed, for some, this was a rational career decision, a product of their needs, their skills, and the prevailing conditions in the decaying USSR. But for others it reflected, instead, psychological problems. By late 1989, 3,000 veterans were in prison for criminal offences, yet since 2,540 soldiers had been imprisoned for crimes committed while serving in Afghanistan (the number executed has not been released), this does not seem to reflect any mass criminality. Instead, what is perhaps possible is that those afgantsy who did turn to crime for psychological reasons tended both to be more violent in their expression of their inner turmoil, and to have the training, possibly even the equipment, to express it in more pyrotechnic fashion: the afganets who threw a grenade into the Zagreb Bar in Leningrad, for example, or the afgantsy who robbed a bank in Alma Ata at rocket-launcher point. This was a time when it was not too difficult to get hold of guns in the USSR, and some afgantsy found the weapons of war integral to their post-war self-image. PARIAH OR PENITENT

No one can look into my eyes, especially women. They think I'm too evil or forbidding. In fact, I don't have friends- I have no friends at all. afganets5

For many, though, the war bred a brooding self-hate which fed on the rest of society's hostility to the veteran, leading to a whole series of problems in forging and sustaining close relationships and even to suicides. Society's tendency to scapegoat its soldiers, to shift blame for a national disgrace onto its executors, is universal, whether one is discussing the Vietnam or 1904-5 Russo-Japanese war. But in the Soviet instance there were also particular factors in play beyond the fact that the veterans notionally received privileges above most citizens. They were largely politically disenfranchised, geographically scattered and

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PART TWO: THE VICfiMS OF THE WAR TABLE 4.2

Afgantsy imprisoned for crimes committed while on military service Total: Crimes of politics Treason Mass disorder Refusing military service Crimes of property Grand theft of state property Theft of state or social property Robbery Embezzlement Theft of personal property Crimes of person Murder Grievous bodily harm Rape Other Hooliganism Infringement of traffic safety Other

2,540

1 person 1 person 2 persons 1.1% 8.5% 11.9% 0.8% 12.4% 8.4% 5.8% 11.8% 12.6% 7.3% 19.4%

Source: TASS (28 Nov. 1989), updated figures

keen to return to 'normal' life and hence unable to argue their case. In addition, being on the whole young men, they were further stigmatised as a result of the widening generational divide within Soviet society. In the afganets art exhibited at the Neponyatnaya voina ('Incomprehensible War') exhibition in Moscow in 1991, it was quite striking to note how often the motif of crucifixion worked itself into the pictures, the afganets nailed to a cross to expiate the sins of a whole people. Veterans' self-disgust and social isolation (especially within their peer groups) fed off each other. When combined with the violent imprint left by military training and combat experience, the potential for suicide was evident. As with so many areas of Soviet science, study of suicide and its psycho-social causes was set back considerably during the Stalin era when, indeed, the word 'suicide' disappeared from the dictionaries. Medical doctors were the first to revive its study, with the formation of the All-Union Scientific Methodological Centre for the Study of Suicide being formed in the early 1970s. Even so, much of the field was characteristically dominated by the commonplace and the banal. Nevertheless, Soviet research revealed not only that three out of four suicides were men, but that the causes were almost always a result

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BROKEN BODIES, BROKEN MINDS

of anomie and despair, of a feeling of having lost emotional roots and lacking any hope for the future. There were certainly cases of suicide in Afghanistan, and one veteran spoke of his battalion suffering one successful suicide and six attempts (maiming themselves with grenades) in the space of a single month. This must have been an exceptional battalion or an exceptional month, though, or there would have been an average of 300 suicides per month, for a total of some 360,000. Nevertheless, it is clear that suicide was considered an option - and not just as the 'last bullet' or 'last grenade' that many kept back rather than suffer capture by the rebels. Tales of suicidal veterans back home, while generally considered risque, none the less did filter into the papers, with Komsomol'skaya pravda, as so often, leading the way with an article in March 1989 about a suicide by hand grenade. Behind the anecdotal tales and reports of individual suicides, there was clearly a wider trend. In 1989, for example, Leningrad's Hospital 27 - which specialised in psycho-social cases and the rehabilitation of veterans - treated ten afgantsy who had taken poison. Nevertheless, the connection between Afghanistan and suicide was not as great as might be expected. To a large extent, it simply reflected the high demand to opt out of a life seemingly without hope, meaning or joy. Whereas the figure for suicides per 100,000 head of population in 1985 was nine for the UK and 12 for the USA, it was fully 30 for the USSR, and suicide rates reached 81,000 in 1984 before falling to 52,000 in 1986 and then once again rising. In addition, most suicide victims were rather older than the afgantsy. Clearly, while some veterans felt driven to suicide, they were just part of a general trend, albeit, because of their high media profile, or, again, possession of the weaponry to ensure a particularly violent and conclusive end, more openly discussed in the press. GLOWING PROMISES, GRIM CONDITIONS

The prospect of walking with a stick did not make me happy, of course. But what really kept me cheerful was the thought that the state would not leave me and my comrades in the lurch. Injured afganets6

The plight of the veteran invalids was rightly highlighted as a disgrace. Despite a few well-publicised instances of rapid and generous support, most had to eke out a pretty miserable existence with only the most basic state assistance, relying on the goodwill of family and friends rather than the notionally generous embrace of the government that

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PART TWO: TilE VICfiMS OF TilE WAR

sent them to Afghanistan. At first, those wounded in action would receive merely a one-off payment of 150 rubles for a minor wound, 300 rubles for a major one, and that would be that. This was an obvious outrage, and it is indicative that media coverage of such problems was already marked and pointed in the days before Gorbachev and glasnost'. One of the first articles, for example, discussed the problems of Aleksandr Nemtsov. Portrayed as an exemplary soldier, shot in the back while trying to rescue his commander, he was paralysed and yet sent home to live with his mother on the third floor of a block of flats without lifts. It took a year to get him moved to the ground floor, the same amount of time to get the invalid car to which he was entitled, and then he was told he would have to build a garage for it, at a cost of 2,000 rubles. Much of the blame was heaped at the feet of slovenly, unfeeling bureaucrats, but this was hardly the whole story. Certainly it is fair to say that even in the days of perestroika, the cumbrous machinery of administration would rather not do something if it could avoid it and if the plaintiff lacked - as was usually the case for the invalids - the connections or the vigour to play the bureaucratic game. This was especially true in the pre-glasnost' era, when the official line on peace in Afghanistan ensured that not only was there no real constituency for support for wounded veterans, but there was an active aversion to dealing with such political hot potatoes. Besides which, it effectively blocked access to the press, so often a means of exerting pressure upon a recalcitrant or foot-dragging authority. With growing candour about the war came a new willingness to admit the need for special care for the war invalids. Andropov introduced the first regulations granting veterans special benefits, but the decree was not published, trapped in the limbo of this undeclared war, and as a result local authorities often ignored it. Under Gorbachev, though, central Party and state organs issued public decrees and regulations detailing the benefits and privileges due war invalids, and the press became increasingly assiduous in turning its attention to local authorities who failed to meet their obligations. The authorities, albeit slowly, began coming to terms with the problems of the psycho-social traumas of the afgantsy, as well as the more general issue of stress as a factor in military medicine. Concepts like alienation and anomie began to be granted serious attention in 1987-88, while on the military front, the authorities were increasingly concerned to cultivate an awareness both of stress and of means to treat and reduce it. While the first key article to discuss alienation, in 1988, used it simply as a stick to beat Brezhnev and make the case for reform, it made important points - about personal responsibility and the need

BROKEN BODIES, BROKEN MINDS

75

TABLE4.3 Main benefits for injured veterans For all invalids Priority access to medical care Guaranteed housing appropriate to their condition Interest-free loan to build an invalid fiat Free passes and travel to sanatoria One annual return trip to home town/village Stipends while in full-time education Extra, for Category I and II invalids Free public urban transport (except taxis) Category II Invalid Pension Extra for Category I invalids Free prostheses Free Zaporozhets invalid car, or Annual travel allowance if unable to drive Category I Invalid Pension

up to 3,000 rubles 50% discount 20--100 rubles per month, depending on status 38.36 rubles per month

400 rubles per year

As enacted by Council of Ministers Decree, 8 September 1988

for 'psychological perestroika' - that opened the way for more and better analysis of the issues involved. A series of articles on stress in modern warfare followed in 1989, representing something of a turning point, a wide-ranging study covering not only the immediate impact of modern technology and doctrine, but behavioural disorders in a wartime civilian population and even exotic chemical and biological inducers and treatment. Psychological damage became, at last, adequate grounds for being classified an invalid. Admittedly, Soviet rehabilitation work had a long way to go. One soldier, for example, suffering from chronic depression, was granted class II invalid status, but the only treatment he was given was a course of anti-depressants, and he duly became dependent on the pills and an alcoholic. Recognition of the psychological dimension was a step, but only the first. THE HEALTH SERVICE THAT WAS NEITHER

That serious problems remained, though, was evident in the constant barrage of exposes about official indifference, popular resentment about the privileges granted wounded veterans, and the afgantsy's protests that these were mere paper promises. The result was a steady stream of

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the nostalgic and self-flagellating diatribes still so much a feature of the Russian media, blaming national selfishness, and an inability to care. Rather than reflecting the failure of five-year planning to create a surplus of the milk of human kindness, the underlying malaise was rooted more in poverty and inefficiency than public callousness or bureaucratic malice. Soviet health and welfare services as a whole were woefully inadequate and had never met the high standards that Soviet legislation required and Soviet propaganda once claimed. In his hardhitting speech to the XXVII Party Congress (1988), Health Minister Dr Evgenii Chazov admitted that the USSR ranked 32nd in the world for average life expectancy, while in terms of capital investment it ranked around 75th out of 126 countries surveyed. In his report to the Supreme Soviet in 1989, Chazov was even more explicit. According to his figures, some 63 per cent of the nation's hospitals occupied substandard buildings, and about 24 per cent lacked sewage facilities. Fully 15 per cent had no running water. In all, he blamed this on underfunding, on the fact that the USSR spent only 3 per cent of its Gross National Product on health care, compared with the US figure of 6-8 per cent. Although in cash terms per head, there had been a general increase over the past 20 years or so, experience in the West had shown that the increasing cost and sophistication of medicine and a natural trend towards ever increasing expectations require far greater resources to be satisfied. The problems of the afgantsy were nothing new: disabled Great Patriotic War veterans were still having difficulties in 1980, when yet another special decree had to be adopted on their conditions, and even in 1989, three-quarters of all pensions fell below the semi-official poverty line. Everyone suffered from shortages, everyone lacked the resources they needed. The afgantsy may have seemed a particularly serious need group, but what about the babies given AIDS because there were not enough disposable needles to go round, or the victims of the Chemobyl' nuclear accident? As one officer, interviewed by the BBC's Stephen Dalziel, said,

The country's level of economic development sets the level of social help that the state can give to the various levels of society. If we did not have a housing problem, we would not have a problem finding accommodation for the afgantsy ... It's not a result of a lack of warmth, it's not a result of a lack of attention, but as a result of problems which exist in the country. 7 What was new, perhaps, was the opportunity and the willingness to bring discrepancies between promise and provision to light. In 1988, for example, an All-Russian Society for the Disabled was established and a

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Health and Charity Fund formed to lobby on the problems of the disabled, while invalid Il'ya Zaslavskii based his successful campaign for election to the Congress of People's Deputies on their rights. Similarly, the exploitation of invalid workers at a Moscow factory even led to 300 staging a strike and a protest march to Red Square in 1989. In classic Soviet style, ringing declarations from the Kremlin and local centres alike were not supported by adequate funding, and those resources that were made available tended to be focused on a few highprofile, high-prestige, capital-intensive initiatives. Not that there were very many of these: the main ones were Lesnaya Polyana at PushaVoditsa, the former Central Committee Rus sanatorium and the Saki hospital, the specialised centre at Leningrad's Polyclinic 51, the Baikal and Kuban sanatoria, the Kasansai sanatorium and the Dnepr hotel, along with other centres for the care of veterans such as the Burdenko Central Army Hospital in Moscow. The military sanatorium and rehabilitation centre at Saki in the Crimea, for example, was described in glowing terms as comparable with the medical centre at the cosmonauts' training base, but the prostheses available there were still so poorly made as to cause sores and lesions. Generally speaking, fully 60 per cent of those so fitted simply could not walk with their Soviet-made prosthetic legs, and 3,000 still had not received any artificial limbs by mid-1990. Similarly, while Leningrad's S. M. Kirov Military Medical Academy's Botkin psychiatric clinic was much praised for its work with the afgantsy, it was almost the only one, in a country spanning twelve time zones, able to devote itself so fully to their problems. Even by mid 1990, the only specialised afganets psychiatric centre was in Moscow, based in Moscow State University's psychology faculty. Some were left without the specialist care they needed, others fell prey to all sorts of quacks and charlatans, including the notorious faith-healing hypnotist Kashpirovskii, who arranged person-to-person and TV therapy sessions. Nor was the problem solely one of resources. It was also one of the impossibility of applying them efficiently in a system so comprehensively riddled with black marketeering, over-manning and sheer disorganisation. Even before the 1970s boom in corruption and 'bureaucratic balkanisation' under Brezhnev, a 1967-71 study showed the minimal effect of commands from the top: two-thirds fell by the wayside because they failed to reach their intended targets, were unaccompanied by appropriate resources, or simply lacked concrete instructions. All this reflects the lack of genuine central control in this notionally most monolithic of states. A meeting of the USSR Procuracy which discussed non-compliance with the ordinances on veterans' rights in July 1988 provided stark proof of this when Tambov region Procurator V. Kuchmin,

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charged with an investigation of the question, candidly attributed many of the problems to two basic facts: 1

2

that most people did not see the afgantsy as 'genuine' veterans of war, conditioned as they were to associating the term with the older generation of Great Patriotic Warriors; and that in the localities, the relevant authorities were often wholly ignorant of the appropriate legislation on veterans' rights.

The war had, after all, been so long a 'hidden' one, even to the extent that regulations of benefits had been classified, and even Procurators had until recently been denied access to them. A result was the comparatively low priority accorded the veterans, the paucity of attention given to ensuring that the system addressed itself to their needs rather than its own. Hence, for example, prostheses were made 'to plan', as norms to be met rather than extensions of their users, with technicians in antiquated factories always working at speed, never seeing the patients, and relying on the invalid either coping with a painful artificial limb, or going somewhere else to have it fitted accurately. As one doctor put it, Artificial limbs are actually made for accounting purposes, for meeting the plan; never for those who need them. 8 Similarly, the papers and medical certificates necessary for all forms of material and financial support were often lost or incorrectly entered. A typical case was that of Oman Umarov from Odessa, who lost an eye and was thus forced to retrain. But his papers were lost by the local authorities, and for over a year he existed in limbo, unable to claim full benefits, or even to transfer to technical college. These twin lacks - of resources and application - could in part be met by looking abroad. Exploiting the 'socialist commonwealth' and Western aid and charity had become, after all, traditional ways of easing tensions created by the internal failure of the system. In March 1984 the first group of veterans went to Czechoslovakia for prostheses, over 200 travelling to centres in Prague, Bratislava and elsewhere, and this established a pattern of using the more developed East European countries for technical assistance - regardless of the depressing admission of the Soviet health service's inability to cope that this represented. Other allies, like Cuba, were expected to provide alternative forms of help, especially less difficult medical care and convivial convalescence, usually under the flag of convenience of an invitation from some front organisation such as a Peace Committee or Friendship Organisation. Given that the plight of the invalid veterans was never accorded the political priority to merit serious hard currency expenditure, tapping

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Western resources had to be confined to soliciting humanitarian aid. There were a few successes, such as the decision by the Swedish firm Noga to donate a consignment of Italian-made wheelchairs to the veterans via the Soviet Peace Committee and another Italian firm's provision of a workshop for the manufacture of prostheses at TsiTO, the Central Institute of Traumatology and Orthopedia, but these tended to be part of wider business dealings, tokens of goodwill and symbolic markers of a commitment to operate in the USSR. The latter deal, for example, was in the context of the establishment of a Soviet-Italian joint-venture finance house. Further charity was gained through contacts with the USA and veterans of the Vietnam war (largely dealing with the psycho-social impact of the war) and with British veterans' groups and carers such as the British Limbless Ex-Serviceman's Association and the Jubilee Sailing Trust. The key point to make, though, is that such efforts could at best ease the tension, that in no way could they 'solve the invalid problem'. That depended on an efficient and well-resourced health service which, in turn, could only be the product of a stable, strong economy. Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, prospects of that became increasingly dim. A final route that received some attention was that of republican politics. As the republics became increasingly independent, many enacted their own measures to help the afgantsy. Belorussia and Azerbaijan supplemented invalids' pensions, for example, while Russia drew up its own package of measures. Nevertheless, with republican governments arguably even less solvent and efficient than the centre, they could scarcely cover the shortfall. As a result the afgantsy were forced to do what everyone else did: ignore the State's notional responsibilities and get things done in the ubiquitous and intricate 'underworld' of barter, gift, self-help and bribery that used to underpin Soviet rule and increasingly replaced it. BYPASSING THE STATE

For years veterans and their friends had been using the 'under-system' to meet their needs on a case-by-case and individual basis, but this began to change with the rise of welfare and mutual-assistance groups, within the context of the general growth of membership in such informal associations from 1987 and their formal recognition from 1988. One could, for example, go to Czechoslovakia and have one's prostheses adjusted for 20,000-25,000 rubles plus hard currency to the value of at least £500. Whereas previously the concept of charity had almost disappeared from public discourse (the word does not even appear in

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the 1986 Soviet Encyclopedia, while the only reference in the larger, multi-volume version tied it exclusively to the bourgeois states), glasnost' had allowed hitherto isolated and disempowered victims of all sorts of problems to unite with their comrades in misfortune, to explore common ground and, ultimately, to mobilise. With the formation of charitable societies in 1988 - with the first, the Leningrad Charity Society, being founded in April, and an All-Union Society in December -and with 1989 officially 'Charity Year', these programmes were further able to tie together the new opportunities for organisation with support for welfare work. It is not as though such efforts were starting from zero. There were already many groups in existence, mainly either military-patriotic clubs or informal circles of friends and colleagues. But 1988 saw increasing fusion between the two, as organisations of the former variety drifted from the 'transmission belt' narrow-focus they had once held to more independent and militant assertion of their needs and rights, while the latter saw increasing need and advantage in formal structures and recognition. In addition, it became clear that self-help was not enough. A single set of German prostheses, for example, cost DM 15,00(}-20,000 - some 250,000-360,000 rubles! To raise that sort of money, the veterans needed political clout (to access state funds and hard currency reserves) as well as the tax incentives offered associations in the 'informal' era. The Novosibirsk afgantsy, for example, had formed a loose union in 1983 as an informal network for self-help and mutual support in a hostile, uncomprehending world. But over time they became more ambitious, with plans to help alleviate members' housing problems by forming a youth housing complex. This, clearly, required formal recognition and organisation, and in October 1988 they registered with the local authorities as the Military-Patriotic Union. One of their priorities was treatment of their disabled members, and doctors from the union visited a hospital in Tashkent to study successful physical rehabilitation of veterans with the long-term aim of building a rehabilitation centre in Novosibirsk. THE LENINGRAD FUND

But if 1987-89 was the period in which grass-roots civil society in the form of informal, semi-autonomous associations developed, the period 1989-90 was marked by a shift of emphasis to agglomeration and politicisation, even amongst the carers and the victims. An example was the way in which the formation of the Leningrad Association of Veterans of the War in Afghanistan (LAVVA - more properly

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discussed later under the development of veterans' lobby groups), led to the Leningrad Fund for Invalids and Families of Soldiers Killed in the Republic of Afghanistan (Leningradskii Fond Invalidov i Semei Voinov, Pogibshikh v Respublike Afganistan). The Fund was formed by a consortium of veterans' groups in the city and was put together by a handful of people who worked under the aegis of the Rodina militarypatriotic centre, funded by the Young Communist League, until the limitations of such a structure and dissatisfaction with having to operate through an ideology-bound, bureaucratic structure prompted them to create a new forum. After a characteristically epic journey through the labyrinths of Soviet local government, the Fund's constitution was duly formulated by a founding conference and ratified by the local authorities during May-August 1990. TABLE 4.4 Constituent Members of the Leningrad Fund for Invalids and Families of Soldiers Killed in the Republic of Afghanistan

Collective members LAVVA (Leningrad Association of Veterans of the War in Afghanistan) 'K sovesti' Leningrad Information-Publication Organisation Modul' Cultural-Leisure Centre for Veterans of Foreign Wars Associations Sovintur All-Union Association of Councils of Reserve Soldiers, SoldierInternationalists and Defence-Patriotic Organisations' EconomicProductive Committee A/fa-Lid Ryubin Central Marine Construction Bureau Source: As at February 1991: 'Vy, vozmozhno, i ne znaete, chto ... ', K sovesti (2.91)

The Fund collected constituent allies, such as the LAVV A and the K sovesti organisation, which put out the afganets newspaper of the same name, as well as patrons, such as the Ryubin enterprise and the Sovintur tourist agency, which beat In tourist to providing certain tourist services in and around Leningrad. It was specifically intended to champion the rights of the invalids (and the bereaved) rather than deal with broader questions of internationalists' rights, beyond helping organise memorials to the dead and charitable and cultural events. Amongst its eight key purposes, the Fund listed the following:

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the provision of extra facilities for the treatment of injured veterans; providing full or part compensation for expenses incurred in the course of necessary treatment; developing invalid sports; legal support for invalids' rights. Over time, though, the economic needs of the programme and an increasing confidence within it led the Fund to branch out. By 1991, its links with Sovintur (which took three invalid veterans onto its staff) developed into joint involvement in the Second Leningrad International Film Festival and sponsoring a book of photographs and memories of fallen Leningraders as well as helping two exhibitions of pictures and photographs by veterans.

CONCLUSIONS: POWER TO THE POWERLESS?

The neformal period of 1987-89 gave way to the more openly political years 1989-90, with the rise of broader, more explicitly political movements which underpinned purely inward-looking or economic demands with a wider programme or world-view. The physical and psychological casualties of the war also began to learn to fight their corner. For this was also the period in which Gorbachev's longtrumpeted demokratizatsiya finally led to the election of (relatively) democratically elected parliaments, and the ensuing eruption of all sorts of committees, commissions and ad hoc subcommittees concentrating on various issues deemed pressing or worthy of attention. In this way the need to pressure the State and unite to campaign for appropriate treatment of invalids fed into wider questions of political activity, of the socially just and necessary allocation of resources, and how groups could articulate their interests in wider fora. It also became a bone of political contention, as rival organisations sought to prove their worth to potential constituencies, from the All-Union Association of Councils of Reserve Soldiers, Soldier-Internationalists and DefencePatriotic Organisations to the Union of Veterans of Afghanistan. In different interviews, for example, Sergei Morozov of the Association disparaged the Union's 'top down' approach and noted that the Association, in collaboration with the Komsomol, operated the Rus' rehabilitation centre, while Aleksandr Kotenev, president of the Union's managing board, launched at about the same time an initiative in conjunction with the Central Scientific-Research Institute for Prosthetics and Prosthetics Manufacture, TsiTO and the Second Moscow Medical Institute.

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The question is not just about charity ... It tests the preparedness of society to discharge its debt to those who showed courage, endurance and heroism. USSR General Procurator Aleksandr Sukharev, 19889

Yet although 1990-91 saw some attention being given to their plight in the new parliamentary structures, the invalid veterans came, almost by definition, from a politically marginalised class of urban and rural workers who lacked genuine input into the political process. As a result, they failed to win much practical support, and their treatment was a particularly stark example of the sharp have/have-not divides which were omnipresent in the USSR, and the role of political influence, whether exerted on an individual or collective level, in lubricating an otherwise gridlocked, resource-starved or unsympathetic system, underlining the moral vacuum caused by political corruption and public shortage lurking at the heart of the Soviet state. Besides which, the more the state's power decayed and resources declined, and the more primitive capitalism became the way forward, the worse the situation for the veterans and similar vulnerable groups. As the Soviet Union fell and the new Russia rose, only to be mired in economic crises and galloping inflation, the veterans' plight once again became desperate: having depended on the state, they were ill-equipped for the primal anarchy that followed. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

S. Alexievich, Zinky Boys (1992), p.155. N. Knyazeva, 'V moem gorode mnogo prokhozhikh', K sovesti 2.90. S. Alexievich, Zinky Boys, pp.1&-17. T. lives, 'An Estonian soldier in Afghanistan', RFE Baltic Area/2 (28 Dec. 1984). N. Traver, Kife (1989), p.77. K. Vorobev, 'The people and the army', Soviet Military Review (June 1989). S. Dalziel, 'Assignment Afghantsy', BBC Current Talks and Features (28 July 1989). V. Baidanov, 'Pomogite vstat na nogi', Ogonek 21.89. I. lvanyuk, 'Do vostrebovaniya', Krasnaya zvezda (19 July 1988).

5

Parents, Workmates, Neighbours, Lovers For a long, long time, the Black Tulips [the nickname given the planes which carried the dead back home] will continue to bloom. 1 The ritual of announcing the death of a soldier to the next of kin is never comfortable. But when the war is officially not being waged or is almost universally disowned, the tragedy can almost approach farce. In the Soviet Union, the news was brought by officers from the local military commissariat, caps held over their left elbows in sign of mourning, accompanied by a local Party activist and, ideally, a friend or neighbour of the bereaved. Tales abounded in the early years of a flat refusal by parents to believe that their sons could have died; why, after all, Sasha was in Mongolia, or Vanya was serving in the Far North. In due course, though, a coffin would arrive, usually a plain zinc casket, but sometimes just a wooden box. Whether the infamous 'zinc box' or a plain wooden crate, it would be handed over to the parents with little ceremony. As is standard practice with any army, the coffin was often sealed shut and contained nothing more than an appropriate weight of sand, there being little left to parcel after stepping on a mine or being caught in a burning tank. With the coffin would come a brief typescript acknowledging the death of a 'serviceman on active duty' and a chit for, in the early years, one hundred rubles: a soldier's life for the price of a pair of jeans. Official statistics claim that some 15,000 Soviet citizens died in the war and 50,000 were wounded. Yet the true toll of the war is far higher: this included the bereaved parents and relatives, those who lived two years in the fear of such a visit, the friends and workmates supporting the physically and psychologically scarred, the carers and the neighbours. Most of Soviet society could, in some indirect way, be counted if not among Afghanistan's casualties, certainly among those affected by it.

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Looking at the wider social impact, it is clear that those nearest and dearest to the veterans represent a group worth studying all on their own, but what is most interesting is the way they - the mothers of dead or missing soldiers in particular - interacted with the rest of Soviet society. Moving from withdrawal into a self-imposed ghetto, to contact and then back into withdrawal as the forces that they helped liberate, from glasnost' to mothers' anti-military activism, took on lives of their own and acquired distinct interests to match, they provided further evidence of the way that the war assumed an importance not for what it was, but as a catalyst and a symbol. THE ZINC PARENTS

Metal was all you ended up with. A tin star for your chest, or a zinc box for your body. Konstantin, afganets

Even given the strains, born of cultural change and economic scarcity, wracking the Soviet family, the country's social matrix was still firmly built around this durable institution. If nothing else, the practical difficulties of life, from housing shortages to the need to pool queuing time in goods-starved Soviet cities, served as a brake on the physical separation of families. Russian conscripts, in particular, barely postadolescent, characteristically recruited from the uncosmopolitan collective farm or proletarian district, were often distinctly immature, still very firmly locked within the mother-centric world of the Russian family. This was the mothers' war, they were the ones who did the fighting. afganets2

Yet there was no serious attempt to provide posHrauma care and support for the relatives of the fallen, especially given that threequarters of the casualties predated glasnost', and hence were not even acknowledged as war dead. Even after Gorbachev's accession, genuine glasnost' about the war came but slowly and patchily, and losses in Afghanistan were to be hushed up, thus depriving the bereaved of even the psychological support and catharsis of public approbation for the departed. Until1988, for example, tombstones could carry no mention of having died in Afghanistan, in battle or even 'fulfilling international-

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ist duty'. Even after then, the state's counter-productively egalitarian and propagandistic habits served still to cause dissatisfaction:

. . . the state depersonalised us. It levelled us out. Going to a cemetery, you see an Order of the Red Star on almost every afganets' headstone. Mother of an afganets3

Practical care was equally lacking, an issue that Yuliya Sokolova, senior director at the Defence Ministry's Main Political Directorate for work with the families of servicemen, went so far as to put at the centre of her campaign for election to the Congress of Peoples' Deputies in 1989. Bereaved families were left with inadequate pensions and benefits which, like those of the invalids, often required prolonged negotiations to secure in practice. Even when the lump sum support payment to families suffering a loss was raised from 100 rubles, it was still derisoryby 1989 it had reached 500 rubles, still not even enough to cover the funeral. Of course, as was the Soviet norm, the treatment of the bereaved varied with the vagaries of fate: some local authorities and military commissariats proved very supportive, others had to be fought to a standstill just for a bereaved mother to get her due food allowance. As with the invalids, much of the problem was rooted in the lack of publicity given the war: it meant that many agencies were unaware of their responsibilities and those that were, often took the official silence to be a signal of the lack of priority to be granted the issue, with the result that those facing the problems felt alone and ignored. LOVE AND WAR

One of the primary symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is emotional numbness. The veteran becomes detached from his (or her) environment in a desperate bid to build a wall to keep out the terrors of war, and finds the wall slow, difficult, even impossible to break down. Even on a less clinical level, the veterans have seen sights and lived through experiences impossible to communicate. The toll on existing bonds and the handicaps placed upon some soldiers' ability to build and sustain stable and lasting relationships could be immense. In addition, the scapegoating facing the afgantsy, especially from others of their own age, also built barriers around those unable to blend inconspicuously back into the mainstream of society. Tales of estrangements and broken relationships were legion, two archetypes being the soldier who drives away his girlfriend or wife, convinced she pities rather than loves him

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and the soldier, back from the war, desperate for both love and sex, who pushes too far, too fast, and thus irremediably sours the relationship. In the absence of reliable data, anecdotal evidence and common sense indicate that the war strained the often burgeoning relationships between (given the age of the average draftee) still barely mature people to breaking point.

Hello Misha! I've been hearing for some time that you're serving in Afghanistan, and I was afraid it might be true. Now that it's confirmed by your letter, I'm terrified for you, terribly. I simply can't imagine all this. 4 Even those who did not end up at the graveside, as another 'zinc kid' was laid to rest, or as another petitioner for divorce, faced the fears engendered by this wilful official silence. This is a striking common factor in conversations with those close to men who served in Afghanistan. By virtue of both custom and cramped housing, Soviet families were both close and used to having their sons at home until at the very least married and financially settled. Friendships were often similarly close and intense. Although national service was, really until 1989, generally accepted as an unavoidable evil, it none the less tended to come as a natural wrench to all concerned. But once genuine information about the war began reaching the grapevine- becoming subject to the inevitable inflations and distortions - the prospects of nearest and dearest serving in Afghanistan became a particular nightmare for those close to the conscripts. In fact it is clear that the lack of candour about the nature of operations there was ultimately extremely counter-productive, not only breeding anger and cynicism at the gulf between fact and reportage but also providing fertile ground for the most lurid and demoralising rumours (Lithuanian underground newsletters, for example, claimed that fully 30 per cent of troops sent into Afghanistan were returning dead or wounded). TRUTH AND WAR

For the relationship between the war and the evolution of glasnost' was to be quite significant. Like the Chernobyl' nuclear disaster, Afghanistan was to prove a significant event whose impact within the country could not be ignored, unamenable to the traditional Soviet methods of information management and control. Faced with the prospect of losing to the power of the grapevine, Gorbachev, as ever, made virtue out of necessity and used glasnost' as a weapon to support his policy line in his four-year struggle to pull Soviet troops out of the war.

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In 1980, a secret Politburo instruction had established the guidelines for reporting the war: military operations could not involve more than one platoon and only privates and junior officers could be cited, to underline the small-scale nature of such fighting. It was not until 1983 that the very existence of the 40th Army, as a specific military formation, was disclosed. A correspondent for the army newspaper Krasnaya zvezda cited a friend's view that 'they don't seem to be doing any real soldiering there, do they?' and then refuted it in so lukewarm a fashion as almost to agree. Even the specialised military press shied away from an admission of the facts: the army journal Voennyi vestnik, for instance, ran a series under the rubric 'On Afghan Soil' which for years presented operations there largely as training exercises, with the occasional provision of technical and logistical support. What problems there were related to the climate or simple overwork rather than any fighting: Take present-day service here in Afghanistan: you cannot imagine anything more difficult. From sunrise to sunset- flights, flights and more flights. . . Helicopters transport soldiers, civilians, the mail, medicines and bread. 5

Tom between the urge to honour its heroes and the need to conceal the nature of the war, the anodyne Soviet press tied itself up in knots of circumlocution, best illustrated by Marshal Kutakhov's memorable attempt to justify the awarding of the USSR's highest combat decoration, Hero of the Soviet Union, to helicopter pilot Major Vasilii Shcherbakov, without actually alluding to combat: . . . during a sortie in Afghanistan, the crew of the helicopter under Major Vasilii Shcherbakov's command found itself in a very difficult and hazardous situation. When all difficulties had been overcome and the mission selflessly accomplished, trouble befell the crew of a second helicopter. Summing up the situation, Shcherbakov flew his craft to the area in question. Enduring once more the severest trials, the crew managed to rescue their comrades in arms. 6

The same lack of candour was imposed on soldiers' letters home, driven by a combination of army regulations on security and the self-censorship of people who did not want to worry or upset those left at home. But, just as with the clear mendacity of the official media, this only served to alienate everyone concerned and leave the ground clear for rumour mongering. Successive polls by Radio Liberty charted the importance of foreign broadcasts and the spreading of rumours in providing information about the war, and the decline of the official radio (though not TV)

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and agitprop. Besides, Soviet citizens had sixty years', maybe centuries' worth of experience in reading between the lines:

I used to write to my parents that I was serving somewhere abroad, that I was eating grapes, reading a lot and watching TV. But in my parents' first letter back to me in Afghanistan, my father wrote that I shouldn't think they were stupid, that they knew perfectly well where I was. Vladislav Tamarov, afganets7

TABLE 5.1

SAAOR poll findings on sources of information on Afghanistan Source

1984

1986

1987

Soviet press Soviet TV Word of mouth Foreign radio Soviet radio Agitprop meetings

52% 33% 37% 40% 41% 38%

53%(+ 1%) 42% (+10%) 34% (- 3%) 45% (+ 5%) 31% (-10%) 21% (-17%)

55%(+ 2%) 50%(+ 8%) 46% (+12%) 45% 26% (- 5%) 15% (- 6%)

Source: S. Wise, 'The Soviet public and the war in Afghanistan: discontent reaches critical levels', in SAAOR AR 4-88 (May 1988)

Gradually, the official line began to edge towards an admission of some of the problems facing Soviet troops in Afghanistan. The secrecy was unpopular with the soldiers, and downright offensive to heroes and martyrs denied proper recognition. More and more young men were returning home with 'inside knowledge' that undermined the Party line. Above all, Brezhnev was replaced by Andropov, with his concern to reintroduce some discipline, honesty and accountability into the Soviet state. Not only did Andropov, the KGB still firmly within his grasp, have a better idea of the extent to which the State's information management system had already been overcome by the grapevine and foreign broadcasts, but he saw in this 'proto-glasnost" the chance to highlight areas for attention and give the country a message that change was in the air. The war began to acquire its own heroes, although still on the whole fortuitously posthumous, including the poet, songwriter and career soldier (a perfect combination, the propagandist's dream) Lieutenant Aleksandr Stovba and plucky draftees Kolya Chepik and Nikolai

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Anfitogenov, both of whom killed themselves and many rebels with their last grenades rather than be captured. Even until mid-1985, this was the prevailing image of the war, openness with a very Andropovian flavour to it. Rather than being about press freedom, it was about a much more realistic and sophisticated control of the media. There was still a Party line, but it was a smarter one. Instead of flatly denying what more and more people knew to be true, it was about being honest enough to be credible - yet not so honest as to lose the information management that was always so vital an element of the social control wielded by the Soviet state and the loss of which was to be another factor in its eventual collapse. But the real changes had already begun to take place on 26 February 1984, spearheaded by the publication of 'Dolg' ('Duty'), an article by Inna Rudenko in Komsomol'skaya pravda, which first addressed the problems of the veterans and their experiences. Ironically enough, this was during Chernenko's term of office but reflects, rather, the impact of Andropov and the generation of reformists he brought into the centre, and the continuing authority they retained under the Chernenko interregnum. Within ten minutes of the paper coming out, Vladimir Sevruk, a senior official at the Central Committee's Ideological Department, began to receive irate telephone calls. He conferred with his department head, Arkadii Vol'skii, one of the key appointments of the Andropov period, a close ally of Gorbachev's and later to be a powerful player in post-Soviet Russian politics. Vol'skii drafted a resolution in support of the article and department head Egor Ligachev induced Chernenko to sign it. Glasnost' had come to the USSR. Or rather, it had begun to arrive. Even during the period 1985-87, soldiers serving in Afghanistan and Angola or engaged at Chemobyl' could not be discussed freely in the press. Nevertheless, in January 1986 the respected commentator Aleksandr Bovin called for changes in reporting, reflecting the change in regimes. A further well-judged push was given in May 1987, when another, Fedor Burlatskii, complained that the media's style of reportage still was not changing fast enough. In time-honoured Kremlin style, these show-cased declarations represented the views from the top, and the media, political instincts attuned to such signals, responded. What was the new line? The war- for such it was- was being kept alive by aid from Western and Islamic nations, training and financing rebel groups, providing and supplying bases. It was a sad and sorry mistake, but Brezhnev's fault, and the new leadership was doing all it could to resolve matters. There were problems facing the veterans, but at least everything was being discussed openly, so remedies could be

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found. The message was simple, Andropov with a human face: be calm, everything would be all right, have faith. TABLOID GLASNOST'

Yet when the Soviet press began to be unleashed, it lacked the experience and sensitivity to cover such delicate issues as death, invalids, indiscipline and suffering. At the same time, the Soviet public was unprepared for exposure to such themes. The result was an equally outraged backlash against 'excessive' and 'unnecessary' Afghan coverage. Much correspondence in the Ukrainian press, for example, was triggered by a letter from the mother of two servicemen: One of them is serving on the border near Afghanistan, and my heart aches for him all the time. And on top of this, you write, or remind us on TV, about how people are dying over there. There's no need to sap our spirits. 8

This clearly struck a nerve, since the same newspaper went on to print a series of replies largely on the same theme, that so much coverage of the dangers of war was upsetting and gratuitous. A similar response followed the release of the documentary film Bot' ('Pain'). In this respect, Afghanistan not only stimulated glasnost', it showed how little prepared Soviet journalists and public alike were for the end of their comforting consensual public myth. In addition, glasnost' quite quickly moved beyond Gorbachev's control. Scores began to be settled on the basis of 'more-open-thanthou'. Soviet radio's Kabul correspondent Mikhail Leshchinskii faced allegations that he would routinely make his report against a backdrop of a few soldiers shooting into the air and claim to be in the thick of the fighting (not that such tactics are necessarily the exclusive preserve of Soviet tele-journalists). More to the point, Afghanistan became a locus for another rumbling guerrilla war, that between reformists and conservatives in the media and censorship organs. When Aleksandr Bovin's critical comments on the war were cut from a television programme, he had them published in full in the reformist newspaper Argumenty i fakty. Similar pressures lay behind the last-minute censorship of the television news flagship Vremya in October 1989 to prevent a live discussion of the war with Andrei Sakharov. Some journals became increasingly visible in their efforts to push back the bounds of the permissible, others as champions of the old orthodoxies. The non-commissioned officers' monthly Znamenosets ('Standard Bearer'), for example, became almost a laughing stock for its Brezhnevian instincts and turns of phrase, and was eventually wound up

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in 1991. One article, for example, written in 1989, still had the almost touchingly naive notion of parading Hungary '56 and Czechoslovakia '68 as glorious instances of internationalism and set them, with no trace of irony, next to Afghanistan '79, even as the dailies and weeklies were full of revelations about the army's operations in enforcing the 'Brezhnev Doctrine', which legitimised the USSR's use of force to preserve its sphere of influence. The journal even went on to recommend this article for training cadets. The same was true of the more heavyweight Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal ('Military History Journal'), which at this time was beginning a ponderous slip into the sort of extremism that was to see it printing extracts from Hitler's Mein Kampf in due course, under an editor-in-chief who had been its Afghan correspondent. It published similar encomia under such ponderous titles as 'A criticism of the base direction of bourgeois falsifications of the heroism of Soviet warriors'. The result was, paradoxically, to restrict the amount of balanced, accurate and factual information reaching the Soviet public. Journalists strove to 'out-scoop' each other, raising the stakes until Afghanistan was replaced by other, more newsworthy stories and became yesterday's news in the face of pogroms in Nagorno-Karabakh, Party corruption or Boris Y eltsin. Those most directly involved became disillusioned and ghettoised themselves in their own press, with veterans' newspapers like the All-Union Pobratim, Leningrad K sovesti and Orenburg Kontingent providing them a forum for their experiences, yet a forum well out of the mainstream. A new consensus was to emerge; Russian and Soviet political culture, the habits of the kollektiv, were to prove rather more solidly established and long-lived than the mere Communist Party of the Soviet Union. As discussed previously, the war became mythologised, a collection of bizarre sound-bites, striking images and wilful misinterpretations. Given the way the myths proved so convenient for key groups, glasnost' proved unable to bring much real pravda (truth), let alone ponimanie (understanding). This, in tum, had its impact not only on the veterans, but on the wider circle of people they affected. With so many veterans coming home seriously traumatised or disabled, and in the absence of any adequate social service cover, it was their families and friends who had to bear the main burden of their support and rehabilitation. The psychosocial problems that the veterans themselves were prey to were duly visited upon their nearest and dearest, 'collateral' casualties of the war and yet largely ignored. As writer Grigorii Baklanov put it at the XIX Party Conference in 1988, Soviet society had never come to terms with the war and as a result refused to accept the claims of those touched by it.

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Not only did the state fail to provide adequate support for the victims of the war and their carers, wider society was no more interested. Although there was a variety of charitable activities and support provided, in relation to the scale of the problem, it never amounted to very much. Not only did it fail to alleviate the practical problems concerned, it served in its meagreness only to heighten the feeling of exclusion experienced by those affected by the war, prompting them to loQk within their own society for support and understanding, a vicious circle of ghettoisation and hence political impotence. Besides, by 1989 there were so many other problems and crises to occupy the leadership's minds. The afgantsy had too low a priority when placed alongside Chemobyl', food shortages, inter-ethnic violence and the collapse of the Party's ability to govern. CHARITY

The initiative for charitable aktsii, actions, typically came from one of three sources. Firstly, public figures; in mid-1988, for example, the editorial collective of the newspaper Literaturnaya gazeta launched an appeal for funds to build a rehabilitation centre (which would alleviate the problems of invalids and carers alike), while the singer Boris Zaitsev regularly performed free at the Burdenko Main Military Hospital. State bodies also played a role. In 1989, the Council of Trades Unions launched its 'Trades Unions for Soldier-Internationalists' campaign, for soldiers and their families and other 'official' charitable ventures. These included the Peace Fund's payment of the princely sum of 150 rubles to each family of a killed afganets and the decision by the USSR Central Armed Forces Museum to charge admission to a new exhibition of Second World War memorabilia, part of the proceeds to be distributed to the victims of Afghanistan. Thirdly, though, it was the role of the Church which was most interesting in that it illustrated the way such issues could become part of wider political struggles, specifically the career of Metropolitan Pitirim of Volokamsk and Yur'ev. Having already campaigned for the Congress of Peoples' Deputies in part on a 'help for the victims of the war' ticket, Pitirim further supported charitable help for them in his role as head of the Moscow patriarchate's publications department. He even set up the 'Volokamsk Initiative', with veterans being invited to establish themselves as independent farmers in abandoned villages in the region. Thus, while Church support had predated and paralleled his efforts - the Assembly of June 1988 had held a requiem for the victims of the war and collected 200,000 rubles, while churchmen had led campaigns to raise money for widows, obtained wheelchairs for invalids and generally

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provided moral and practical support- Pitirim was able to use this issue to help fend off criticism of his mishandling of his department and use the fate of the afgantsy to fuel his political career. He ultimately became a member of their Supreme Soviet Committee and regularly appeared at key occasions such as the founding congress of the Russian Union of Veterans of Afghanistan. From late 1990, though, there arose also opportunities for the activism of afgantsy groups and other independent groups to play a real role. In Leningrad, for instance, the Feya organisation put on classes for orphans of the war, under the auspices of the Leningrad Charitable Society, while the Materi ('Mothers') fund-raising initiative raised more than 170,000 rubles for bereaved families. Yet such a catalogue of individual instances of charity and humanity can only highlight their inadequacy in the face of the problem. The Materi exercise, however well-meant and well-supported, eventually resulted in a one-off payment of a hundred rubles to each eligible family in the city, at a time when a watermelon at a street market cost forty. Lacking genuine support, these people, the 'hidden veterans', the parents, families, widows and friends, also had to unite to support each other. Yet for a long time this remained a local, grass roots phenomenon: We got to know each other at the cemetery, by the gravesides. You'll see one mother hurrying from the bus in the evening after work; another already sitting by her graveside crying; a third painting the railing round her son's grave. We can talk about only one thing - our children, as if they were alive. Mother of dead afganets9

It needed a catalyst to start them on the same road on which so many other marginalised and alienated elements of Soviet society were travelling during the Gorbachev era, the road to unity and union. In the prisoners of war, they found it. POWS AND THE MOVE TO UNITE

When General Gromov said he was the last soldier of the OKSV out of Afghanistan, he was making an understandable exaggeration. Even if one accepts the cosmetic retouching that left Soviet military advisers in place to advise the Kabul regime (they had, after all, never been officially subordinated to the OKSV but to the Chief Military Adviser), there were the 312 soldiers unaccounted for: missing (presumed dead), captives of the rebels or converts to their cause. Of this figure, the Soviet army believed about a third to be dead, and given the indepen-

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dently corroborated reports of the rebels' propensities to flay captive invaders alive or otherwise maltreat them, this may have been an underestimate. TABLE 5.2 Missing in Action, as at the end of the war

Soldiers missing in action of whom:

330

Lost without trace Defectors in third countries

312 18

of whom: in in in in

USA Germany Canada Switzerland

11

1 4 2

Source: A. Lyakhovskii and V. Zabrodin, Tainy afganskoi voiny (1991), p. 213.

Concern had begun to be expressed about the fate of those missing in action in 1988. The first initiatives came through the Soviet Red Cross and Red Crescent and from emigres in the USA, who formed the International Committee for the Rescue of Russian Prisoners of War in Afghanistan, with the participation of Literaturnaya gazeta's US correspondent as well as prominent US figures, including a rabbi and a Catholic priest. This group, headed by artist Mikhail Shemyakin, visited the USSR in November 1988, and tried to develop roles as intermediaries between the Soviet authorities and rebel groups and their Pakistani backers. Literaturnaya gazeta took up the issue, with an article headed 'No one is forgotten', deliberately picking up on the Great Patriotic War connotations of the phrase, which produced a flood of responses from the public. This prompted the Foreign Ministry to declare its concern to trace and succour missing afgantsy. Missing soldiers, though, faced trial should they return and be deemed deserters: Nikolai Ryzhkov, for example, a deserter granted asylum in the USA, subsequently returned to the USSR where he received 12 years hard labour, despite promises of immunity. A concern to allay such fears was one of the main factors behind the amnesty for crimes committed in Afghanistan introduced in 1989. Although a Public Coordinating Committee had been set up in 1988, hitherto efforts had been both officially sponsored in nature and concerned purely with

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locating and extracting prisoners of war, not the wider questions of supporting those waiting for news of missing loved ones. As usual in the Soviet system, this eventually resulted in the grass-roots formation of ad hoc and informal groups of missing soldiers' parents (mothers, especially), which began to unite in early 1989 in the Nadezhda ('Hope') movement. DON'T MOURN - ORGANISE!

We have no choice but to solve our problems ourselves. Only we can help . .. Mother of dead afganets 10

While some turned for support to God, others turned to politics. Just as invalids, afgantsy and other minority groups used the new opportunities of the late 1980s to begin to link individuals and local groups and form wider political and self-help movements, those affected by the losses and casualties of the war began to organise. The primary constituency of these groups were the widows and, especially, mothers of dead soldiers, a particularly dramatic expression of Soviet womanpower. Although feminist dissident groups like Mariya had been involved in protests against the Afghan war from the first, the importance of these new groups was in their essentially non-ideological roots, in their commitment to broad issues able to unite large numbers of ordinary women from different cities, classes and republics. The first major expression of this new mood was Nadezhda, which was established as a specifically 'Afghan' body, but this was soon overtaken by broader based movements, uniting the mothers or widows of Afghan veterans or, more generally, of conscripts as a whole, and able to win very widespread sympathy by their non-ideological stance. In other words, there seemed no way to reconcile a concentration on specifically Afghan problems and a mass base. Indeed, some of the demands of Afghan-related groups (such as the lifetime exemption from income tax for all members of a fallen soldier's family envisaged by the Belorussian Councils of Mothers of the Fallen) met with outright resistance. Where the war was important was as idiom, as a symbol which, because it related to an affair shocking to mass sensitivities and publicly discussed and well-known, could provide a focus for larger issues, such as that of peacetime deaths. Essentially nationalist protests, like mothers' picketing of draft offices in the Baltic in March 1989, began to assume a more general character in the wake of the media attention given the appeal by 300

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women to the first USSR Congress of People's Deputies to release their sons from conscription. This led to the formation of the Council of Soldiers' Mothers and Widows in 1989. This organisation set itself the task of monitoring and highlighting instances of bullying and mistreatment of soldiers, and campaigning for more general reform in the army, renaming itself Materinskoe serdtse ('Mother's Heart') in June 1990. In 1991, there was even founded a weekly journal, Plach Yaroslavny ('Yaroslav's Lament') to represent the relatives of those soldiers killed or injured in peacetime. This was, after all, an important issue, with estimates of anything from 35,000 to 76,000 deaths over the period in which the war claimed 15,000 lives. These figures were unconscionably high, and were caused to a large extent by bullying and carelessness. Besides, they were being inflicted not upon well-paid volunteers, but conscripts. TABLE 5.3 Peacetime deaths: estimated numbers Source

Total Figure

Independent estimate 120,000 (1976-90) Goskomstat Committee of Soldiers' Mothers 'Women Against Violence' 15,000 (1989-92) Russian Presidental Committee

Annual Figure

Total during Afghan War

8,000 6,600

76,000 62,700

4,000 3,750

38,000 35,625

6,000

57,000

Peacetime deaths: causes

Suicide Inflicted in juries Accidents Overheating/electric burns or shocks Missing, fate unknown

50% 20% 10% 5% 15%

Proportion due to bullying

75-80%

Source: A. Kharlamov in Kuranty 67.90

Organisations specifically catering for an 'afganets' constituency continued to exist, including the All-Union Conference of Parents of

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Servicemen Killed in Afghanistan and the Union of Mothers of Killed Soldier-Internationalists. Another organisation, the Egipetskaya Assotsiyatsiya ('Egyptian Association'), was formed in late 1990 to represent those bereaved by Soviet military participation in the Middle East. Yet these organisations rarely seemed to have the influence or profile to involve themselves with more than local activities. Instead, they had to lobby the more general bodies such as Materinskoe serdtse, the Supreme Soviet committee for women's affairs or even the Tatar Public Centre's Tatar Mother Committee for real action. Whereas Gorbachev never met specifically Afghan groups, he did meet a delegation from the Council of Soldiers' Mothers in November 1990 and followed it up with a decree 'On measures to implement the proposals of the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers' on 15 November. In such a deeply chauvinist society, the role of women's organisations had never been strong and even then had been confined to 'feminine' issues. Nevertheless, the patriarchal social order and the emphasis given women's 'prime social function' of motherhood provided the Council of Soldiers' Mothers and its sisters with some genuine moral authority. The powerful passions and needs, both physical and psychological, of those 'innocent bystanders' hit by the war's aftermath drove many into activism and protest, and provided grounds and an idiom to unite over previously insurmountable barriers of culture, language and political atomisation. Yet genuine political impact, an ability to build alliances and legitimacy and sympathy outside its own ranks, could only be found when the movement broadened its appeal and turned its attention to wider political issues. The placards read 'No More Afghanistans' when mothers picketed draft offices in protest at the notion of conscripts being sent to quell rebellious Baku in January 1990, but the symbol was packed away and forgotten when the draftees were stood down and the (largely professional) paratroopers and special forces deployed to bring Azerbaijan to heel. Thus the impact of the war on its wider circle of 'victims' is a complex one. Those affected by the practical and psycho-social fall-out from the war first found themselves ignored by the state and a public that, beset with cares of its own, lacked the patience or surplus to devote much care to them. The political opportunities opened up by Gorbachev's reforms permitted, then encouraged, then actively required them to unite and lobby for their due share of attention and resources, but in the ferment generated by demokratizatsiya, they soon found themselves being pushed aside equally firmly in the political sphere. The war became a powerful idiom for other, broader, more powerful organisations and hence these 'secondary afgantsy' lost even their monopoly of their experiences. By 1991, they had either assimilated themselves into

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the political mainstream or retained their specifically 'Afghan' interests and retreated once again into self-help and disillusion. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

0. lvanova-Luzhetskaya, 'Tyul'pany pamyati', K sovesti, 3.91. S. Alexievich, Zinky Boys (1992), p.89. I. Golovneva, 'Ya- grazhdanin respubliki "Afganistan'", K sovesti, 3.90. Letter to soldier, taken from his body by the rebels and published in J. Goodwin, Caught in the Crossfire (1988), p.305. A. Sgibnev, Krasnaya zvezda (6 March 1982). Trud (23 Feb. 1982). V. Tamarov, 'Faces ... from a forgotten war', Armed Forces Journal International (May 1990). 'List' do redatsii', Molod' Ukrainy (15 Jan. 1987). Alexievich, Zinky Boys, p.123. Golovneva, 'Ya- grazhdanin respubliki "Afganistan"'.

Part 3

THE WAR AND SOCIETY

6

Veteran Society

When a man's on his own, he feels sort of awkward and uncomfortable in a world where people don't understand him. But when you have got a group of such lads together then life's easier. afganets, member of Dolg club 1

I hate those afgantsy. Their clubs are just like the army itself, and they have the same army mentality ... That's a part of my life I want to leave behind for ever. afganets2

For an outsider, a visit to an afganets club is rarely comfortable and never predictable. Some turn out to be sweaty gymnasia where nervy misfits build their muscles and mutter about the day they would be unleashed on the dregs, the hippies, the junkies, the Jews. Others are more reminiscent of poorhouse libraries, full of improving texts and quiet and earnest readers, keen to learn. Then there are the echoing meeting halls, today hosting a guitar-strumming session of mournful Afghan war ballads, tomorrow a kung-fu session for aspiring Bruce Lees from the local technical school. Nevertheless, the development of the veteran movement was one of the most visible, widely reported and, arguably, misunderstood consequences of the war for Soviet society. Given the lack of a single, homogeneous 'afganets mentality', the 'afganets movement', Afganskoe dvizhenie, represented a variety of strands of opinion and intent. Admittedly, there was the afganets slang, which almost approaches the status of argot (traditionally described as the special language of a criminal subculture: the afgantsy may not have been criminals, but they were a declasse community), which provided some sort of common identification and a social ringfence able to distinguish nashi (ours) from the rest. But the typical afgantsy did not choose to join the community represented by this argot; they had it thrust upon them once they went 'over the river'. Instead, one has to look at those who continued to 'opt

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in' after the compulsion of national service was withdrawn; for anything like a specific subculture, one has to look at the loose 'movement' of afganets clubs, groups and associations. Yet how many, once out of uniform, still chose to define themselves first and foremost as afgantsy rather than Soviets, Estonians, workers, students, Muscovites, Christians, or whatever? At its peak in 1991, the Union of Veterans of Afghanistan claimed to represent more than 300,000 afgantsy, perhaps 30-40 per cent of the total. Nevertheless, many of these were essentially passive members, loosely affiliated to a club or joining for purely practical reasons, to ensure a place in the queue for a special flat or access to charitable food parcels without any real feeling of actually belonging to a community. A wholly subjective, personal assessment based on contact with the veterans would suggest an absolute maximum of two-thirds being 'genuine' members, perhaps only a half, or up to 200,000: around a quarter of all the afgantsy and 0.07 per cent of the population at large. MILITARY-PATRIOTIC EDUCATION

What are young men interested in? Above all, bodily strength. afganets 3

The first expression of the afgantsy as a distinct entity was in the framework of military-patriotic education (voenno-patrioticheskoe vospitanie- VPV). The role of VPV in Soviet society was complex and pervasive. On the one hand, it had a straightforwardly instrumental role, that of providing pre-conscription age children prior grounding in basic military skills and of brushing up the training of reservists. This was, after all, a necessity in the context of an army largely made up of draftees on 18-24-month tours of duty, and a military structure designed as the skeletal mobilisation base for a reservist army. On the other hand, it also supported the national economy - providing training in useful skills such as driving, electronics and first aid - and the wider, ideological and propaganda network building and defending the Party's monopoly of authority and legitimacy. Hence, VPV was big business. DOSAAF (the state military sports association) merited a General in a senior Defence Ministry post to itself, a multi-million ruble budget and its own newspaper and publishing house. There was money and hence power and blat (influence) in such activities, the motors that drove any good Soviet careerist. In this context it would have been surprising if the system had not sought to draw afgantsy into itself and that there had not been afgantsy prepared

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to be bought. In this way the VPV system, for all it came later to be derided, provided the afgantsy with their first chance at coalition and as a result instilled premises and functions which persisted throughout the evolution of the 'afganets movement'. On the one hand, for the afgantsy the VPV structure represented jobs and the sort of extra-curricular opportunities to collaborate with the system which were an essential aid to lubricating the rest of one's life within the Party-state. On the other was the more subtle element to VPV's relationship with the afgantsy. Many young men simply liked to be involved in it, since it provided useful skills, the camaraderie of the groups, the macho heroism of stories and films shown at meetings and the opportunity to test one's physical abilities. In this, the afgantsy clearly had a head start, by virtue of their training and experience. But more than that, to many, VPV, like action-filled careers, provided a necessary support environment in which they were still the 'best and the brightest', not butchers and brigands, 'heroes of internationalism', not Kremlin stooges. STATE INITIATIVES

VPV activity originally united veterans on a small-scale and strictly local basis and generally as individuals rather than as a social group. It took the Gorbachev succession and the new rise of the 'informal movement' to begin to elevate these microscale ventures onto a larger stage. One can not even say that the first veterans' clubs were formed in 1985, since they were the most informal of groups, often little more than a circle of friends meeting in homes and cafes to drink, reminisce and perhaps help each other out in various small ways. They did not so much form, as happen. The Riga 'Serviceman-Internationalist' club, set up in 1986, for example, grew out of a simple group of friends who used to meet regularly for a drink and a chat. Nevertheless, with the explosion both of official glasnost' in the media and the enthusiasm of the Soviet people to test their new-found freedoms of speech and association, an appreciation of the unique needs of the afgantsy and of the advantages in unity began to spread. This set the scene for the first real initiatives on the part of the State to forge and direct the 'afganets movement', in 1986. To put this into context, one of the key assumptions of perestroika, as originally envisaged, was one familiar to any number of Tsar-Liberators and similar products of an enlightened and nationalist oligarchy. It was that the mass of ordinary citizens were intrinsically loyal, productive and content, but that artificial fetters were deforming such instincts into disillusion and apathy. Freedom would simply release these in-built

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potentials and result in a great upwelling of political contentment and economic production. However naive and self-deluding this may have been, this view of the Soviet people - which was, after all, snatched from between the curtains of a fast-moving Zillimousine, or taken from the front page of Pravda- bred a determined drive to replace the leash with the harness, to release society and yet channel it to economic and political reconstruction. One obvious such harness was the Komsomol, the Young Communist League. Up to 1985, the Party's youth wing had largely ignored the afgantsy, in line with official reticence about the very fact of war, and confined itself to lionising the select few heroes discussed in the media. At 1985's Komsomol Central Committee meeting, for example, five afgantsy who 'marched into immortality' were dutifully extolled, but then bracketed wholly within the 1941-45 Great Patriotic War experience. These were figures of history, not contemporary experience. Next year, though, it established a new Administration for Afghan Questions, and efforts were made to incorporate the energies of the afgantsy. Armed forces political chief General Lizichev, began to cite the experience of the soldier-internationalists as a potent weapon in the VPV armoury to defeat 'pacifist tendencies' in Soviet youth. Schools began to name classes after heroes of the war, sometimes regardless of whether they had been educated there or not. Articles began to appear in the press highlighting good practice and castigating Komsomol bodies which failed to cater to the afgantsy. Nevertheless, this was envisaged largely in rather crude terms, combining VPV work with pastoral care for veterans with material problems, rather than dealing with their wider social or political needs. The experimental institution of a 'youth military-patriotic school' in the Siberian city of Tyumen, a two-year course of weekly meetings with afgantsy and other veterans under the tutelage of the school voenruki, even looked as if it was heading to make them an obligatory part of the school curriculum until the project folded as a result of inertia, underfunding and resistance from afgantsy and schoolchildren alike. In Vologda, for example, the Komsomol established the Klub krasnaya zvedza ('Red Star Club') at the Atommash plant, but this confined itself to helping organise the Zarnitsa games for schoolchildren's VPV and sending some food parcels to a children's home in Afghanistan as a carefully contrived propaganda exercise. It is perhaps unsurprising that within nine months of its formation, a rival club had been established by and for afgantsy, which grew to 1,600 members by 1991. Yet this rival, which soon eclipsed the Red Star, was itself formed under the umbrella of the Komsomol, and operated out of the city's Museum of Komsomol Glory.

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Other examples included the Salang club, established in Perm in 1986, and the Krasnodar-based Ataka ('Attack'). By 1988, Satang had over 100 ex-soldiers and afgantsy working for it and had set up three teenagers' clubs: Pandzhsher (after the Panjshir valley, site of so much of the fighting of the war), Pamyat' ('Memory') and Dolg ('Duty'), for students still at school and at SPTU technical institutes- in other words, the very sort of working-class kids who would be the next generation of draftees and, had the war continued, afgantsy. Ataka, on the other hand, was formed in 1985, but by 1988 only had around 200 members. Nevertheless, it arranged rather more intensive work for schoolchildren (including parachute jumping) and could boast the novelty of an afganka, engineer-constructor Galina Voilova. In the short term, the increased involvement of afgantsy in VPV, and the new opportunities offered the otherwise rather exhausted 'heroic fiction' genre by the new line on Afghanistan, seemed to promise a much-needed shot in the arm for the whole concept of militarypolitical education. The veterans were younger, enthusiastic and imbued with genuine combat experience. They were also, or so it was hoped, vested with the mantle of heroism and thus ideal role models for teenagers and 1987-88 saw many expressions of hope that this would be the case. The fact is, though, that this failed to revive VPV and thus did nothing to prevent the death of the basic concept of conscription. Indeed, it often did much to bring it into disrepute. While many groups carried out very positive and fruitful work with juvenile delinquents, when one group began extending the teaching of combat drill and martial arts into a borstal, this is what caught the public eye.

ASHKHABAD-87 AND ACTIVISM FROM BELOW

In Afghanistan it was simpler ... There we knew for sure that the enemy had to be wiped out. Here you can't put a bureaucrat against a wall, or bag a home-grown punk or drug addict with an assault rifle. We need something else. What? Nikolai Kovalchuk, afganets, at Ashkhabad-874

The 1987 Law on Amateur Associations and Hobby Clubs laid the first effective legal basis for union, although it was not until the Law on Social Organisations was passed in 1990 that they acquired full legal rights. None the less, at this stage the 'afganets movement' was still unsophisticated, even by the standards of those days of proto-politics. After all, virtually by definition, the soldiers who had served in

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Afghanistan were the proletarians, the underclass lacking political experience and sophistication, and their lives had already been shaped by a militarised education system and then war. Just how far they were still unable to separate association from VPV was demonstrated at Ashkhabad, in November 1987. The All-Union Gathering of Young Reservists at Ashkhabad represented a turning point in the story of the 'afganets movement', while illustrating its limitations. It was held under the auspices of the Central Committee of the Komsomol, and on one level seemed a textbook instance of Gorbachevian reform. It assembled some 2,000 veterans from clubs and organisations throughout the USSR and in between bouts of competitive unarmed combat and photo-sessions, they held forth on the need to educate young people with both combat skills and appropriate ideological awareness and form an All-Union Military-Patriotic Union under the aegis of the Komsomol. To this extent, it seemed totally dominated by the needs of military-patriotic education. But within the long and rambling accounts of VPV clubs formed, bureaucratic obstacles surmounted and targets achieved, there was also a subtext pointing to even in 1987- the limitations and the decay of the Young Communist League's grip on even this, the most visible and amenable segment of veterans' society. This was, after all, the first genuine opportunity that afgantsy - and some of the more dynamic, entrepreneurial and articulate ones, at that - had had to meet and discuss common issues.

It does not suit the bureaucrats that we are getting together. Because, well, strength is a fist and not just a single finger. afganets, member of Dolg club5

Elsewhere in the USSR, the 'informal movement' was growing dramatically in size and sophistication, with, officially, 30,000 neformaly formed by late 1987. The afgantsy played their part in this development, not least because of the very practical reasons for the afgantsy to unite, reflecting the still essentially communal nature of Soviet law. The notion of individuals expressing unorthodox political views and campaigning for office or on an issue, is one that came late to the USSR. The legal and political unit was the kollektiv, and only groups could enjoy full rights and - since again, we are talking about a social group defined by its lack of access to the levers of political power - the opportunity to fight its corner for attention and resources. More specifically, when it legalised clubs, the government empowered them to conduct economic activity. The chance to avoid the charge of 'speculation' was attractive enough, but in the case of the veterans

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(and other groups deemed deserving, like invalids) they were also granted tax exemptions. Given the extortionate level of taxation on such private and social ventures, this was an obvious and attractive advantage and association promised to provide not just moral and material support, but political and economic benefits. THE VETERANS' GROUP

A postal survey of nine groups, ranging in size from 45 to 1,800 members, and geographically scattered from Kaliningrad to Karaganda, reveals certain common features. I carried out this exercise during 199192 and it entailed questionnaires being sent to a number of veterans' groups and associations, whose addresses were drawn from the mainstream and afganets press and the grapevine. In all, groups representing some 4,409 members, predominantly veterans of Afghanistan, responded. Although there are obvious problems with any such study, this, plus material in the national and afganets press, allows certain broad conclusions to be drawn. The sort of club which evolved was strikingly homogeneous, combining the imperatives of self-help and militarypatriotic education with a generous portion of shrewd economic and political entrepreneurship. It had good links with the Komsomol and Union of Veterans, to both of which it was also affiliated, as well as the military commissariat (voenkomat), which generally acted as liaison for the local military authorities and the local civil authorities. It was part of the Union of Veterans of Afghanistan (SVA), though it was also very likely to be affiliated to the Association of Councils of Reserve Soldiers, Soldier-Internationalists and Military-Patriotic Organisations. It considered its main role to be that of giving help to victims of the war and other charitable causes, to which end it would set up business enterprises, as well as involve itself within the VPV structure - especially teaching unarmed combat - out of both conviction and economic necessity. As such, this profile says less about the afgantsy themselves and more about the general state of late Soviet society. They had to be economically self-sufficient, because the groups still operated within a cultural matrix stressing small circle loyalties and zero-sum attitudes to the struggle for a limited pool of resources, rather than the looser relationships of a mature democratic capitalism, and autarchy was a necessity rather than an option. Many were essentially unstable, coalescing around a particular charismatic figure or group or responding to a particular set of circumstances. The Aprel' ('April') club of Leningrad's Nevskii district,

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TABLE 6.1

Afganets group survey results Number of groups: 9 Membership Afgantsy Other soldier-internationalists Komsomoltsy Schoolchildren Relatives of dead afgantsy

9 3 2 2 4

Good Relations with . . . CPSU Young Communist League DOSAAF Union of Veterans Local military commissariat Local authorities Police Materinskoe serdtse

4 8 5 8 8 8 3 5

Functions of the organisation Help afgantsy Help invalid afgantsy Help families of fallen Perpetuate memory of fallen Establish housing co-ops Protect individual rights Help run sanatoria, etc. Fight drug abuse

9 9 9 9

2 7 1 3

Sources of funds Membership dues Party/local authority funds VLKSM Economic activity Formal/inks with ... Union of Afghan Veterans Young Communist League DOSAAF Union of Veterans Association of Councils of Reserve Soldiers, SoldierInternationalists and MilitaryPatriotic Organisations Raise money for charity Teach unarmed combat Publish materials Military-patriotic education Set up businesses Help police Arrange public events

6 2

3 5

8 7 5 8

5

7 7 1 8 7 2 6

Findings in italics are those shared by more than three-quarters (7 +) of the groups surveyed.

for example, was founded at the end of 1986, but after a year of steady expansion, almost folded in 1988 as some of the original kernel of organisers simply lost interest, others married, had children and had to devote their time to their families and others joined full-time study. Eventually it was relaunched successfully in 1989 and became a branch of the Union of Veterans of Afghanistan, but still faced a legacy of division and mistrust. Yet their central focus was always on the acquisition of resources to redistribute to the needy: themselves, their friends, the parents of their fallen comrades, a characteristically Soviet mix of Robin Hood altruism and hard-headed self-interest. As such, economics lay at the heart of the 'afganets movement'.

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ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION

Another feature of the Gorbachev era had been the rise of small-scale private enterprise, typically on a collective or communal basis, and the tax privileges of the veterans' groups ensured they could play a full role in this. If one takes 'economic activity' in its broadest sense, covering more than just profit-making ventures, the afganets groups tended to become involved in three basic forms: enterprises formed to support the groups' activities, war-related commercial ventures, and housing. Given the ever clearer bankruptcy of the Soviet state and its reluctance to provide funds for what was, after all, a politically marginal constituency, the groups right from the start placed heavy emphasis on generating income to supplement membership dues and subsidies from the Komsomol, local authorities or similar sources. Even in 1989, for example, the Afganets club in Moscow was financially independent, due in large part to its running a lucrative enterprise manufacturing footware, with 40 per cent of the profits set aside straight away to support the invalids, families of dead soldiers and similar causes. Elsewhere, veterans joined other entrepreneurs in servicing or exploiting (opinion is mixed) their fellow afgantsy, and that sector of the public still finding fascination or romance in the war. The Yaroslavlbased Aist enterprise, for example (named after the nickname of dead afganets songwriter/hero Aleksandr Stovba), produced 13 collections of songs about the war and had sold more than 8,000 by mail-order by September 1991. Other groups produced books or pamphlets about the war, established their own newspapers or held concerts of afganets music. Others effectively exploited the state and its VPV structure. The Alma-Ata Theatre-Studio united afganets actors and stuck to 'the heroic-patriotic element of modern art', reputedly making substantial amounts from DOSAAF in the process. Unarmed combat, taught by the overwhelming majority of afganets groups, was a sure-fire moneyspinner. If a group could not persuade one arm of the VPV system or the other to pay for such services, it could charge high fees to young men keen to look macho or feel safer in a time of rising crime - and the more street-wise groups even managed to do both. The late 1980s saw a huge upsurge in interest in the martial arts, one for which the afgantsy were well prepared to cater. There was even a backlash against such 'oriental arts', with one approving article discussing a former KGB officer who taught 'Russian-style' unarmed combat, based on the special forces' distinctive rukopashnyi boi, and concluding that it was superior if for no other reason than its native provenance - for none of the oriental arts involve a good, Russian 'Hoorah!'

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The third key area of activity was in housing, as has been discussed in the context of the experiences of the veterans returning home. Facing a colossal housing deficit, and with little hope of being able to muster the political muscle to force more access to scarce resources, some veterans turned to the opportunities provided by house-building cooperatives, which appeared to many to offer the right mix of relatively quick and cheap results and the chance to remain within the embrace of afganets society. The MZhK (young persons' housing complex) was especially appropriate in that it could be organised through afganets clubs (and two of the nine surveyed regarded this as a basic element of their role). These offered groups of young people the opportunity to build their own houses themselves, at their own expense, but with the inducements of being able to sidestep waiting lists, live with friends and colleagues, build to personal rather than shoddy and unimaginative State plans, and do so with generous government subsidy. Veterans were encouraged to join a MZhK, being granted the right to enrol without having had to participate in 'socialist competition', and a MZhK was granted interest-free state loans for construction. As a result, the afganets MZhK became one of the more concrete expressions of afganets activism, with the first completed in Leningrad, with accommodation for 200 veterans (80 of them invalids and another 80 Great Patriotic War veterans). At both the national (through organisations like the All-Union Association of Reserve Soldiers' Councils, Soldier-Internationalists and Military-Patriotic Unions' Economic-Production Commission) and local level, afgantsy saw this as a practical way to solve a practical problem. None the less, they often found themselves following a bureaucratic paper-chase and their efforts were often to little avail: in 1991 there was even a hunger strike by homeless afgantsy in Khartsyzsk in the Ukraine. UNIONISATION: THE LENINGRAD EXAMPLE

By 1989, though, the pattern of afganets economic activity was changing in line with the evolution of grass-roots economic activity outside the afganets movement. Indeed, 1989-90 also saw the fruition of other deeper trends. Within the context of the general development of Soviet society, it is not surprising that pressures began to build for this scattered community to become united within larger umbrella formations. If the 'early perestroika' years were a time of small-scale association, of neformaly, then 'late perestroika' brought mass politics and the awareness of the power and security to be achieved in broader unions (formaly?). In the words of one observer, the clubs and organisations of the afganets movement had grown 'like mushrooms

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after the rain, without a clear notion of their tasks and a considered programme of action'. By 1989, it was clear that such a lack of unity could only mean impotence. Similarly, it should not be surprising that there were several different organisations vying to represent the afgantsy. The first step was the alescence of smaller, local groups within the larger cities and regions. Just as the Novosibirsk afganets VPV association had been keen to co-operate with other Siberian groups, such oblastnichestvo, regionalism, manifested itself elsewhere. The Kuzbass afgantsy had been holding an annual conference since 1988 both to share experiences and to present a united front to an unhelpful regional Party leadership. Leningrad provided a particularly striking example where such growth came from grass-roots consensus rather than pressure from above, when the Leningrad Association of Veterans of the War in Afghanistan (LAVV A) was formed during the winter 198990, with a founding conference held on 19 May 1990. Broadly speaking, its aims were three: to foster co-operation between local veterans' groups, to co-ordinate common enterprises such as the establishment of a database (on relevant laws, contacts, etc.) and a common programme of self-help and to provide legal and social protection to afgantsy. Setting out consciously not to model itself on traditional Soviet associations, with their heavy emphasis on the powers of the centre, it granted each constituent organisation one working mandate (delegate), not weighting for size of membership, and also provided a central body under which several associated enterprises and organisations could shelter, including the Modul' social-cultural centre and the afganets newspaper K sovesti ('To Conscience'). The LAVVA operated in greater or lesser collaboration with the local Union of the Mothers of the Dead, the Leningrad Military District, the Invalids' Union and various interested parties and enterprises. NATIONAL UNION(S): UNION VERSUS ASSOCIATION

The afganets movement must not have borders, we will always be together. N. Georgadze, Chair, Georgian Union of Veterans of Afghanistan6

From mid-1989, with the birth of the new Congress of People's Deputies and Supreme Soviet, the emphasis was shifting increasingly to national politics. A new political system was slowly and painfully emerging, and with it the promise of a new deal, a redistribution of power and resources. One manifestation of this was the rise of a consensus within

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TABLE 6.2

Afganets Groups in Leningrad within LAWA Afganets society of veterans of the war in Afghanistan [Primorskii ward) Afganets club, Petrodvorets section of the Union of Veterans of Afghanistan Aprel' ('April') Nevskii ward organisation of veterans of the Afghan war Dekabrist ('Decembrist') military-patriotic union [Kuibyshev ward] Dolg ('Duty') reserve soldiers' club [Vasileostrovskii ward] Dolg ('Duty') Krasnogvardeiskii ward club of veterans of Afghanistan Frunze ward council of soldier-internationalists Pereval ('Mountain Pass') creative union of soldier-internationalists [Petrograd ward] Shuravi Kirishsk ward club Sovetskii Soyuz ('Soviet Union') club of veterans of Afghanistan [Kirov ward] Soyuz ('Union') military-patriotic union [Moscow ward] Viktoriya Pushkinsk union of veterans of Afghanistan Vozrozhdenie ('Rebirth') Kolpinsk society of veterans of Afghanistan Zvezda ('Star') Kaliningrad ward organisation of veterans of the Afghan war The Leningrad Fund of Invalids and the Families of Soldiers Killed in the Republic of Afghanistan The Leningrad Fund for the Assistance of the Young and Orphans of the War in Afghanistan The Economic-Productive Commission of the All-Union Association of Reserve Soldiers, Soldier-Internationalists and Military-Patriotic Unions Source: 'V dvukh slovakh o dvizhenii', K sovesti 3.91

the 'afghan movement' that it needed some national-level body to articulate its views and, in effect, ensure that it was not overlooked at the centre. The two main forces, the Union of Veterans of Afghanistan (SVA - Soyuz veteranov Afganistana) and All-Union Association of Reserve Soldiers' Councils, Soldier-Internationalists and MilitaryPatriotic Unions (Vsesoyuzn17ya assotsiatsiya sovetov voinov zapasa, voinov-internatsionalistov i oboronno-patrioticheskikh ob"edinenii, or henceforth simply 'the Association', in the interests of brevity) were not direct rivals, but represented two separate approaches to the whole question of union.

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While notionally confederal, the SVA leadership tried to run it in traditional, federal, Soviet style and developed a close relationship with the government. In many ways, it became another front organisation, a useful conduit for foreign aid and a convenient transmission belt for Kremlin decrees. It spawned a complex series of sub-committees and satellite organisations, from a section responsible for the families of fallen soldiers to economic enterprise centres. The SVA even used its newspaper, Pobratim, to publish a front page statement from its Coordinating Council on the eve of the March 1991 Union Referendum, strongly backing the government's line. Yet short of funnelling some foreign charity to high-priority areas and setting up a plethora of economic enterprises, there was a clear feeling that it was failing to fulfil its primary role, of lobbying for genuine state assistance for the veterans as a whole. By its 1991 annual conference, held in Perm in July, the chair of the SVA, Aleksandr Kotenev, could claim more than 300,000 members, with 185 regional sections, nine republican SVAs, SV A organisations in every republic except Estonia and an annual budget of 7,000,000 rubles and $960,000. Yet what did it do? It spent around two million rubles on material assistance for veterans and families, but this was money either gathered by the veterans themselves or donated by the state, both of whom could have as easily spent the money themselves. In short, it was an organisation devoted to the redistribution rather than the creation and acquisition of resources. Besides which, the Soviet Union itself was falling apart, and the formation of the Russian SVA, intended originally merely to be a logical part of the SVA's development, was ultimately to lead to internal tensions as the notion of an All-Union body became increasingly untenable. Although the founding congress was a glittering affair, gathering such luminaries as Metropolitan Pitirim, General Varennikov, Vice-President Aleksandr Rutskoi and Chief of Staff General Moiseev, with greetings from Boris Yeltsin and Afghan President Najibullah, the LA VV A, for example, decided ultimately not to affiliate. The feeling was that linkage within the SVA would limit freedom of manoeuvre and lead to centralisation and politicisation. The SVA ultimately all but withered away for this very reason, but the Association was in little shape to take its place simply because it was a rather different and more limited body. In many ways, its limitation was its very strength, for it combined a traditional, even conservative, emphasis on military-patriotic education (especially its most lucrative elements) and economic activity in general, with a looser, more confederal structure. Formed in February 1989, the Association's central body, the co--ordinating council, was formed of four elements:

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The Commission for Clubs and Unions. Dolg ('Duty'), an organisation to help invalid afgantsy. The Propaganda and Agitation Commission. The Economic-Production Commission. These four agencies, having rather more limited and specific tasks, were far less intrusive and dirigiste and thus far more acceptable to local organisations suspicious of the SVA's centralism, while at the same time, the Association could link afgantsy with other reserve soldiers. Within a year, it united 124 regions, 4,000 clubs and 2,000 soldierinternationalists' councils (including LAVVA, which did not feel the same misgivings as it had over marriage to the SVA). Although there were inevitably problems - not least over how money collected in the localities would eventually be used and distributed- in time these were settled. Dolg was divided between two programmes, Poisk ('Raid') and Miloserdie ('Charity') which concentrated on the issues of prostheses and helping run the Rus' rehabilitation centre. The EconomicProduction Commission (PEK - Proivodstvenno-ekonomicheskaya komissiya) raised and dispensed funds and helped establish and support economic enterprises. Both became important elements of the afganets movement. In Leningrad, for example, the PEK was involved in funding psychotherapy sessions for parents of fallen soldiers in Leningrad, opening 60 new beds for limbless veterans at the city's Nil Protezirovaniya (prosthesis medical institute) and part-funding a housing development. Yet the Association's very strengths were its lack of centralisation and its concentration on specific, practical projects rather than involvement in politics. Hence it could not be and was not a loud voice in national politics, underlining the fact that the afgantsy would do well to work together, but to a large extent because they could expect nothing more than tolerance from the majority of the population. In such unity there was not great strength, but there was survival.

NATIONAL DISUNION: BACK TO GRASS-ROOTS

This consensus was very quickly to give way to disillusion, though, as it became clear to the afgantsy just how marginal their position was, and just how unlikely were their chances of acquiring the allies and sympathy to win political recognition for their claims. By and throughout 1990, the public mood grew increasingly angry and divided, born of hunger, shortage, disillusion and an apparent policy impasse in the Kremlin. Marginal groups like the afgantsy found themselves receiving increasingly short shrift. Afgantsy politicians like General Boris Gromov and Colonel Aleksandr Rutskoi moved, as will be discussed later,

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away from sectional and into national politics, with scarcely a backward glance. The VPV movement, and the afganets component within it, continued to decay. While by 1990 there were still afgantsy involved with VPV, for reasons both of conviction and career, their number was static and their moral authority in decline. At that time the military authorities began to realise the dwindling hold they had upon them, leading to despairing cries of 'how to re-educate the neformal?' Of course, in part this problem reflected the usual lack of co-ordination and support. One afganets, for example, who wanted to set up a shooting club, was told that he could do it only if he gave up his main job and took a part-time DOSAAF's instructor's salary. The prospect of exchanging a monthly salary of 600 rubles for 200 was quite enough to cool his military-patriotic ardour. Traditional methods were tried, such as the establishment of a 'club of heroes' to gather Heroes of the Soviet Union to lend their lustre to VPV, but to no avail. Clubs began to lose members, or simply close through lack of funds and commitment. Symbolic of this retreat was the Ashkhabad-90 assembly. Whereas Ashkhabad-87 had marked the beginning of the afganets movement's entry into the wider political and social world, within three years it had flowered and withered. Ashkhabad-90 was a purely Turkmen event, opened by the first secretary of the Turkmenistan Komsomol Central Committee and frequently putting a specifically Turkmen slant on matters, underlining, for instance, their particular respect for their elders. Inter-national and inter-ethnic division had already broken the afganets movement and shown just how thin the bonds of 'afganets brotherhood' were. Instead, energies were wasted in endless, circuitous and ultimately pointless discussions as to whether they should form a generic association or a union, and the semantics surrounding such a choice. As delegate Hero of the Soviet Union Viktor Kapshuk concluded miserably, 'it seems to me that the lads themselves don't know what they are doing'. The successful afganets groups were those which managed to retain any sort of momentum and contacts on a local level. This involved either access to the political sphere or a sufficient critical mass of afgantsy and hence it is an interesting illustration that whereas the Muscovite afgantsy did not manage to make much of themselves (in part because they depended too much on the All-Union bodies), the Leningrad veterans, retaining the structure of the LA VVA, managed to retain a role. They continued to expand their economic arm and lobbied the local authorities for social provisions. They developed further links with the local military establishment and played a part in the formation of the Union of Afgantsy (Soyuz afgantsev) of veterans serving within the

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Leningrad military district and this was to prove important in providing LAVV A a role in helping persuade the local military authorities to defy the putshchists' orders to impose martial law in the city during the 1991 August Coup, when they played a significant, if fortunately untested, part in defending the city government, providing men to guard barricades. They also produced regular broadsheets under the K sovesti banner through those crucial days, special issues coming out at 2 pm on 20 August, and three times on 21 August, starting with a 7 am issue. Crudely duplicated single sheets of A4, with news from Leningrad and elsewhere, they represented an information lifeline, a means of promulgating the city government's decrees and letting the city know it was not standing alone. A WINDOW ON SOVIET SOCIETY

By 1990, Pobratim was publishing a regular supplement Ne mozhet byt' ('It Can't Be!') on UFOs and believe-it-or-not anecdotes, filling its pages with lurid tales of giant rats in Moscow's sewerage system, being hunted by afgantsy with gas and assault rifles. While K sovesti hung on for longer, taking a broader perspective with coverage of crime in the ranks, bullying and nationalist secessionism, by late 1991 there was disillusion within its editorial collective and claims that it was just becoming a money-making venture. High hopes of union had given way to a recognition that the practical problems of scarcity were leading to division rather than cohesion. One commentator may have felt simply that 'it is comfortable for us each to work in our own estate ... , tsar and peasant', but the fact was that when resources are scarce, when there is no margin, beggar-my-neighbour is not a vice but a necessity, a lesson the Russians have had centuries to learn. 7 Perhaps one afganets interviewed for the book Zinky Boys put it best: ... don't write about the so-called spirit of brotherhood among us afgantsy. I never saw it and I don't believe in it. The only thing we had in common was fear . .. And what we've got in common now that we're back home is that we haven't got a thing to call our own . . . If ever all that gets sorted out, our veterans' clubs will fall apart. 8 His prescription was plenty, but lack had the same impact. Just as union had been a situational response, a perceived best course of action to meet certain psychological and physical needs, by 1991 it was a case of every afganets for himself. Hence the afganets movement's dynamic mirrored that of the mothers', taking advantage of the freedoms offered by glasnost', trying

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to fight for some share of resources in the period of democratisation, then pushed back into the ghetto in the face of hard times and disinterest on the part of society as a whole. In many ways, indeed, it reflected the evolution of Soviet - or at least, Russian - society as a whole, with its transition from informal groups within the existing structures to independent groupings, co-operatives and unions - a brief explosion born of equal parts of idealism and pragmatism and then the slow, sullen retrenchment as times became ever harder. NOTES 1. S. Dalziel, 'Assignment Afghantsy', B BC Current Talks and Features (28 July 1989). 2. S. Alexievich, Zinky Boys (1992), p.l21. 3. S. Pchelkina and I. Ikonnikova, 'Monolog negramotnogo pedagoga', K sovesti, 1. 91. 4. L. Tsagolova and I. Chernyak, 'Muzhskoi razgovor', Sobesednik, 47.87. 5. Dalziel, 'Assignment Afghantsy'. 6. L. Sbrodov and V. Voronin, 'Sozdan Rossiiskii soyuz veteranov Afganistana', Pobratim 9 (1990). 7. A. Smirnov, 'Tak i zhivem', K sovesti, 5.91. 8. Alexievich, Zinky Boys, p.19.

7

Afgantsy and Politics

As for the Afghan war veterans' participation in the life of the country today and in current economic reforms, their place is at the forefront. There are many guys ready to run risks and act without fear or second thoughts. If an Afghan war veteran thinks he's right, he'll go over the top, sweeping away all obstacles. People's Deputy and afganets Yurii Romanov, 19901

Tough war hero at Boris Yeltsin's side during the August Coup, hardtalking champion of Russia's national interest, Russian Vice-President Aleksandr Rutskoi epitomises in so many ways the image of the afganets as political warrior prepared to surmount any obstacle, tackle any injustice. This myth was persistent and pervasive. In part, at least, this was because it drew on a rich folk tradition of superhuman individuals standing out against the grey tide of life, from the bogatyri, the heroes of Russian folk myth to Stalin's communists who, in the official propaganda, could 'storm any bastion'. There is enough truth in it not to discount it out of hand, but it has to be put into perspective. Cause and effect, for example, are not always that easy to connect. Consider the saturation of the British House of Commons with Oxbridge graduates. It is not enough to say that an education at Oxford or Cambridge makes you more determined to get into politics. What we can say, though, is that one way or another that background has a variety of effects: it may make some people more likely to turn a vague interest into a firm ambition; it may provide the background and the contacts to get you into parliament; it may raise sights onto national politics instead of the equally necessary but less glamorous local council. Of course, the parallel cannot be taken far: getting to Oxbridge requires qualifications where Afghanistan largely consumed those lacking in any pull or diplomas, and an Oxbridge education is rarely described as an experience of suffering and betrayal. Assessments of the afgantsy in politics must be cautious when dealing with them as a group rather than

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with individuals; General Rutskoi's real strength, for example, was that he made use of his Afghan pedigree, but then managed to break away from it and find new causes, alliances and bases of support. WHAT DID AFGANTSY THINK ABOUT POLITICS?

There is certainly little evidence that the afgantsy as a whole were especially interested in politics. Polled for the newspaper Komsomol'skaya pravda, only 12 per cent cited participation in politics as a primary concern. Many more were interested in helping one another (34 per cent) or raising their families (30 per cent). Most, in fact, were abnormally passive. Either they were so desperate to fit into mainstream society that they were too busy keeping their heads down, or they were just too tired and cynical to involve themselves in politics. Thus one needs to be cautious when dealing with the politicised afgantsy, who were another of these small, yet highly visible minorities. Given the recurring theme, that the effect of the war was most often to heighten and accentuate existing tendencies, the point is that people who, perhaps, would have been content as Komsomol Congress representatives or local councillors instead sought higher office. Maybe vague discontent became rabid anti-government opposition. But the seeds were usually there, ready to be watered by the blood and tears of war, and this was at a time when the creation of new political institutions permitted a rapid rise. Whether radicals or conservatives, they all had much in common. They tended to see politics very much in terms of two core issues, both clearly stemming from their experiences. Firstly, a concern with guilt and blame, a sharp edge to the general resurgence of morality in politics which marked the 1980s. Second, an inability to accept the concept of representation: that another, elected figure or group could adequately address their concerns. This is hardly surprising. Mature democracies depend on the concept of representation, on the notion that you can vote for someone who does not share all your interests and background but that you can still trust him or her to fight your corner, in theory at least. But late Soviet and post-Soviet democratic political culture was still very young and in place of representation there burned a constellation of self-interested (in the best sense of the word) pressure groups and alliances, operating as best they could within an environment of scarcity and instability. If you were a soldier, you wanted to vote for a uniform; while mothers would think twice before voting for a childless candidate. In the case of the veterans, this parochialism was greatly accentuated by a belief that they had been let down - by an expansionist government, by backsliding bureaucrats, by an ungrateful and unpat-

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riotic people - and drew on both their training and their practical experience, both of which inclined them towards individual and group self-reliance. I, like most ordinary people, believed since my childhood till yesterday in the impeccability, wisdom and competence of State leadership . . . But the triumph of incompetence in the top echelons of State power produces quite an oppressive situation. It is quite terrible that this situation has existed for decades. Supreme Soviet deputy and afganets, Colonel Valerii Ochirov2

SUPREME SOVIET COMMITTEE FOR SOLDIERINTERNATIONALISTS' AFFAIRS

This insularity of approach was certainly evident when the Supreme Soviet, the USSR's higher parliament, decided to set up a Committee for Internationalists' Affairs. With the advent of some form of genuine demokratizatsiya, the Supreme Soviet spawned a variety of committees and subcommittees on everything from ecology to architecture, and in April1990, the afgantsy and other internationalists duly won their own. Chaired by a decorated afganets, Pavel Shet'ko, its brief was to protect the interests of the internationalists not just of the Afghan war but also of deployments in Vietnam, Egypt, Ethiopia and other 'fraternal allies'. At first, it was to comprise 14 members, all but one of whom were afgantsy. Yet it soon became clear that while some had relevant experience (for five years, Shet'ko had headed the Belorussian SoldierInternationalists' Committee), many did not. The secretary, for example, Vladimir Finogenov, while a decorated former paratrooper, had been a polisher, fifth class. As the committee began to flounder in ignorance and inexperience, the decision was made to add another twelve part-time members with the breadth of experience and interests to assist it in considering its wide-ranging brief, including an industrial manager, the chair of a collective farm, a doctor and the tirelessly selfpromoting Metropolitan Pitirim. The committee's work covered a wide range of often piecemeal issues, and notched up several successes. Within three months of its establishment, it had successfully campaigned for a 50 per cent tax discount for afgantsy and that afganets aid organisations be exempted from tax altogether, while Pavel Shet'ko led a mission to Pakistan to collect a freed prisoner of war. Meanwhile, the Committee developed working links with the USSR Ministry of Health (and its republican counterparts) in order to prepare a co-ordinating plan for invalids of the war, and opened informal talks with Mossovet (the Moscow City

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TABLE 7.1 Supreme Soviet Committee for Soldier-Internationalists' Affairs, 1990

Member

Notes

Pavel Shet'ko (Chair)

Afganets, former Chair, Belorussian SoldierInternationalists' Committee Afganets Afganets Manager Afganets, voenruk Gynaecologist Afganets, Hero of the Soviet Union, professional soldier Teacher Medical doctor Writer Singer Afganets TV commentator Afganets, Chair of analogous RSFSR Committee Teacher Soldier Afganets Afganets, VPV teacher Teacher Later, USSR Vice-President (and August Coup plotter) Electrician Afganets, Hero of the Soviet Union, professional soldier Afganets, VPV teacher Afganets Afganets, invalid

Rizoali Odzhiev (Deputy Chair) Vladimir Finogenov (Secretary) Nikolai Bekh Vladimir Bulatov Viktoria Gnatyuk Colonel General Boris Gromov Tat'yana Zhukova Dr Gavriil Ilizarov Vladimir Karpov Iosif Kobzon Aleksandr Kolodeznikov Aleksandr Krutov Yurii Romanov Vyacheslav Simvolokov Sr Lt Aleksandr Uvarov Nikolai Chentsov Nikolai Shamin Viktor Yakushkin Gennadi Yanaev Igor' Ablameiko Colonel Ruslan Aushev Andrei Logeiko Igor' Novikov Sergei Chervonopiskii Metropolitan Pitirim of Volokamsk

council) about the possibility of setting up memorials in the city and perhaps holding celebrations to commemorate the war. In October 1990, the committee was also mandated, along with the Committee on Issues of Defence and State Security, to investigate development in Afghanistan, with a view to preparing a report on how the Soviet Union could help achieve an early settlement of that country's continuing problems. This mixed bag illustrates the fact that perhaps the committee's chief asset was not so much the quality or clout of its members

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but the fact that it represented a central focus, not least in developing links and soliciting assistance abroad. As well as Shet'ko's set-piece trip to Pakistan, there were working visits to the USA, to meet Vietnam veterans, politicians and rehabilitation experts. Indeed, alarmed by (very premature) rumours that Soviet troops might join the multinational alliance against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, a three-man delegation from the Committee visited Baghdad in January 1991 to press for an international peace conference. So far, though, it was acting in an essentially passive way, responding to specific opportunities or providing input into others' legislation. As it found its feet, the committee began to support a move away from such ad hoc measures and establish some firm, institutionalised framework for the care of and provision of the veterans. This entailed a shift of responsibilities away from the Council of Ministers- which, in 1989, had been entrusted with preparing a programme to help the afgantsy by the first Congress of People's Deputies - and its reliance on specific, targeted decrees and greater use of laws, setting out the authorities' legal obligations towards the veterans. The draft programme was submitted for discussion in 1990 and whereas the committee accepted its premises, it felt that it still lacked both an appropriate mechanism and an appreciation of the different needs of different veterans, as opposed to some notionally 'average' soldier-internationalist. As a result, the committee took it upon itself to develop an alternative to present back to the Council of Ministers. This was not quite as arid an issue as it may sound, for the main problem with Council of Ministers' decrees was that they were so specific. Unlike statutory regulations, decrees require continued, active goodwill on others' parts, but if the afgantsy could have their rights and safeguards enshrined in law, then the Council of Ministers and parliament would have to protect them. To pass regulations is but a single battle, to keep the decrees coming, a war with no end in sight. But as the Soviet Union began to come apart at the seams, any central body soon had to compete or co-operate with republican counterparts, their relations complicated by wider issues and tensions over their respective roles and constituencies. Soviet parliamentary committee member Yurii Romanov, for example, also chaired the ponderously named and specifically Russian rival, the Russian Conference of Representatives of Participants in the War in Afghanistan and the Parents and Families of Servicemen Killed in Afghanistan which, in due course, ended up playing second fiddle to the Russian Supreme Soviet Committee for Invalid Affairs, War and Labour Veterans and the Social Protection of Servicemen and their Families, chaired by Aleksandr Rutskoi. Then in the light of the Conference's inability to

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organise itself, in December 1990 there met for the first time the executive of the Russian Union of Veterans of Afghanistan (RSVARossiiskii Soyuz Veteranov Afganistana) at Rutskoi's initiative, given that he and his committee wanted a single body with which to work. As if this was not enough, in 1991, the USSR Council of Ministers decided to establish its own State Commission of Soldier-Internationalists' Affairs. Both the USSR Supreme Soviet Committee and the Union of Veterans of Afghanistan denounced this, the Deputy Chair of the SVA calling it a 'bureaucratic game', but in so many ways this is a perfect illustration of the confused and essentially log-jammed nature of late Soviet politics. A dangerous mixture of liberalisation and decay gave rise to a desperate and largely counter-productive scramble to create newer, different bodies as a surrogate to concerted action. Needless to say, the end of the USSR changed little, with the formation in March 1992 of an equally cumbersome Committee for Internationalist Soldiers Attached to the Council of the Heads of Government of the Commonwealth Member States, under Ruslan Aushev. AFGANTSY AS PARLIAMENTARIANS

But what is striking is that they could come up with 13 afgantsy in the Supreme Soviet to staff its Committee. After all, of a 542-seat chamber, the overall level of participation in the war would suggest one-two afgantsy within it. What is more, they were a heterogeneous mix, ranging from outright military candidates such as Colonel Valerii Ochirov, Hero of the Soviet Union and member of the Defence and State Security Committee, to Party hack agitators like the legless invalid and Komsomol appointee Sergei Chervonopiskii, who launched a bitter and personal attack on the former dissident Andrei Sakharov when he dared denounce the war, and the veteran turned pacifist Vasilii Katrinich. This is, after all, in keeping with the overall theme that Afghanistan heightened and sharpened tendencies in every direction. Although to suggest that it radicalised all the veterans is a crude overgeneralisation, there is a significant minority for whom it clearly acted as a spur to win political office. Radicalisation, moreover, can often be as much to the 'right' as to the 'left'. In the larger Congress of Peoples' Deputies (the rump parliament from which Supreme Soviet deputies were elected), whose 2,250 members 'should' have thrown up five-six afganets deputies, there were 56. While many had been nominated by groups such as the Party or the Young Communist League, others won in straight elections. Some campaigned on a clear 'afganets ticket', stressing either militarypatriotic education or abhorrence of the war, and it is clear that focusing

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on such a narrow issue did not preclude winning broad support. Admittedly, former 40th Army commander and Siberian Military District chief Colonel General Boris P'yankov did rather overplay his hand by sending armoured vehicles, gun barrels festooned with 'Vote For P'yankov' banners, rolling through the streets of Novosibirsk. His bid for higher office was not a success.

TABLE 7.2 Serving so/dier-afgantsy elected as USSR Peoples' Deputies, 1989 Lieutenant Colonel Ruslan Aushev General Valentin Varennikov Colonel General Boris Gromov Major Vasilii Erokhin Major Vladimir Zolotukhin Captain Aleksandr Kolodeznikov General Yurii Maksimov Colonel Valerii Ochirov

Colonel General Igor' Rodionov General Mikhail Sorokin General Ivan Tret'yak Lieutenant General Ivan Fuzhenko Colonel Aleksandr Tsalko Senior Sergeant Yurii Shatrovenko Lt General Vladimir Shkanakin Captain Sergei Yastrebtsov

There also seems to have been something of a class and generation gap. Military deputies tended either to be very senior officers firmly entrenched within the ruling elite, or beardless conscripts and very junior soldiers who usually turned out to be ambitious Young Communists serving their term's national service before a lucrative career within the Party or simple and trusted placemen there to give the parliament a cosmetic common touch. The afgantsy, though, were more likely to be junior officers, captains, majors, lieutenant colonels and colonels. In other words, men neither with the connections or prestige to be 'insiders', nor so poor or unknown as to be cheaply bought to toe the Party's line unquestioningly. Deputy Yurii Shatrovenko was probably closest to the identikit 'typical afganets deputy' in highlighting three key areas for concern. First, the role of the army, and its need for public support on the one hand, but a clear and constitutional bar on its use to suppress the people on the other. Second, he addressed youth concerns, again mixing authoritarian views on draft-dodging and military and civil indiscipline with an appreciation of the genuine problems of finding accommodation and meaningful work. Finally, he appealed that the afgantsy and the country should be told, once and for all, whose fault the war was, and see that justice was done.

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This is a characteristic mix: discipline and real opportunities, due respect for the army in which he served (and whose travails he understood) and guarantees that it not be misused again and, above all, even breaks for the young and retribution for the guilty. It was echoed in the platforms of afganets candidates of all shades, both in the USSR and Russian elections, tapping a number of bases for support, and not just from the veterans and those touched by the war, for the very reasons that it did incorporate so many of the general concerns of the time: physical conditions, control of the organs of coercion, moral justice and the danger of civil anarchy.

ALEKSANDR RUTSKOI, HSU

Early on, the afgantsy in the Supreme Soviet resolved to work together and afganets Deputies had called for a united bloc, reflecting their desire to form ranks to fight their corner. They never really represented an especially tight grouping, since basic political views were often very different, and instead took a part, if not often very prominently, in the wider activities of parliament, notably through its committees. But few afgantsy managed to break out of the lower level of parliamentary activity: too many were either professional soldiers without the time or the broad support base to do more, or relatively unsophisticated appointees and populists, or too ghettoised by involvement in afganets issues and nothing else. Two figures in particular, though, did manage to grow out of these limiting confines, and merit some more detailed attention: Aleksandr Rutskoi, pilot, founder of the Democratic Party of Communists of Russia (DPKR) and eventual Russian vice-president, and Boris Gromov, general and First Deputy Interior Minister at the time of the August Coup. Aleksandr Rutskoi served in Afghanistan in 1985-86 and 1988, and returned a Hero of the Soviet Union, having flown 428 combat missions and been shot down twice, once by a US-made 'Stinger' missile. Having been downed within Pakistan in 1988, he managed to evade searchers for five days before being captured. One favourable article implied that he managed to escape and get to the Soviet charge d'affaires in Islamabad, but in fact he was seized by Pakistani soldiers and later exchanged for a captured Pakistani. Back in Moscow he was enrolled into the Voroshilov General Staff Academy, soon to be headed by a former commander of the 40th Army, Colonel General Igor' Rodionov, hastily transferred from Tbilisi after his involvement in the 'Tbilisi massacre' of April 1989 that left 21 Georgian protesters dead. An intelligent and forceful conservative (until Tbilisi derailed his career, he

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had been headed for the top), Rodionov lost little time in making the academy a haven for hard-line Communist ideals. One can speculate about Rutskoi's frame of mind when he returned to Moscow from the war, and the political and social environment in which he found himself, but he first came to prominence in 1989, when he became Deputy Chairman of the Russian nationalist and conservative Otechestvo ('Homeland') society and stood for election to the Congress of People's Deputies in Moscow's Kuntsevo district. The campaign saw high passions on both sides, with a journalist asking a meeting 'How can you vote for a man whose arms are drenched up to his elbows in blood?' ,3 and a letter to the voters from the radical priest Father Gleb Yakunin and two others alleging Rutskoi had the active support of both the military and the fascist group Pamyat'. That the authorities had been prepared to strike a deal to free Rutskoi from captivity was unsurprising - he had, after all, been deputy commander of the 40th Army's air forces. Nevertheless, it was clear that a mixed and unsavoury collection of hard-liners and anti-semites were supporting him, and hence people were prepared to listen when Rutskoi's opponents played this up as proof of shadowy relations with the Party leadership. The whispering campaign helped ensure that he failed to win the seat to the USSR Congress of People's Deputies, losing out to a candidate endorsed by Boris Yeltsin, the man on whose ticket he would later run. For underneath some lurid rhetoric about spiritual and moral degradation and the like, his public statements indicated more an impatience with the drift that had set in and a bitter resentment that men like himself had done what they were told was their country's bidding and come home to be branded murderers and criminals. A candidate who called for the genuine separation of Party, state and economic organs and for the armed forces only to be used on the authority of parliament could scarcely be characterised as a simple hardline conservative. All this helps to explain what otherwise seems almost miraculous, the conversion of the 1989 model Rutskoi, the bristling national Bolshevik, to the centrist mediator of 1990 and, indeed, the champion of democracy against the August coup of 1991. In March 1990 he won a seat in the Russian Republic's Supreme Soviet from his home city of Kursk, and chaired its committee on invalids' and veterans' rights. There he belied expectations about the 'blood-drenched colonel', as his involvement with the day-to-day struggles of rather less fortunate veterans against a bloated and decaying state and Party bureaucracy some 45,000 complaints in about a year - persuaded him firstly that there was little that was Communist in the late Soviet 'partocracy', and that there was no room for tinkering, only for major change.

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For this was not a conversion, more an awakening. He retained his admiration for Andropov, as a man for whom discipline started with himself, and he set about building a new structure to save Communism from the Communist Party. Snubbing the conservative Russian Communist Party that had co-opted him onto its central committee, on 2 April 1991 he announced a new movement, Communists for Democracy, defined by its provisional support for Yeltsin and a vision of a sovereign Russia and a genuine form of democratic socialism. Thus he torpedoed Gorbachev's bid to outflank Yeltsin with a reformed Party and in May, Boris Yeltsin selected him as his running mate in Russia's first presidential elections. With his main conservative candidate standing with General Gromov at his side, it made sense for Yeltsin to have his own war hero. More importantly, by embracing Rutskoi, he was making a play for the social democratic wing of the Party. It was a shrewd political stratagem, and following Yeltsin's success, Rutskoi established his own Democratic Party of Communists of Russia (DPKR) on the foundations of Communists for Democracy. While admitting that 'of itself, Communism is a beautiful idea', he envisaged the DPKR as an avowedly social democratic and broad church party, with extensive links with such non-party groups as (the Communists for Democracy-sponsored) Grazhdanskoe soglasie ('Civil Accord') as well as independent deputies. The inaugural meeting of the DPKR in August 1991 drew a very mixed response. Predictably enough, the conservative press sought to play it down and denigrate Rutskoi, but the liberal media was also sceptical, either unprepared to offer the benefit of the doubt to anything still labelled 'Communist' or concerned that it represented a new rival. Even the Russian Democratic Party's Demokraticheskaya gazeta, amongst the most even-handed, heavily laced its report with extensive accounts of its own plans and programme and heavy-handed comparisons intended to put this new party in the shade. Besides, there was still unease: which was the real Aleksandr Rutskoi: the champion of Otechestvo or the social democrat? Irina Volgogradova, Communists for Democracy's parliamentary leader after Rutskoi's election, estimated that the DPKR had about four million potential supporters, primarily disgruntled CPSU members, but then the August Coup shattered the matrix of Soviet politics. By at once elevating Rutskoi and further tarnishing the name of Communism, it precipitated a total break with the Party and pushed the DPKR formally to renounce Communism and instead move towards constituting itself as a 'left-democratic' Party of Free Russia. Yet, ironically, in the long run this may contribute to Rutskoi's dream of being able to preserve some ground for left-of-centre politics in a Russia almost hysterically eager to ditch or denounce everything touched by the old order, since Rutskoi

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went on to become increasingly critical of Yeltsin's volatile mix of populist authoritarianism and radical marketisation, while himself moving to establish his nationalist credentials by championing the rights of Russian nationals in the other states of the Commonwealth of Independent States.

BORIS GROMOV, HSU

The case of General Boris Gromov, 'Lion of Afghanistan', perfectly illustrates the other extreme of late Soviet politics, and the way the two have begun to converge in the post-Soviet era. Largely due to his service ties with them, the dirigiste young commander found himself drifting into a hard-line camp of soldiers and bureaucrats who began by regarding themselves as true sons (and daughters) of the Communist Party and then became increasingly extremist as it grew clear that the Party was beyond resurrection. Instead, they began grafting bolshevik traditions to a chauvinist Russian nationalism that has by turns been labelled National Bolshevik, neo-Stalinist and even downright Fascist. Put simply, they admired Lenin's Bolshevik Party, its discipline, ruthless tactics and determined grip on power, but their gut loyalties were not to proletarian internationalism or the Communist utopia but to Mother Russia, proud and strong, terrifying, glorious and eternal. As was customary for a senior officer (especially one whose media profile had been so carefully cultivated), Gromov was expected to show some interest in politics when he assumed command of a Military District, which he did in 1989, when he took over the Kiev District. He had already been granted a keynote address at the XIX Party Conference in 1988, and it proved a forthright expose of many of the problems facing the soldiers in and after Afghanistan, in keeping with his image as a straight-talking soldier of the new 'perestroika generation'. Gromov went on to be one of the relatively few senior officers elected rather than nominated to a seat in the Congress of People's Deputies, and his first public pronouncements seemed spotlessly centrist and reformist, comfortable with the idea of a reunified Germany and underlining the army's role in defending the country against external enemies, not internal disorder. The general with the reformist's heart, he seemed to appeal to every side, with his name being mentioned as a likely conservative plotter one week, and then floated as the potential Defence Minister of a liberal coalition government the next. Nevertheless, 1990 saw an increasing hardening in his position, not least due to the influence of General Valentin Varennikov and other military comrades. In Afghanistan, Varennikov - as head of the

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General Staff Main Operations Directorate -had been the grandmaster behind the endgame. Gromov had been his operational commander, translating Varennikov's broad strategy into concrete plans, as well as his front man. The question of how far Gromov was psychologically prepared to cut his ties with Varennikov makes for fruitful (if impossible to resolve) speculation. By the end of 1990 he had moved into alliance with the hard-liners, and his appointment as First Deputy Interior Minister in December reflected their general ascendancy as Gorbachev, spirits dimmed by a hard winter and a series of gloomy economic and political indicators, made his short-lived 'winter alliance' with them. Gromov once again made the right noises, about the need for collaboration rather than coercion, but he presided over a steady militarisation of the police forces. Sometimes this was purely symbolic, even farcical, such as the joint army-militia patrols which were put onto the streets of major cities. Long, straggling crocodiles of bored conscripts and embarrassed policemen, often up to 30 strong, the main threat they posed criminals was that they would hurt themselves laughing at the notion that this was a credible initiative. But other moves were rather more sinister, from the expansion of the Opnaz security troops to the evolution of plans for the seizure of power. The final stage of his political career began in May 1991 when he agreed to stand alongside Nikolai Ryzhkov in a doomed bid in the Russian Republic's presidential elections. This represented what seemed a final declaration of allegiance, and was followed by his support for the conservative 'Word to the People' the open letter in Sovetskaya Rossiya that was, in effect, the manifesto for the August Coup. However, he managed to avoid the initial fallout from the coup, claiming to have been on holiday and that his signature had been appended to the letter without his knowledge, and despite the prominent role of the MVD's Interior Army in the putsch and his close links with so many of the plotters, he was exonerated, even cited as one of the generals who prevented the use of troops to storm Boris Yeltsin's 'White House'. This may indicate political skills not hitherto suspected but probably reflects a powerful protector. What seems most likely is that Rutskoi stepped in to shield his former comrade-in-arms, but at a price. Gromov was rehabilitated, but it was made clear to him that he should leave politics alone and stick to soldiering in the future. He was appointed deputy commander of the ground forces and then put in charge of the important but unrewarding task of extricating CIS forces from Nagorno-Karabakh. A career as 'retreater-in-chief' may be embarrassing and uncomfortable, but it is better than prison or public disgrace, and does now leave General Rutskoi with an extra ally and client within the high command.

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HOUNDSOFTHESTATE Listen, we have wonderful lads, those back from Afghanistan ... I appeal to them: help. You're brave lads. Help us in the end to break this situation of crime in the streets. Prime Minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov, 19904

This transition, from heavy-handed Soviet patriotism to national bolshevism, was by no means unique to Gromov. There were many other afgantsy who espoused the former, in particular. They were typically current or recent Komsomoltsy, often involved with military-patriotic education and frequently from the more elite, decorated and actioncentred services like the paratroopers, and their views were probably encapsulated by Sergei Chervonopiskii's slogan 'State Power, Statehood (derzhava), Communism' (and probably in that order). After all, even before the explosion of political participation from 1988, afganets involvement in certain bulwarks of the Party and its State had already been considerable. Much official press coverage was afforded men like Aleksandr Chernozhukov, Order of the Red Star, Hero of the Soviet Union, at the XXVII Party Congress, and a report in the youth magazine Sobesednik on the XX All-Union Komsomol Congress in 1987 chose to note that many of the delegates had served in Afghanistan. Indeed, that Congress was the first real showcase of political afgantsy, and many were exalted in the press, including Aleksandr Zverev (of whom more later), Hero of the Soviet Union Igor' Chmurov and Mikhail Volinets, a law student from L'vov who then went on to work in Nicaragua. The intertwined nature of Komsomol loyalties, VPV militarypatriotic work and afganets self-help is best illustrated by Aleksandr Kolodeznikov. One of the Young Communist League delegates to the first Congress of People's Deputies, Kolodeznikov was a career soldier invalided out after stepping on a mine in Afghanistan, who went to work with the Council of Reserve Soldiers in his home town of Yakutsk. Even while worried that VPV was being used to ghettoise and pacify the afgantsy ('play around with the lads, there is nothing else for you, you are not fit for anything else'), there he campaigned to develop their role in military-patriotic education, held fund-raising concerts with afganets groups and raised 100,000 rubles for his work. Many also served as volunteer druzhinniki, police auxiliaries, and at a time when the size of this body was declining, the authorities looked particularly at the afgantsy to bring it back up to strength. Perhaps more interesting, though, is the role of veterans in forming informal vigilante

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groups. In the aftermath of intercommunal violence and antigovernment unrest in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, in 1990, the deputy chairman of the Supreme Soviet Committee for SoldierInternationalists' Affairs flew there and helped organise local afgantsy (both Russian and Tajik) into 'self-defence groups' to 'help restore order'. Nor was this the only case. In Azerbaijan, following strikes and disorder in 1990, afgantsy were used to cordon off meetings and, after an agreement with the Azerbaijan Komsomol, were issued with uniforms and sent to 'prevent provocations', searching protesters for weapons and detaining 'agitators'. Dzhavad Ismailov, chair of the local afganets organisation, then organised veterans to lead the drift back to work. This reflected a wider strategy by hard-liners simultaneously to whip up tensions within the country (both to undermine reform as a 'force for anarchy' and in pursuit of the time-honoured goal of divide and rule) and build up their own vigilante forces. Along with the blue-collar workers of the loss-making heavy industries and the Russian expatriates in the republics, both clearly threatened by perestroika, they selected the afgantsy as a possible constituency. This was particularly favoured in the predominantly Russian, heavy industrial and mining region of the Eastern Ukraine, after the success of sustained and organised intimidation from afgantsy and 'workers' brigades' in forcing activists of the Christian Democratic Party and Democratic Ukrainian Left to flee Mariupol for L'vov. Given that, polled by Komsomol'skaya pravda, fully 10 per cent made the struggle against 'law-breakers' their primary goal, there were clearly afgantsy prepared to accept this role. Besides, the conservative local authorities were prepared to back ideological blandishments with hard cash.

GREEN TUNICS AND BROWN SHIRTS

But as late Soviet politics decayed, there were also those - both bureaucratic power-players and firm-bicepped veterans - who supported even more extreme manifestations of conservatism, wandering near or crossing over the border into Stalinism and neo-fascism. When Aleksandr Zverev from Karaganda came to Moscow to attend the XX Young Communist Congress, he was horrified by 'Muscovite degeneracy':

It is as though I had stepped into another world. Painted girls scampered about, ultrafashionable boys greeted the DJ's next announcement of a record by a group from 'over there' with blood-curdling screams. They hiss down our Soviet music.

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Speculators in the toilets ... We're stifling in this dirty little world. 5 It would be easy to dismiss such jeremiads out of hand, but the bulldozer driver from Karaganda raised questions about a young generation who had forgotten the grandeur of their national heritage, prostituting themselves to alien traditions, not necessarily of interest only to the lunatic fringe. If nothing else, such rampant consumerism was next to impossible outside the main centres, and resentment (at the better standard of living possible in the big cities, for example) has a way of turning envy into self-righteousness. When even Rutskoi could flirt with neo-fascism before becoming the champion for democracy, it is clear that the seeds of extremism were sown wide and deep within the afgantsy and late Soviet society as a whole, when all the values upon which society had been based had been shattered. A perfect example was Sergei Baburin, a professor of law at Leningrad State University and Russian Supreme Soviet deputy. While a member of the Party, he had by 1991 rejected much that was Marxist, as well as the 'extremism' of the Bolsheviks in destroying 'the traditions of a thousand-year old state' and pan-slavic culture. Baburin was a nationalist of the conservative Russkii tradition and a favourite of the extremist military newspaper Syn Otechestva ('Son of the Fatherland'). He was in so many ways typical of his time, a talentless political animal leaping from one bandwagon to another. In a hagiographic interview, Syn Otechestva pondered why people like Baburin were slighted and ignored by the liberal press - perhaps it was because I, at least, was unable to find a single noteworthy achievement or effective speech to his name. Baburin was involved, at arm's length, with the founding of the Otchizna ('Homeland') society in Leningrad, uniting unreconstructed local apparatchiki and Stalinists, afgantsy, conservative naval officers from the Baltic Military District and the maverick nationalist journalist Aleksandr Nevzorov in loose alliance. After all, this is a natural, if disagreeable, by-product of war. Consider the following sentiments:

Not in an institute. It had to result from the artificial attitudes of a life in war: dumping all the questions, reducing everything to the very kernel ... [There are] two currents: in the first is a spirit of conservatism, desperately clinging to memories and an absolute, immutable projection towards the past, without hope of changing it; in the second is the elegant fountain of life, the systematic destruction of nostalgia and a fierce, unstoppable drive towards tomorrow, general futurism.

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The great majority of soldiers belong to the first category. Most supported the war. They sacrificed themselves without a spark of enthusiasm [and] . .. return to take up their old positions. They don't try to renew themselves, rather, at every sitting they reconstitute themselves around the past, the same men, the same ideas, the same interests. 6 This could so easily have come from the ponderous and overblown manifestos of a dozen national Bolshevik groups and societies, movements which felt that Russia was still in decay, and that from the flames of war a new Russian patriot could at last be born. In fact, they are the words of Giuseppe Bottai, the Italian futurist and fascist, dating from 1919, and they underline the interesting parallel between some of the afgantsy and the Italian Arditi (literally, the 'Ardent'). The Arditi were Italian commandos in the First World War, well-trained and -provided for, who were kept behind the lines and then deployed in unconventional, vital and often downright suicidal missions. Their experience, of brief flurries of high-tempo, death-or-glory action, without the dispiriting drudgery of day-to-day army life- the drill, the bull, the misery of enduring shelling in the rain- created a distinctive pattern. War could still be romanticised, indeed, it had to be, to give them the necessary stimulus to overachieve and hence survive in each engagement. This inclined them towards activist and violent answers to every problem. Returning to civilian life, stripped of their special privileges, neither trained nor adapted to their new environment, they proved eager recruits for all sorts of extremist groups, including Mussolini's Fasce di combattimento. The parallels with the elite soldiers of a modern counter-insurgency war, kept in safe and well-stocked barracks before it is time to board the carrier or helicopter for an hour, day or week or battle and then back to the barracks while the infantry dig in and hold the line, are clear.

AFGANTSY OFF THE NATIONAL STAGE

Yet while it is important to look at the involvement of veterans of Afghanistan in the politics of the national stage, it is at the local level that much activity was focused, and, ultimately, the vitality of local politics was one of the rocks upon which the August Coup foundered. Local politics operate under different conditions and with different expectations, not least the closer relations between leaders and led. This is the level at which things actually get done, at which many resources are acquired and distributed, the politics of the doorstep which, while less prestigious than national politics, is arguably much more important

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and immediate in its impact on people's daily lives, and hence it is interesting to note that afgantsy do not seem to have been as heavily involved on this level. With the exception of Valerii Ryumin of Ryazan', afganets participation in local politics was minimal, and where veterans did campaign they did so without emphasizing their Afghan experience either in their platforms or in their subsequent actions. It is as if on the more intimate canvas of local politics the 'otherness' of being an afganets was less comfortable, less forgivable in a candidate. Ryumin was, after all, an exception to so many rules. A paratrooper and a political officer, at 28 the youngest regimental political commander since the Second World War and having served with distinction in Afghanistan, he epitomised in so many ways the agitprop poster cutout of the zampolit, the political officer. In 1987, though, he made the mistake of taking glasnost' at face value and criticised certain mistakes made by the central leadership. Thus began an escalating feud with the local Party and military authorities, culminating in a whole array of dirty tricks being used to prevent him winning elections to the USSR Congress of People's Deputies, including sending in the police to break up his meetings and having him arrested just before the ballot on trumped-up charges of financial irregularities. A reformist Communist and supporter of the 'Democratic Platform', he eventually won a seat in the Russian Federation Congress of People's Deputies and, in 1990, was elected to the post of mayor of Ryazan', where he made a name for himself for his innovative responses to the perennial problems of housing and food supplies. As importantly, it was Ryumin, with the paratrooper training school in his town and with all his contacts and supporters still within the service, who raised the alarm when airborne troops were sent to Moscow in September 1990. This turned out to be nothing more than a dress rehearsal, but in proving that military movements could not be kept secret, Ryumin managed to limit severely the plotters' room for manoeuvre in August 1991. When they made their bid for power, they had to rely on forces already in place, and these forces too often proved unable or unwilling to enforce the junta's writ. NATIONALISTS AGAINST THE EMPIRE

But it must be repeated that Ryumin was an exceptional afganets in every sense of the word. Perhaps it was the prosaic, practical nature of local politics that failed to appeal to the afgantsy? Certainly it has to be said that the only sort of local politics for which they showed any real enthusiasm was that of those republics where it was tantamount to guerrilla warfare or warlordism, including parts of Georgia, Armenia

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and Azerbaijan. More generally, it is necessary at least to note the role of afgantsy in nationalist movements outside Russia. For while General Gromov, rather patronisingly, claimed that veterans were falling under the sway of 'criminals' because the state had not moved quickly enough to co-opt them for itself, others have noted that at least nationalism provided a cause and some ideals to which they could pledge allegiance. Besides filling an emotional need, it also offered some meaningful employment for which their skills counted for something, and in which they could feel their experiences were an asset rather than a stigma - all powerful arguments to those veterans who had never managed to find a stable niche for themselves in civilian life. Despite reports throughout the 1980s that Afghanistan had alienated the Islamic peoples of the USSR, on the whole they proved among the most quiescent. The exception was, of course, Azerbaijan, and in the course of the Armenian-Azeri war over Nagorno-Karabakh, afgantsy were heavily represented among the guerrilla bands of both sides. In the Baltic states, afgantsy began to become a political force specifically as afgantsy when relations with Moscow soured and military force became an active element in the equation. In Lithuania, for example, veterans joined defenders of the parliament building in early 1991, after Soviet troops and OMON riot police stormed key buildings in the capital, Vilnius. Other groups graduated from symbolic destruction of their medals to training young volunteers in rough-and-ready urban combat skills. The Lithuanian Union of Veterans of the War in Afghanistan contacted the USSR Supreme Soviet Committee for Soldier-Internationalists' Affairs to warn that any further attacks would meet an 'armed rebuff'. Even in the Ukraine, as armed force became a political issue, the afgantsy began to acquire a new role. With the first moves to create a Ukrainian Army, afgantsy were singled out both as a vital source of recruits and an active constituency of support for the idea. A MIXED BLESSING

The experiences of the August Coup showed just how little political unity and weight one can ascribe to the afgantsy as a whole. Afganets Varennikov induced the afganets Colonel General Shatalin to deploy his (disproportionately afganets) MVD troops to seize power. Afganets Rutskoi stood against them, with the support of afgantsy in the major cities. Indeed, one of the three defenders of the Russian parliament who died, Dmitrii Komar, was himself an afganets and Captain Nenashev, one of the leaders of the volunteer defenders, singled out the way the 'veterans set an example of courage to all the others amidst the burning

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vehicles and roaring tanks.' Yet what did most afgantsy do? Kept their heads down, like everyone else. Afganets politicians, like Rutskoi, Ryumin, even Gromov, rose thanks to the war, which provided glory, machismo, media profile. Yet they managed to sustain their rise by not just confining themselves to afganets issues; indeed, one would be tempted to say, by making it very clear that their loyalties and interests were far wider. To retain identification with the afgantsy was to court marginalisation and hence impotence. The strength of veterans has always been either moral- the victims of a just and victorious war - or military. With the fractured communities and ideologies left by the collapsing USSR around which no Freikorps or Soviet OAS could yet cohere, they found themselves in a political environment in which they could not exert any real authority and hence within which they could expect no favours. NOTES 1. Afghanistan: One Year After (1990), p.39. 2. Supreme Soviet deputy Col. Valerii Ochirov, in V. Cherkasov, 'Peoples' Deputy Valery Ochirov', Soviet Soldier (April 1990). 3. I. Chernyak, 'Ne khochu !gat' izbiratelyami', Komsomol'skaya pravda (13 May 1989). 4. Interview on Soviet TV, 5 Oct. 1990 in BBC Summary of World Broadcasts (8 Oct. 1990). 5. A. Zverev, 'Opalennaya sovest", Sobesednik 17.87. 6. G. Bottai, 'Combattenti', Roma Futurista (20 July 1919).

8

The War and Politics: Impact

We thought that we were civilising a backward country by exposing it to television, to modern bombers, to schools, to the latest models of tanks, to books, to long-range artillery, to newspapers, to new types of weapons, to economic aid, to AK-47s. But we rarely stopped to think how Afghanistan would influence us. Artem Borovik, war reporter1

The war's impact on Afghanistan was as obvious as it was horrifying, a land littered with burnt-out hulks of tanks and unexploded mines, a nation half refugee abroad. The impact on the USSR and Russia is harder to quantify, but beyond the relative handful of war-wounded and bereaved, the question inevitably arises as to the extent to which the war influenced the politics of the 1980s, the rise of the Andropovian and then Gorbachevian approaches to reform, the flowering of perestroika and the withering of the whole Soviet system. Did Afghanistan feed into, even trigger, these changes, or was it overshadowed by grander or more pressing concerns, from the fragmentation of the elite to hunger in the cities? Of course, in part, this entails analysing Soviet public opinion, a fraught and inaccurate affair. Decades, centuries of absolutism bred a characteristic disinclination to air in public any views deviating from orthodoxy, a familiarity with 'doublespeak' that could almost be called habit. Yet politics is not primarily the preserve of the masses, and the true power constituency, the elite of the nomenklatura, was an even more unfathomable quantity. Nevertheless, one can pick out strands of opinion, map the contours of the debate and begin to divine the role of Afghanistan in their thinking, and their ultimate paralysis and collapse, what Lenin had called that final 'critical absence of will' that ultimately dooms any system. First, then, let us consider the extent to which the war - real or mythological - became a political issue, as a prelude to consideration of the consequences it was to have.

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THE INTERVENTION AND PROTESTS OF THE INTELLIGENTSIA

Initially, public protest was confined to small groups with experience in decoding and exposing the state's doublespeak, the motivation publicly to criticise the invasion and a constituency which would appreciate such defiance. In other words, these were Westernised dissidents from the intelligentsia in the large cities, playing to fellow dissidents from the intelligentsia and to the foreign media, and nationalists eager to draw parallels between the occupation of Afghanistan and Soviet control over their own lands. Andrei Sakharov's overt opposition - in an open letter to Leonid Brezhnev and the heads of state of the other UN permanent Security Council members, and his acceptance speech for the Sziland Award- was generally regarded as a key factor behind his internal exile to Gor'kii. Two Leningrad feminists, Tat'yana Goricheva and Natalia Malachuskaya, were expelled from the USSR in summer 1980 for appealing to conscripts to go to prison rather than Afghanistan. Where Leningrad's feminist Mariya club was framing its protests as a response to masculine belligerence, others were using the language of nationalism. The Lithuanian samizdat journal Ausra stressed common suffering ('Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians. Under oppression themselves, they must obey the brutal orders of Russian officers and shed both their own and Afghan blood'). There seems little to suggest similar concerns in Central Asia, though; when Lezghin writer Iskander Kaziev criticised the war, it was as simple aggression. In this, and in highlighting the treatment of Andrei Sakharov in response to his critique of the intervention, Kaziev's tone and concerns were those of a member of the dissenting Soviet intelligentsia, not a Daghestani nationalist. A similar case is that of the Crimean Tatar Mustafa Dzhemilev. Although he claimed to be affronted by the war as a Moslem, when asked at his trial what possible connection there was between events in Afghanistan and the Crimean Tatars, he confined his critique to the fact that Crimean Tatars were dying in Afghanistan hardly a rolling declaration of Islamic solidarity. Perhaps the most bizarre incident came on 18 May 1983, when a news announcer on Radio Moscow's World Service spoke of Afghan tribal leaders gathering to call on their compatriots 'not to lay down their arms' and 'to fight against the Soviet invasion'. Yet in the early years, resistance was largely confined to those relatively small circles either already ideologically opposed to the regime, or with the connections to penetrate the secrecy surrounding the war and get at the real facts: the deaths, the incompetence, the underlying miscalculation upon which the whole intervention had been based.

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Before genuine liberalisation of the press and the first (albeit often amateurish) genuine public polls, the best single source of quantitative opinion analysis was Radio Liberty-Radio Free Europe's SAAOR (Soviet Area Audience and Opinion Research), and a general survey in 1985 revealed the nature of public attitudes to, and even awareness of, the war. Broadly speaking, the survey concluded that a quarter of the adult urban population actively approved of Soviet policies in Afghanistan, while a quarter disapproved. Yet, as the survey admitted, it is hard to be overconfident about its accuracy. The poll surveyed Soviet visitors to the West, predominantly educated, urban males, aged between 30 and 49, Party members and inhabitants of the European USSR. Their presence in the West was also a token not necessarily of their loyalty, but of their membership of the charmed circles able to procure such access. In addition, some 10 per cent of the sample refused to take part in the survey, and it is likely that a fair proportion of these would be the die-hard loyalists, unprepared to co-operate with Radio Liberty. Although the results were then processed through a computer simulation designed to correct for such weightings and model the opinions of the broader urban population, it is difficult to be too confident about the results. Besides which, the cities accounted for only two-thirds of the total population, invariably the more politically advanced and least conservative segment. While there may have been little active support for what seemed to most Soviets to be a trivial operation in an unknown backwater, evidence of general disenchantment is markedly lacking. THE WAR AND GLASNOST'

I first began to doubt our press during the Afghan war. Most of our officers had the same experience. Our people were being killed and wounded, yet the newspapers said we were not taking part in combat . . . It was impossible to explain to the soldiers why we were there. Colonel Valerii Ryumin, afganets2

I remember I came back from a battle one day. It was a hard battle, with much bloodshed . . . That evening, I read the newspaper reporting how we and Afghans planted trees together as happy friends. There was not a single word about the war. I felt deeply offended. Captain Aleksandr Lukyanets, afganets 3

Yet, as discussed earlier, this was to change, and public awareness of the war that its nation was fighting and the more general process of glasnost' developed together. While it is going too far to say that the war gave

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birth to glasnost', it is certainly true that it doomed attempts to fabricate the truth on a constant and massive scale. The media coverage of and around the intervention was almost a textbook case of Brezhnevian politics, a characteristic blend of shameless duplicity and a naive confidence in the ability of the propaganda machine to manufacture public opinion. Public opinion reflected the decline of public ignorance, thanks to the domestic media rather than foreign broadcasts. Under Brezhnev, there was no fighting: happy soldiers were distributing bread and medicines to a grateful Afghan populace. Under Andropov, there was some fighting, invariably the result of perfidious bandit attacks on Soviet soldiers on manoeuvres, and always concluded by a devastating, though measured Soviet riposte. Much the same is true of the brief Chernenko interlude, despite the fact that he was the only Soviet leader apparently genuinely to try to win the war by military means, primarily massive conventional assaults and extensive carpet bombing. Nevertheless, it was during Chernenko's tenure that the first glimmers of truth began to penetrate the blanket of censorship, with Inna Rudenko's harrowing article 'Dolg' in the newspaper Komsomol'skaya pravda. The official line under Gorbachev was more interesting, and it provides an effective case-study of the evolution of glasnost'. After 'Dolg', articles bewailing the lot of injured and alienated veterans on their return home became commonplace. This was part of the early bid to use the media to pressure the local bureaucracy to tackle local issues and also to bypass the clogged and distorting official information channels upon which the leadership had relied. It is easy to fall back on conspiracy theory when trying to analyse the Soviet Union, but without pretending that there were dark plots afoot, it is clear that there were several different agendas in play during the glasnost' era. The cultural intelligenty were eager to break into the taboo regions. For them, discussion of Afghanistan could be ranked alongside such issues as the exposure of Stalin's crimes in Abuladze's film 'Repentance' (1984) and Rybakov's book Children of the Arbat (1988) or of Central Asian corruption and drug abuse in the turgid film 'Needle' (1989) or of working-class poverty and promiscuity in Pinchul's 'Little Vera' (1988). Rather than having a weight and importance distinctly its own, it was shocking, it was new and hence it was good. As ever, Yevgeny Yevtushenko was the fickle bellwether ofthe new mood, using an afganets in his poem 'Koldunchik' ('Sorceror's Apprentice') as the murderer who kills a woman schoolteacher. There seems no real reason why it should be an afganets, beyond that the effete and selfconsciously radical intelligentsia, eager to be seen as independent, indeed rebellious, picked on the afgantsy for the simple reason that they

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were at the time being feted by the conservative state propagandists. The fact that this meant that they were still dominated by the conservatives' agenda, locked in a rather sterile mirror-image appears neither to have occurred to nor bothered them. Meanwhile, Gorbachev and the liberal, political intelligentsia sought to use the war as one more political weapon. At first, Gorbachev had followed the policy of his mentor, Andropov, trying to repair rather than reform the-existing system. In due course, though, he began trying to build a self-sustaining and more grass-roots process of change. Coverage of Afghanistan also began to evolve and after Gorbachev called the war 'a bleeding wound' at the XXVII Party Congress in February 1986, the press increasingly began to test its new freedoms, and in doing so became ever more heterogeneous. The magazine Ogonek, always eager to present itself as avant-garde, pulled off something of a coup when the well-connected young journalist Artem Borovik began filing stories from the war which combined a populist and effective mix of gritty war-talk, derring-do and sentimentalism. Afghanistan also began to appear on both television and the wide screen, with the Ukrainian film Rana ('The Wound') in 1988 and other documentary films. Articles and news reports began to broach such sensitive issues as draft-dodging, drug abuse and even the cost of the war, just as the press was pushing back the bounds of glasnost' in its wider context. The regime did nothing to hinder this spread, eager to see its intelligentsia allies manufacture a public opinion which would support withdrawal from the war and a broader assault on the militaryindustrial complex and, by extension, the high-spending practices that kept the USSR a global nuclear superpower. The irony was that while sometimes glasnost' was held back by inflexibility and timidity, conservative journals and outlets were also able to make use of their new freedoms to fall back into the old ways. The military press continued to focus on US involvement in Afghanistan, or the need for ideological rectitude or Soviet heroism, while critical accounts, like Aleksievich's Tsinkovye mal'chiki (Zinky Boys) were pilloried. The growing power struggle within the regime and the collapse of the reformist coalition was reflected in their continuing, but erratic use of the censorship weapon. When a commentary by the respected analyst Aleksandr Bovin was cut from a TV broadcast, it was then printed in full in the radical newspaper Argumenty i fakty, apparently with Gorbachev's support, whereas when the TV news programme Vzglyad was about to interview Andrei Sakharov over the war in October 1989, it was taken from the air. The public presentation of Afghanistan thus became another bone of contention between reformists and conservatives.

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The final stage, from perhaps late 1988, saw two additional factorsagendas- come into play. Firstly, the rise of the veterans' own press, with newspapers like Pobratim (the official organ of the SVA, first published in 1989), Leningrad's K sovesti (founded in 1990) and Orenburg's Kontingent (founded in 1989). Second, the beginning of the witch-hunts, as representatives of the old information order began to be called to account for their participation in the propaganda of the past. Mikhail Leshchinskii, state radio's main correspondent in Afghanistan, was the first to receive concerted criticism, both for his early silence and then for alleged distortions, as unproven but persistent rumours suggested that he would get soldiers to fire in the air while recording to give the illusion of on-the-spot war reporting. AFGAN'S PENETRATION OF THE CULTURAL SPACE

Another way in which the war began to impinge upon the consciousness of wider circles was that the art and literature issuing from it began to emerge into wider fora, although they did remain largely ghettoised, symbolic of afganets alienation from the mainstream rather than a contribution to the new, glasnost' -and-beyond culture. Although the photographs of afganets Gennadii Zhivotov were exhibited in the offices of the magazine Yunost' in 1989, for example, in most cases the veterans themselves had to push their art to wider audiences. Perhaps the most striking case was the Neponyatnaya voina ('Incomprehensible War') exhibition held in central Moscow's Exhibition Hall Number One, from July 1991. Organised by the All-Union Veterans' and Invalids' Association and the Moscow SVA, it brought together paintings, sketches, songs and photographs of the war (including some very effective and hard-hitting photomontages), as well as memorials to the dead, vehicles and equipment of the conflict and a video presentation. This was, however, by no means unique, and the afgantsy showed an increasing desire to bring their experiences, mediated through art and music, to a wider audience. Veterans' groups in Leningrad, for example, hosted two exhibitions in Autumn 1991, one showing the paintings of Dmitrii Grishin, the other the photographs of Aleksei Karatetskii. Eager to photograph the war, Karatetskii went there in 1987 as a volunteer boiler stoker and his stark and striking pictures of the war had already reached a military audience in the pages of the military magazine Sovetskii voin (Soviet Warrior). On a purely anecdotal note, I saw a display of paintings in central Moscow in July 1991 which were scathingly satirical and whose themes and in-jokes made it clear that they were intended for a Soviet rather than foreign tourist market.

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Some dealt explicitly with Afghanistan, presenting Brezhnev, Ustinov and Suslov as three bogatyri, mythical heroes, riding their chargers into Afghanistan over zinc coffins and fallen weapons; the crowd of spectators was sizeable and appreciative. Nevertheless, such events were rare and usually smaller in scale and hence self-limiting: the only people who got to hear about them were those already interested. Hence three other media were important: the written word, music, and television and film. FROM SUPPRESSION TO CO-OPTATION TO LIBERATION: LITERATURE OF THE WAR

Apart from news accounts in the press, most of the written pieces on the war or its consequences were in military journals or those written for an affiliated audience, particularly by Aleksandr Prokhanov. Nicknamed the 'Nightingale of the General Staff' for his devotion to the military, he produced a steady stream of books and articles, from his Derevo v tsentre Kabula (A Tree in the Centre of Kabul) in 1982, through to his short stories such as 'Gory' ('Mountains') and 'Domoi!' ('Home!'). Although his point of view evolved through the 1980s, his work was generally suffused with a gung-ho and sentimental militarism and an uncritical and imperialistic acceptance of the 'burden of internationalism' that also earned him the title 'the Soviet Kipling'. Prokhanov's heyday, 1980-86, was one he shared with relatively few other writers on the war. Few books dealt with it, and many of those that did - such as Dynin's Zvezdy podviga (Stars of the Exploit, 1985) and Ovsyannikov and Solov'ev's Vypolnyaya internatsional'nyi dolg (Fulfilling an Internationalist Duty, 1986)- were just anthologies of press articles. After his early successes with the establishment- Lenin Komsomol prize-winner, secretary of the Russian Writers' Union, delegate to the XXVII Party Congress - Prokhanov and his views ran into resistance from within the artistic intelligentsia from 1986, on the grounds of the essentially identikit nature of his characters and prose-style and lack of compositional unity and originality; criticism which seems wholly justified. This circle of 'Afghanists' remained quite small and although the militarypatriotic propaganda machine cranked on, devoting an entire issue of the 'military-literature journal' Podvig ('Exploit') to Afghanistan, and an All-Union seminar in December 1989, the real growth came in documentation of the veterans' own views and experiences. While stories like Verstakov's 'Afganskii dnevnik' ('Afghan Diary'), Sviridov's 'Prizraki v gorakh' ('Ghosts in the Mountains') and Dyshev's 'Synok' ('Sonny') kept the old cliches rolling, and the military publishers Voenizdat promised a whole cycle of memoirs presumably to rival its Great Patriotic War cycle for anodyne indigestibility, works began to

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appear which presented the war in a more complex, critical and credible light. In some ways it is striking that 'Afghan literature' took so long to emancipate itself from the old stereotypes, given that as early as 1987 Yunost' had published Yurii Polyakov's sobering 'Hundred Days to the Order' about bullying in the ranks. By 1989, there were signs of change with the rise of Oleg Ermakov, the first of the new 'veterans' generation' to acquire real artistic standing, and even Prokhanov's later Tretii tost (The Third Toast, 1991) was nodding towards greater honesty. None the less, these were but isolated signs, and this may reflect the fact that the war was still seen as too sensitive, or that there was perhaps a lack of ability or desire to produce work meeting the standards and expectations of the literary magazines. Sergei Zalygin, energetic and reformist editor of the literary journal Novyi mir (New World), which published Ermakov, certainly claimed that he was keen to give prominence to afganets writing - but that usually it was too personal or just not good enough. Much of the real veterans' writing was thus first published in the afganets press: stories which were steeped in truth and hence did not always sit comfortably with the consensual myth were kept out of the mainstream and left in the ghetto. THE MUSIC OF THE WAR

Although in some cases music was used to protest against the war, especially when blended with nationalism, as by the Latvian vocal group Zvaigznite, it also became used as part of the regime's attempt to revive patriotic and martial sentiments amongst its disaffected youth, an attempt which, as with literature and glasnost' as a whole, went beyond its control. Whereas in the early 1980s even such stalwarts of the order as the Golubye gitary ('Blue Guitars'), a pop group drawn from the paratroopers, had been censured for the 'roar and rattle from highpowered electronic devices, which assaulted the listeners and which, for some unknown reason, was called music', more flexible conservatives were soon to see such 'muscular rock' as a useful weapon in their own, increasingly desperate struggle to maintain some legitimacy with Soviet youth. Its roots were in the growing disaffection of the poor workingclass youth of the industrial towns - the very cohort most heavily represented in Afghanistan. These self-proclaimed 'Optimists' and 'New Intelligentsia' looked to the martial images and experiences of war and self-sacrifice to find some surrogate ideology which would legitimise their gut instincts: to vilify, ostracise or mug their haileifisty ('high livers') and khippy ('hippy') bugbears. Other soldiers' groups, especially the paratroopers' Golubye

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berety ('Blue Berets') and individual balladeer-songwriters began to move away from the sterile conventions of 'military-patriotic music' and tune into the powerful vein of music coming from the war itself. Here in the mountains we have only one law, To stab and to slash the Afghan tramps. And if your chest doesn't catch a fragment of lead, It'll most likely catch a medal, instead. The story of this music opens, like so many aspects of the war, a revealing window into the decay of the Soviet Union. In early years of the war, the songs, with their emphasis on fallen friends and vicious fighting, were seen as subversive of the official line and attempts were made to suppress them, replace them with sanitised variants and old Great Patriotic War chestnuts. The first real underground 'star' was Lieutenant Aleksandr I. Stovba, nicknamed 'Aist' ('Crane') after his initials, who died in the war and whose lyrics spread throughout the OKSV and beyond. Regardless of the fact that the real war was waiting just outside the camp-fire's ring of light, just on the other side of the wire fence, and despite the fact that they, themselves, would sing them in their messes, the officers and political deputies would confiscate the handwritten songbooks and ban the tunes. By 1984, though, the authorities were beginning to accept that it was better to co-opt rather than try to suppress this music, not least given the way that, in their Slavonic sentimentalism, they also embodied themes not wholly out of sympathy with the official line: racism, pride in the Russian or Soviet soldier, machismo, patriotism. In a case of life imitating art - the Vietnam film Apocalypse Now, to be precise - one paratroop commander would even have such songs played over heavy-duty speakers as his battalion attacked. By 1986, a trickle of songs and poems (the Russian ballad tradition kept the two very closely affiliated) from the war was threatening to become a flood, as the military-patriotic propaganda machine enthusiastically tapped this new resource:

Gulbuddin's [a rebel commander] dog has A Chinese rifle, An English machine-gun, A Pakistani knife, An American leash, But he'll die a dog's death, all the same! Such soldier-internationalists groups as Kaskad ('Cascade'), originally formed within a combat unit in 1980, began to find their constituency, one made up not just of afgantsy but other present and former soldiers, adolescents hooked on the presumed mystique and

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heroism of soldiering and the like. Yet even as the military publishing house Voenizdat prepared its collection Vremya vybralo nas (The Times Chose Us) and a record was being compiled on the Melodiya label, the authorities found themselves unable to assume or retain real control over this musical phenomenon, since it sprang from experiences and emotions similarly beyond their ken:

We brought the war back with us To the side streets of home And our peaceful strolls. Now watchfully, now loudly Shattering the silence with our echo. We came back to the Old World Still in the prime of our best years . .. We left the troop carriers in the mountains, Yet our fiery convictions Will have to be our armour. Afganets music attained maturity in the later 1980s, drawing on a variety of distinctive images. The mountains became stark, beautiful, brooding, dangerous symbols for the war, often characterised as a struggle against natural forces, such as in Igor' Morozov's imaginary dialogue which opens:

Goodbye, great mountains, you know best What price for everything we paid, What enemy escaped his fate, What friends amongst these rocks we lost. The other main image was of the Black Tulips, the aircraft that brought the dead back to the USSR:

In the Black Tulip, in Afghanistan, Vodka in the glass, we sail silently Over the earth. Across the border the sad bird To Russian summer lightning Brings the kids back home. The useful distinction has been made that this was not professional poetry but professional folklore. The poems and songs of the afgantsy were often crude, simple, even derivative. But they boasted a purity and a vigour that could cut through the often over-stylised and -mannered cultural mainstream and begin to attract a wider audience than soldiers

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and their ideological camp-followers. Proof lies in the success of the 1990 All-Russian and All-Union Songs of the Afghan War Festivals in Yaroslavl' and Alma-Ata, respectively, and the 'Aist' studio's mail order cassette business, which within six months of opening had assembled 13 collections of afganets music, and had sold more than 8,000 cassettes, most, but not all, to veterans, their friends or their families. For the veterans they represented a form of self-medication, a safe way of expressing, externalising and purging their experiences that, in the form of informal singalongs and pop concerts, could also be communal. For others they could be a way into their closed and uncommunicative heads, offering some hope of understanding their lives. For yet others, they were the source of vicarious excitement or an infusion of primitive vitality into Russian culture. AFGHANISTAN- THE MOTION PICTURE

Soviet film and television, as it began to free itself from the deadening conventions of Brezhnevism, became increasingly racy. An unlikely combination of reformists eager to make new, 'Western', audiencegrabbing works and flexible conservatives, looking for new, more effective lures, led to an explosion in film-making. Documentary (or drama-doc) films such as Rana ('The Wound', 1988), Vozvrashchenie ('Return', 1988) or Bot ('Pain', 1988) were, as their titles suggest.. , striking and harrowing, but scarcely mass-market. A Franco-Russian collaboration, Dorogie moi ('My Dears', 1989) tried to bridge the gap, drawing on the letters home of fallen soldiers, but this was still hardly the stuff of box office smash hits. The 1991 film Afganets was cast in the same mould, described by one critic as 'a harsh and burning document about events, participants and eyewitnesses of Afghanistan who are themselves the protagonists of the film'. The film Solitary Voyage (1986), while not set in Afghanistan, heralded a new wave, as a lean, mean Soviet commando foiled CIA plots in pyrotechnic gunplay and well-choreographed violence. The stage was set for Afghan war movies, but this was a sensitive subject, and many film makers were disinclined to get involved with anything less sober than a drama-documentary. There had been calls for films about the war as early as the 1987 Komsomol Congress, and afterwards director Elim Klimov said that scripts and scenarios were under consideration, but the first real example of the breed was Afganskii izlom ('Afghan Fracture'), a Soviet-Italian joint venture issued in 1991. The Italian actor Michele Placido (who had starred in the Italian series Octopus- Power of the Mafia, a roaring success with Soviet audiences, not least given the parallels with their own country), played Major

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Bandura, a Soviet soldier capable of great bravery and yet also the anguished witness of a terrible, pointless war. Perhaps it was more indicative of the increasing assimilation of the veterans into the cultural mainstream, though, that they began to crop up not as central figures but as cameos, such as the protagonist's estranged friend in 'The Messenger Boy' and the afgantsy in Yuris Podnieks' acclaimed Leg'ko byt' molodoi? ('Is it Easy to be Young?', 1987). In other words, they were not there as the focus or tokens, but as part of the everyday social scenery. PUBLIC ATTITUDES It is clear that there was a steady evolution of public opm10n, in

response both to the rising toll and spread of the war (as more and more young men went off to fight and die in Afghanistan) and the growing independence and assertiveness of the intelligentsia in the media and the arts. In addition, as the increased opportunities of democratisation brought veterans such as Ryumin and Rutskoi into politics, so too did they bring a greater awareness of the war. Successive SAAOR surveys, for all their weaknesses as 'spot' indicators of opinion, are excellent gauges of the changes in public attitudes brought about by the interconnected growth of glasnost' and first-hand knowledge of the war. By 1987, they were registering an increasing polarisation of their sample, with the proportion of active supporters and critics both rising at the expense of the middle ground. In 1984, half had no clear attitude to the war; by 1987, this had fallen to less than a third. As the Soviet Union committed itself to withdraw from Afghanistan, the same year saw the supporters' camp crumble. The projected proportion of urban adults opposing the war had risen from a quarter in 1985, to a third at the beginning of 1987 and almost half by its end. Whatever else one may draw from this polarisation of opinion, it reflected the growing part that the war was playing in citizens' political consciousness. When they did not know or think much about it, respondents would have been far more likely to react with mild approval or discontent or have no opinion at all: this rise in definite responses charts the spread of conscious opinion about the war. The public's perception of the soldiers who fought the war, although this is a side-line, is one worth pursuing before trying to draw some conclusions. As has been detailed elsewhere, many veterans sank or thrived depending on the reception they received. Nor was this purely important as regards the treatment of the veterans. Attitudes to the soldiers were an aspect of the wider issue of how the public came to terms with the war and the associated pain, shame, pride or anger. A

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poll conducted for Komsomol'skaya pravda revealed the lack of public consensus on everything beyond the fact that the veterans had a 'wounded soul' (54 per cent), with small minorities seeing change for the better (16 per cent thought that the afgantsy had become 'brave and stout-hearted') or worse (5 per cent felt that they were 'indifferent and cynical', 11 per cent 'cruel and violent'). The political and military authorities, of course, sought to make the veterans heroes once the war had become an admitted fact, both to legitimise their actions and to counteract the negative rumours of the grapevine. This also acted to raise the war's profile and bring it closer to the centre of debate and opinion. True to form, the propaganda machine picked over the bodies of the dead to cobble together new heroes, Frankenstein's afgantsy. The first was a Turkman, Khodzhanepes Charyev, a Komsomolets, in 1982; in the words of Turkmen Party First Secretary Mukhamednazar Gapurov, an 'eternal symbol of fidelity' and 'example of unfading heroism', clearly carefully chosen to defuse potential nationalist concern at this 'non-war'. Yet it was with glasnost' (or at least the 'proto-glasnost" of the Chernenko era) that there was a clear attempt to co-opt them as model citizens of a reforming USSR and use their presumed (if often illusory) glamour to support the reform programme - a classic example of the way that the manipulations of the elite influenced the presentation of the war, for seemingly unrelated reasons. Gorbachev himself called for veterans to set a moral example to Soviet youth, while new (conveniently posthumous) icons of martial Soviet youth began to be manufactured: Nikolai Chepik, who killed himself and thirty rebels with his last grenade, the similarly martyred Nikolai Anfinogenov, Aleksandr Koryavin, who saved his commander by taking the bullet meant for him, Valerii Neisapov, killed taking supplies to a village, the list grew and grew. Later, the expansion of the list would acquire a new drive, in the attempt to exalt 'internationalist' Soviet youth over narrow, sectarian nationalism. I would very much like to get to know a young man who went through service in Afghanistan ... even if he is an invalid! I cannot read or listen to a broadcast about Afghanistan without tears. It seems to me that these lads would never let you down. Oksana, 17, letter to Krasnaya zvezda

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Who are the afgantsy? Soldiers who have fought in Afghanistan, with guns and hands. What sort of people are they?

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-

Rambo! Is that good? Of course. Would you like to be like that? Yes. Conversation with Moscow teenager, 1991

Of course, one should not be too cynical about such campaigns and the soldiers themselves. Young Oksana and the spotty fan of Sylvester Stallone shared a preparedness to accept the heroic image broadcast by the state media, the afganets as a figure both manly and sensitive. Yet, in part as a result of the overkill of state propaganda and the desire to reject the old order and all it stood for, there was certainly a considerable element of scapegoating: after all, to blame the hapless soldiers fighting a 'bad war' is as time-honoured a tradition as killing the bringer of bad tidings and fulfils a similar role of assuaging feelings of guilt and revulsion by externalising them, projecting them onto another, clearly defined and politically and socially powerless group and punishing them as proxies. For the street-smart, they were fools who had been unable to wangle their way out of the war, to patriots, simply losers, failures in battle: We have received benefits from the homeland for having paid the price of victory with our blood, with our health. What sort of victory have they won? Great Patriotic War veteran4

To others, though, they were actively dangerous, a new wave of Stalinists, fascists, vigilantes and psychotics. This was particularly widely held within the intelligentsia, separated by a near-unbridgeable cultural divide from the veterans and their families. Beyond Yevtushenko's trivial poem discussed previously, Aleksandr Kabanov's apocalyptic script Nevozvrashchenets ('The Non-Returner'), which took the metropolitan cultural intelligentsia by storm in 1989, depicted a miserable and brutal future, in which armed gangs of afgantsy roamed the streets of Moscow. Other stories abounded of veterans being castigated for not throwing their medals away or being accused in the street or the disco of having blood on their hands. I can still squirm at the memory of eating in a restaurant as two perfectly sober and polite young army officers with combat decorations were chased off. The solicitous maitre d'hotel rushed back to reassure us that this was not the sort of establishment where 'that sort' could be expected to eat.

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THE WAR THAT NEVER HAPPENED

During the period of glasnost', then, the Afghan war became an important, though by no means central, element of the political scene. This 'war', though, had very little direct connection with the real fighting taking place 'over the river'. Afghanistan had become a political symbol, but one defined principally, but not exclusively, by an intelligentsia largely, by definition, with minimal real contact with the war and political interests in distorting it. By 1989-90 and the advent of real democratisation, Afghanistan was not just being raised in the Congress of People's Deputies or the pages of the liberal newspapers. Ordinary people were protesting on the streets of Russian cities against the mobilisation of reservists for the pacification of Baku with the slogan 'no more Afghanistans'. The political intelligentsia had wanted to use Afghanistan as a means to furthering their ends of opening up the policy-making process, demilitarising foreign policy and retreating from the global wargame of East versus West with, as will be discussed in the next chapter, some success. The cultural intelligentsia (insofar as one can use such artificially sharply-defined categories) had relished the chance to write about and depict a war by turns sordid and grandiose. This distinction is clear in Artem Borovik's two documentary novellas, where, between 1988 and 1989 he casts off the uniform of the gung-ho war correspondent for the equally well-worn mantle of the wearily incredulous observer. Their image of the war, distorted, idealised, bowdlerised, became dominant. Its key components were: 1

2

This was an aggressive, imperial war, started by senile and stupid Party leaders and over-confident generals. In other words, what Izvestiya's Stanislav Kondrashov called the 'imperial damn-foolishness of the septuagenarian leaders with their outdated mentality, stemming only from the lessons drawn from World War Two and in the Cold War environment'. 5 This was partly correct: the driving forces were Brezhnev, Suslov, Gromyko and Ustinov, but, to be fair, the General Staff cautioned against intervention. This was a military defeat. This is incorrect: had the USSR ever deployed the sort of forces the US had used in Vietnam, for example, where a ratio of 7 soldiers per square kilometre was reached, compared with Afghanistan's 0.7, the war could have been won. Since the Kremlin was never prepared to accept commensurate losses or the political risks of cross-border incursions into Pakistan, it is more fair to say, as Mark Urban has in his War in Afghanistan, that this was a war the Soviets never really tried to win. Nevertheless, it is important to note that the leadership

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managed, by careful stage-management, to preclude the rise of a 'stab-in-the-back myth' that conservatives and militarists could use to salvage the Brezhnev doctrine and pillory the reformists. This was largely through judicious leaks and a steady retreat from the old regimes of Brezhnev and his puppet-ally Babrak Karma!, alliance with military figures like Colonel General Kim Tsagolov (former Chief Military Adviser in Kabul) and the establishment of a facesaving post-Soviet regime under Najibullah. This was 'Russia's Vietnam', and blighted and ruined an entire generation of Soviet youth. Again, this is obviously untrue, as has been demonstrated in previous chapters. The war took only a small proportion of its cohort, and most of them managed to assimilate themselves back into normal life.

Myth has always the drop on reality, especially in politics which, as opposed to administration, is the art of manipulating symbols. Wars, as powerful foci for a wide range of emotions, are especially prone to mythology, whether the 'technowar' in the Persian Gulf in 1991 (a straightforward ground-pounder of a war, which substituted mass firepower for finesse, where most damage was done by conventional, 'dumb' bombs, and which could only be described as a partial, tactical victory), the 'stab-in-the-back' defeats of the Germans in 1918 and the USA in Vietnam or the 'civilising' British campaigns in Africa up to and including their suppression of the Mau Mau in Kenya. Hence the war was to have an obvious impact on the development of the policies and ideologies of the late Soviet (and post-Soviet) era, over a range of issues. I hear the politicians talk about Afghanistan this, Afghanistan that . .. [But] sometimes I wonder whether this was the same war I saw. Kostya, afganets

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

A. Borovik, The Hidden War (1990), pp.12-13. J. Steele, 'Soviet hero declares war on the Party', Guardian (13 Nov. 1990). Yu. Golovin, 'Pain came later', Soviet Soldier (Aug. 1990). Radyanska Ukraina, 1 April 1988, in SWB (18 April 1988). Afghanistan: one year after (1990), p.27.

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Impact? Not really. Lev, afganets

It was a momentous event, a milestone in our struggle for a new way. Shura, Moscow University student and draft-dodger

The contrast between the phlegmatic young veteran and factory worker and the smart young student in his Levi SOls and Adidas sweat shirt encapsulates so much about the war. Both of an age, both Russian, both even living within walking distance of the same metro station, they nevertheless were, socially and politically, continents apart. For while the war soon brought forth a response from the (self-)consciously freethinking urban intelligentsia, it took years of fighting and dying, the slow diffusion of veterans in society and glasnost' to begin to make Afghanistan an issue for the wider public, first through press coverage and the more general intrusion of the war into Soviet culture. With few exceptions, though, general public attitudes were either irrelevant or moulded by the concerns of political, social and cultural elites. They used Afghanistan as an idiom and a weapon to forward reform in five main areas: 'reclaiming' Russian and Soviet history; redefining relations with Islam; and an interlocked trinity of reassessments, of the ends of the USSR's foreign policy, the means by which it should attain them and the procedures whereby that policy should be formulated. In most instances, this happened with the active support of the Gorbachev regime. However, it did so in the context of a decay in the legitimacy of the regime and the cohesion of the elites, and thus became idiom and contributory factor for these processes, too. In some small measure, at least, Brezhnev's decision to deploy troops in Afghanistan brought about the downfall of his and his successors' USSR.

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THE WAR AND HISTORY: OTHER INTERNATIONALISTS, OTHER WARS

If the war bred a new candour about the state of the USSR and the

conduct of its affairs, it also played an important part in returning the country's history to its people. The pattern was the familiar one: developments closely related to Afghanistan soon touched off a whole sequence of others, opening up far broader and deeper questions until the original trigger, Afghanistan, was all but forgotten. Initially, for example, the war brought new light to the exploits of all the other 'soldier-internationalists' who had fought abroad in Moscow's name, unacknowledged and all-too-unsung and unrewarded, as well as the period of basmachestvo, the suppression of Islamic rebels in Central Asia in the 1920s. In September 1990, the Ministry of Defence finally provided a near-definitive list of countries where Soviet troops had been involved in hostilities since the end of the Second World War (it excluded, for obvious reasons, those 'internationalists' who crushed the Prague Spring and rebellious Hungary). While some were already wellknown in the West, many were, officially, news to the Soviet people. In addition, one should add those Soviets who fought in the Spanish Civil War and in Mongolia before the war. The official line had always been, after all, that such deployments were state secrets - even conspicuous gallantry had to go unrewarded or, as when reporting the award of a medal, camouflaged to pretend that it referred to an exercise on home territory. TABLE 9.1 Countries where Soviet 'internationalists' were involved in combat, 1921-91

Spain (1936-39) China (1933-34) North Korea (1950-1953) Algeria (1962-64) Arab Republic of Yemen (1962-63) Syria (1967, 1973, 1982) Angola (1975-79) Ethiopia (1977-79)

Mongolia (?) East Germany (1953) Hungary (1956) Egypt (1962-63, 1969-72, 1973-74) Vietnam (1965-74) Czechoslovakia (1968) Mozambique (1975-79) Afghanistan (1979-88)

This recovery of history had several effects, not least, for those involved in these adventures. Typically, these soldiers had not been

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classed as 'internationalists', or even war veterans, and were thus ineligible for the various benefits- a harsh blow if an invalid or suffering from health problems- and were even denied proof that they had been in combat on their motherland's behalf. Consider the case of one veteran, with two years of service in a war zone, 1973-74, whose army record only listed his service as 'office work' and who had to put up with the tolerant disbelief of his grandchildren. Only in 1990 did his service finally receive official recognition. While hardly of towering, global importance, the personal impact of the wilful contempt shown by previous regimes for those who did their dirty work should not be ignored. Similarly shabby standards came to light in the casuistry surrounding the definition of 'combat'. Pilots who flew combat missions in support of Syrian operations over Lebanon in 1982, for example, were excluded because they were not actually fired upon. Soldiers who served in Ethiopia in 1982 were also ruled out because they were not there, officially, to fight but to advise - a singularly meaningless distinction when stationed in the middle of a war zone. From nowhere, accounts in the media began to appear in 1987 about the need to recognise and recompense all these other veterans of foreign wars. At first they were rather anodyne pieces orchestrated by the centre, but they triggered off a spate of letters demanding fair treatment not just for the afgantsy, but for the 50,000 'koreitsy', 'egiptyany', 'efiopy' and the rest. A military history group looking specifically at Soviet involvement in the Korean War was established within the Committee of War Veterans. A Central Committee Party Control Committee special review of the implementation of benefits for veterans of the Second World War soon merged into a wider debate about who was due such privileges. As a result the Supreme Soviet Committee for Soldier-Internationalists' Affairs explicitly broadened its competence to include all such veterans, and began to lobby for fair treatment for and public acknowledgement of these other veterans of wars abroad. Secondly, this new can dour has fed into the evolution of foreign policy, with a new dimension being added to assessments both of the successes and failures of past policies and the role and potential of military force in the equation. The quelling of the Moslem Basmachi revolt of the 1920s, for example, had become overlaid with a thick patina of mythology and rhetoric by successive official Jines. But not only did the experiences of the war allow military commentators to unlock and for the first time apply some of the genuine experiences of that campaign, it also began to raise questions about the justice of the imposition of urban, industrial, Muscovite control on rural, Islamic Central Asia.

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As another example, consider the debate about the dispatch and subsequent withdrawal of troops from Egypt. Anwar Sadat's decision to expel Soviet military advisers in 1972 came as a rude shock to the Kremlin, but was one which could not be discussed openly for the simple reason that officially there had not been any Soviets there in the first place. In the era of glasnost', though, accounts began to emerge of the decision and of the Soviet reactions to it. Retired Lieutenant General Ivan Novoseletskii, a former adviser in the Middle East, was particularly concerned to rebut claims by an Egyptian officer that the Soviets bore much of the blame for the belated Egyptian offensive of 1973. Former Ambassador to Egypt Vladimir Vinogradov was quick to pin the blame on Sadat's waywardness and US blandishments. After all, with the return of history also came the return of culpability, of mistakes being admitted and being laid at someone's door. A final example to raise is that of the interventions in Hungary 1956 and Czechoslovakia 1968. The parallels with Afghanistan were obvious but for a long time too sensitive to raise, until the usual trail-blazer, Komsomol'skaya pravda, called in 1989 for a reassessment of the suppression of the Hungarian uprising. This duly led to Czechoslovakia being raised in similar terms, although the newspaper Izvestiya was rather more cautious, first testing the waters with some readers' letters before publishing articles assessing the intervention and concluding that it prolonged the dominance of neo-Stalinism in Eastern Europe by almost twenty years. As ever, carefully metered glasnost' - initially directed from the top, to prepare the ground for progressive disengagement from the conservative regimes of Eastern Europe - acquired its own momentum. Disputes broke out within the press, and discussion spread to everything from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 to Trotsky's role in the evolution of the Soviet Union. It even reached the final taboos, moving towards a critique of Lenin's policies and reassessing General Vlasov, the Great Patriotic War commander who fought alongside the Nazis against the USSR. ISLAM

Moslems reject Western civilisation because they are not sufficiently cultured to accept it. Why force them to better themselves if they don't want to? Ukrainian scientistl

The Islamic dimension always featured strongly in discussion of the war, not least given the growing glasnost' about the basmachi rebellions, the

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rabidly fundamentalist attitudes of a large proportion of the rebels and disclosures about Moscow's adventures in the Middle East. For many, the intervention itself was a response to the rise of militant Islam, a bid to throw an armoured cordon sanitaire around the Moslem Central Asian states of the USSR in the face of Khomeini's Iran. During the war, the Kremlin's attitudes to Islam went through several phases, from trying to combine internal suppression with external co-operation (culminating in a serious campaign against the faith in 1986), through to increasingly courteous yet wary respect. But in the context of the end of the 'Soviet idea' and the quest by many Russians both for a new cultural identity and a 'fast-track' into the warm and prosperous bosom of the capitalist West, a fear of Islam also arose as a factor in late Soviet and post-Soviet politics. On the one hand, there was an appreciation among Slavs of Islam's strength as a cultural unifier. Active Christians, in particular, were interested in a religion which had successfully retained its role as matrix of a whole society. After all, the late USSR existed in a state of anomie, alienation from all existing patterns of authority and community, and hence the genuine respect for such a unifier. Yet Afghanistan had been a nasty and merciless war, where both sides freely used torture and terror. Unlike Vietnam, there was very little contact between occupiers and even friendly Afghans, shown in the lack of local words adopted as slang, no heartwarming or tragic tales of cross-cultural love. To an extent, even to Soviet Central Asians, but especially Slav soldiers, the Afghans remained alien, unknowable and suspicious. As a result, neither those supporting nor those repudiating the war had much fellow feeling for the rebels; both shared the same image of the Afghans as a people bound by a religion strong, vital but also barbaric and atavistic, by turns noble and honourable, bloodthirsty and treacherous, always following an internal logic unfathomable to outsiders. As one soldier put it:

The East has its own laws. We couldn't understand it at first. We somehow acted according to our own notions and habits ... Allah only knows these people! Aleksandr Malkov, afganets 2

This built on the long tradition of Russian xenophobia and Christian/Moslem friction, fears of the 'yellowing' of the USSR (given the higher birth rates of the Central Asian peoples within the Union), developments in Iran, the explosions of ethnic violence in NagornoKarabakh, Fergana and Dushanbe and then the Gulf War of 1991. Given that the metropolitan Slavic intelligentsia was suffering such a

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crisis of confidence and identity, manifesting itself in the essentially servile way it began mimicking all things Western with all the uncritical vigour with which it had once extolled the Soviet system, the chance to create some common enemy, to join the camp of 'Christendom', was very attractive. In the non-Slav republics, Gorbachev's 'democratisation', a bid to keep the Union together by becoming increasingly open towards the cultural and religious needs of all faiths and providing the political mechanisms for the satisfaction of legitimate aspirations, was failing. New political structures stimulated rather than satisfied nationalist and separatist appetites, while paralysing the central system. In the quest to create, recreate or simply locate a new cultural identity, numbers of Soviet Central Asians turned to Islam. Although this was no explosion of fundamentalism, it sparked a new (or renewed) wariness amongst the Christian Slavs. In the throes of their own cultural reinvention, built in part on the Orthodox Church, the new intelligentsia elites found some solace in the image of North/South polarisation in the world, a rather different New World Order pitting 'Europeans' against 'The Rest'. As an image of the way Russians and the other Slavs and Christians could find themselves in the new 'winning team', this took some beating: We didn't know why we were fighting in the DRA. Only now do we know, and this time we, all of us in the Christian world, must win. Viktor, afganets

As Christian and Moslem came into conflict, often for wholly local, political or contingent reasons, more general public attention came to be focused on the religious/ethnic/cultural dimension. Armenians and Azeris fought over Nagorno-Karabakh, which then escalated into effective inter-republican war, especially after Moscow's (predominantly Slav) paratroopers reimposed central control on Baku in January 1990 after an explosion of ethnic pogroms in the Azeri capital. Armenians were persecuted by Tajiks in Dushanbe in February 1990. By 1991, as the USSR fragmented, so too did its conflicts become increasingly general, culminating in the Russian Chechen-Ingush crisis. There, again, Slav observers chose to characterise Chechen nationalism not as a response to generations of Slavic dominance but as simply another manifestation of a virulent and voracious Islam Resurgent, and this had become a cause for which people were prepared to fight. Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian troops in Nagorno-Karabakh, for example, peacekeepers by day, were supporting their Armenian coreligionists by night, with the connivance of their commanders. Nor,

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as will be discussed later, did anything change with the end of the Soviet Union. FOREIGN POLICY: ENDS AND MEANS

Afghanistan changed perceptions of the USSR's - or, increasingly, Russia's - foreign policy and the country's proper role in the world. As the war and glasnost' unveiled the past, notably the costs of superpower status and the inability of the country to stay in the game, the war became a perfect symbol for those arguing for a graceful and grateful withdrawal. What constituted superpower status? Was it worth it? Was it even possible for the ailing USSR? Parallels with Vietnam and the US retreat from globalism are interesting, but Afghanistan hit a nation already in turmoil: the confluence of moral crisis, political paralysis and economic collapse produced a far more volatile and extreme compound. Afghanistan and economic collapse killed the Brezhnev doctrine that sanctioned the use of Russian troops to maintain the Kremlin's writ within its sphere of influence. One of the underpinnings of this Brezhnevian 'internationalism' had been the use of aid, from selling tanks at bargain prices to subsidising 'fraternal' imports and outright charity, to bolster friendly regimes and buy uncommitted ones. Beneath its socialist rhetoric, Gromyko's foreign policy had been an object lesson in high-spending, cheque-book realpolitik. Between 1974 and 1978, for example, the value of military assistance to tropical Africa rose from $90 million to $1.2 billion. Even before public admission of the costs of this policy, and the crisis in the state budget, Afghanistan had catalysed public disquiet at spending money abroad when Soviet citizens lived so manifestly below their aspirations. Arguably, indeed, public perceptions exaggerated the burden of foreign aid, just as they tended to overstate the extent to which their home region or republic was exploited for the good of the rest of the Union. As ever, glasnost' finally acknowledged the concern and, once again, the disquiet of the elites was communicated to the masses, who made the concern their own. On 8 May 1988, Sotsialisticheskaya industriya started the ball rolling in time-honoured style, by printing a letter from a concerned citizen. Under the caption 'Is it necessary to help everyone?', a schoolteacher from Krasnoyarsk set questions about the wisdom of international aid against the travails of her family, and this brought a predictable response. Later, the newspaper published over a dozen letters received in response, largely in agreement, that the Soviet people 'build and build for everyone, but do not have enough for ourselves'. Two specific issues were raised in the exchange, which were to prove significant in the way Afghanistan, and other foreign policy

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failures, influenced perceptions as to how policy was to be decided and organised: it should be directed solely at developing the material condition of the USSR and its people and it should be made through accountable and open processes. As one letter-writer put it, the principles of khozraschet, of profit-and-loss accounting, should be applied to foreign as much as economic policy. Empires are expensive: subsidies for satellite nations, ocean-going navies, nuclear missiles, high-prestige space missions. The war itself cost the USSR some five billion rubles a year, for a total cost of 60 billion rubles. As of November 1989, the Soviet Union was owed some 86 billion rubles, almost evenly split between 'socialist countries' and the Developing World. Although national debts are a normal part of global trade, most of these 'debts' were essentially aid and there was no real or immediate prospect of repayment. No constituency was willing to pay that price, once it became clear: not a public facing hunger, nor even a military eager rather to stock up on bullet-proof vests and tear gas for the troubles to come. As Gorbachev himself put it:

the foreign policy that served the utopian aim of spreading communist ideas round the world, had led us into the dead end of the Cold War, inflicted on the people an intolerable burden of military expenditure and dragged us into adventures like the one in Afghanistan. For the first time in many years and decades a foreign policy is being conducted that serves our own national interests and works to benefit our domestic development. 3 Hence, Afghanistan, far more than Vietnam, brought a lasting retreat from globalism (although Russia's integration into the world economy will require a globalism of a different sort). When US Secretary of State James Baker urged the Soviets to intervene in Romania to depose Ceau~escu, Shevardnadze ruled it out without equivocation. Similar reservations arose when the Soviets were sounded out to join the Alliance forces against Iraq in 1991, even at a token level. This represented a perfect opportunity to make a concrete statement of commitment to a common 'New Woi'ld Order' and protect a regime in Kuwait with which Moscow had been developing increasingly warm relations and which had provided the USSR with $450 million in credits over the past four years, yet the reaction was overwhelmingly negative. Radicals, unprepared to see more troops deployed abroad, and conservatives, clinging to their memories of a superpower with Arab clients, were at last able to agree:

What should the Soviet Union do in this situation? Nothing. Komsomol'skaya pravda4

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As for aid to Afghanistan, as early as July 1990, Boris Yeltsin had announced that the Russian Federation government would halt further shipments of supplies to Kabul, a rather empty declaration that came closer to becoming binding when, next year, he said that Russia would not keep bailing Afghanistan out, since Russia had already spent $280 million on aid; the implied threat was that he would subtract this from Russia's contribution to the total Union budget. After the collapse of the USSR, Yeltsin was fully able to carry out his threats, and made it clear that countries like Cuba, Afghanistan and Ethiopia could expect no more aid, only commercial economic relations. POLICY-MAKING: PROCEDURES AND PRACTICES

We don't even know who made the decision and when it was made. Here again, as in Hungary and Czechoslovakia (to say nothing of the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact), we see the danger posed to the world by a closed, totalitarian society. Andrei Sakharo0

Perhaps more important, though, stress was placed on the lack of democratic accountability, and in this way, Afghanistan contributed to the shift away from the closed oligarchy, and towards a new approach, or ideal, at least, in policy formulation. By unlocking informed and critical debate about other reversals, Afghanistan brought a new appreciation of the importance of local conditions compared with broad, ideological, class-based analyses. Above all, it created a genuine role for those experts whose 'scientific' input was originally intended to have been one of the ways in which the Brezhnevian order was going to improve on erratic, 'hare-brained' Khrushchevian methods. The Soviets were forced to accept that international relations really were extremely complex, rooted in the sophisticated interrelationship between different cultures, with the consequent dangers of misunderstanding, misconstruction and misjudgement because of the gulf separating different cultures and decision-making contexts. Suddenly, the Soviets 'discovered' the concept of political culture, the notion that history and environment condition national politics, define the matrix within which conscious decisions are taken. This was clearly relevant in the case of Afghanistan, a war in which Moscow's absolute failure to understand Islamic societies and come to terms with them had been a vital factor. The special instructions issued to political officers during the invasion, for instance, managed almost totally to overlook Islam in their guidelines on how to deal with the Afghans. Yet in part this was also

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because of the obvious applicability of the concept for trying to understand what was going on within the USSR. This had clear implications for policy-formulation processes. The official story that emerged was that the prime movers were Brezhnev, Suslov, Gromyko, Ustinov and Andropov - all, conveniently, dead. Boris Yeltsin had first pointed the finger at Brezhnev, Ustinov, Suslov and Gromyko, at a pre-election meeting in March 1989 and Anatolii Gromyko (Foreign Minister Gromyko's son) later threw in the names of Andropov and Kosygin. However useful this story may have been, it was basically true. Gromyko ignored his experts at the Foreign Ministry; Ustinov certainly rejected the warnings of the General Staff; Suslov, being Suslov, never listened to anyone anyway, and Andropov, despite misgivings, was eventually persuaded by Suslov as well as Ivanov, his own man on the spot. Of course, chief of the KGB's foreign service at this time was Vladimir Kryuchkov, later head of the whole KGB and he may well have had particular reason to keep the blame on the local rezident, since Ivanov was, after all, one of Kryuchkov's agents. As a product of closed politics, Afghanistan became a cautionary tale when the Congress of Peoples' Deputies and Supreme Soviet developed their responsibilities, including the formation of the latter's Committees on International Affairs and on Defence and State Security. When USSR Supreme Soviet Council of Union Chair Evgenii Primakov sought to underline the new, genuine authority of the chamber, the point he chose to make was that there could be no repetition of the secret decision to intervene in Afghanistan. Realism in politics is incompatible with voluntarism, vozhdism [bossism]. In international politics, the age of the politician-mage and sorcerer-diplomat has gone. Anatolii Gromyko6

Afghanistan was used by the 'experts', particularly the institutchiki from the think tanks, to demand what they saw as their rightful place in the policy-making system, and new and more effective sources and channels of information. As director of IMEMO, the Institute for International Economic Relations, Evgenii Primakov had already spoken out at the XIX Party Conference on the way that the war had highlighted the ignorant caprices at the heart of Brezhnev-era policymaking. He had some right to make this claim, given that IMEMO had advised against the intervention and been overruled. The Institute of Economics of the World Socialist System had experienced a similar dismissal, not least since it was a team under the Institute's director,

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Oleg Bogomolov, which had produced the first critical report on the war, just 25 days after the intervention, which stated:

Our policy has evidently gone beyond the brink of confrontation tolerance in the 'Third World' as a result of the move to send forces into Afghanistan. The benefits of the action proved insignificant compared to the damage caused to our interests . . . A third dangerous seat of military-political tension has emerged on the southern flank . . . The anti-Soviet front of countries encircling the USSR from West to East has substantially grown in numbers and solidity. Detente has been blockaded . .. Economic and technological pressure against the Soviet Union has sharply grown . .. [events] have destroyed the preconditions for a possible normalisation of Soviet-Chinese relations ... [and] served as a catalyst for . . . conciliation in the relationships between Iran and the US. Yugoslavia, Romania and North Korea have started increasingly to distance themselves from and mistrust Soviet policy . . . The Soviet Union has now got to shoulder a new burden of economic aid to Afghanistan. 7 This catalogue of blunders was ignored and remained secret; Bogomolov and his team took matters no further, and he, at least, later admitted that their acquiescence and their silence played its part in the prolongation of the war. After all, such incidents had raised an unpleasant dilemma for the advisers: either compromise and thus remain within the discussion, with the chance of at least salvaging something and correcting the smaller mistakes, or being principled and yet also powerless. People being people, rationalising the former was usually rather easier. As discussed earlier, Bogomolov had a close relationship with Andropov and he and his Institute had first championed the notion of the spread of Soviet influence 'by force of example', implicitly questioning the Brezhnev Doctrine. Later, he was to blame the war on a system wherein experts either twisted their data to fit the Party line or were ignored when they insisted on introducing a note of unwelcome realism into debates. Indeed, it was scholars at or alumni of the Institute who placed themselves firmly at the head of the reappraisal of Soviet foreign policy under Gorbachev. Besides Bogomolov, there was Evgenii Ambartsumov, who made the first call for an unconditional withdrawal from Afghanistan, Anatolii Butenko, whose view that contradictions within socialism could be antagonistic undermined the very bases of Brezhnevian 'Developed Socialism', Vyacheslav Dashichev, who had counselled against involvement in Angola and Nikolai Shmelev, who had led the calls in 1987 for a 'new NEP', harking back to Lenin's

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reformist policies of the 1920s, with their emphasis on private enterprise. In particular, they used Afghanistan to illustrate the need for checks and balances, for genuinely pluralistic inputs into the decisionmaking arena, for open scrutiny and public accountability, all of which also applied to domestic policy. POLITICS AND MORALITY, LEGITIMACY AND DECAY

Another question arose since the war: was Soviet foreign policy moral? This was one of the most striking features of late Soviet politics, one certainly tracing some of its roots into Afghanistan: the craving for some morality in politics. The old system was, after all, being measured against two yardsticks. Russian notions of social justice accepted authoritarian, even capricious rule but expected all to share in fat times as well as lean, a sense of community binding all the Rus' together. The newer, Westernised notions of the intelligentsia, on the other hand, looked instead to rational decision-making, technocratic pluralism, a law-based state. The system was clearly violating both sets of norms, and at the same time failing. Much of the debate and recrimination ostensibly about the war was also clearly about general questions. Kto vinovat? Who is to blame? This was, after all, part of that return of culpability, a feeling that at last some sort of reckoning was in order. A particularly striking case was an article in 1990 in which Oleg Bogomolov went further than ever before, saying not just that the war was a mistake, but that it was one for which he felt he shared some of the blame and felt the need to make public repentance for not having more vigorously and openly opposed it. While in part this was a ploy to underline that the decision was made against his advice, that he chose such a moralistic idiom was indicative of the overall mood of the times. We are also seeking a political assessment of the Afghan war ... We will try to see to it that all those who led us into the war are called to account - and not just the dead, who are long gone. Nadezhda Makar'eva, executive secretary, SVA women's section 8

This was important, since it was a view making itself felt in the new struggle by all sorts of actors to find and build new political constituencies. Nor was it just the concern of veterans, their mothers, or selfimportant commentators. Very striking was an article in 1989, where two institutchiki, both from the US and Canada Institute, professional foreign policy analysts, criticised the ethical bases of Soviet foreign policy, from its refusal to condemn the Tienanmen massacre to its equally fudged stance over the fatwa on Salman Rushdie. Boris Yeltsin

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himself, ever the masterful weather-vane of Russian public opinion, made great play of trumpeting that his foreign policy would be 'moral' after the end of the USSR. Such concerns were symptomatic of the decay underlying the legitimacy of the Soviet state. To an extent the war played a part, but on the whole it simply reflected the general alienation of both the masses and the rank-and-file Party members who always represented the social basis of the Soviet order. The purchase of exemptions from service in Afghanistan was just part of the wider issue of corruption; the mulish short-sightedness of intervention just part and parcel of the ossification of policy and the 'imperialist internationalism' of the old order; the manifold shortcomings of the war effort just a microcosm of the collapse of the planned economy experiment. Again, using the SAAOR surveys for their portrayal of trends, they reveal a clear convergence between the attitudes of Party members and other Soviet citizens. In 1984, over half of the Party members approved of the official policy on Afghanistan, compared with one in five non-Party members. By 1987, the gap between the two had narrowed sharply, from 33 per cent to 16 per cent, with almost as many Party members actively disapproving of the official line as supporting it. The old Soviet state had come to rely on the acquiescent passivity of the masses and the cloistered support of the Party; as the masses lost their apathy and the activ its cohesion and will, so too did the state's base crumble. Gorbachev was trying to revive the Party and remove what he saw as the overlay of Stalinist and Brezhnevian revisionism, yet he failed in this monumental act of ideological perestroika. Instead he proved able only to destroy the old order, and Afghanistan was just another symbol of that system's failure, to rank alongside Chernobyl', empty shops and mafia millionaires. Although it is largely beyond the scope of this study, it is also worth mentioning that the war had perhaps greater specific impact in the dissolution of the Soviet state outside Russia, where it provided a graphic and urgent example of Muscovite imperial pretensions, for which subject peoples' blood was being spilled. Again looking to the SAAOR surveys, they revealed that whereas disillusion with government policy grew generally during 1986-87, the greatest shifts were in Central Asia, where approval fell to 18 per cent and disapproval rose to 49 per cent. Baits disapproved by 67 per cent to 12 per cent, while Caucasians registered 58 per cent disapproval. Russia, while also losing its appetite for the war, was still the only region with over 20 per cent approval rates. Hence, the war's main impact was transient, influencing the policies of a state that never really managed to establish itself before being swept away in the incompetence and chaos of the August Coup. The question

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becomes, then, how far has this been carried through into post-Soviet Russian policy-making? Boris Yeltsin's political upbringing as a tough, no-nonsense Party boss seems to emerge at moments of crisis, and the role of experts, of pluralist inputs into policy-formulation and parliamentary accountability all seem to take second place to the exigencies of Presidential rule and the palace politics of his inner circle of 'Sverdlovsk mafiosi' and courtier-princes such as State Secretary Burbulis and Prime Minister Gaidar, who rise for a while, only to be sacrificed on the altar of political expediency. None the less, the war set the seal on the retreat from military globalism, and Russia's priorities are, at best, of regional hegemony and assimilation into the European/North Atlantic community. Perhaps the critical issue on which this has bearing is Russia's relationship with her neighbours and, given the presence of troops in war zones in Moldova to the West, Nagorno-Karabakh and Ossetia to the South and Tajikistan to the East, her lingering imperial ambitions. Essentially, this is a question of security interests and military capabilities and thus one needs to consider the state of the military and the attitudes of the High Command. As one afganets, a lieutenant colonel, put it: Russia should not think we have lost a war. We- the army- now know what we want and what we can do. The question is, rather, how long will it take the politicians to realise this. NOTES 1. Quoted inS Wise, 'The Soviet public and the war in Afghanistan: discontent reaches critical levels', in SAAOR AR 4-88 (May 1988), p.23. 2. G. Ustyuzhanin, 'An omen proved true', Soviet Soldier (March 1991). 3. M. Gorbachev, The August Coup (1991), p.l19. 4. A. Vasil'ev, 'Nuzhna li v pustyne kurzovaya obuv", Komsomol'skaya pravda (25 Oct. 1991). 5. A. Sakharov, Memoirs (1990), p.509. 6. I. Belyaev and I. Gromyko, 'Tak my voshli v Afganistane', Literaturnaya gazeta (20 Sept. 1989). 7. Report from the USSR Academy of Sciences to the Party Central Committee (20 Jan. 1980). 8. N. Burbyga, 'Gore, kotoroe nel'zya zabyt", lzvestiya (10 Aug. 1990).

Part 4

THE WAR AND THE PROFESSIONAL SOLDIERS

10

The Afghan Brotherhood

[The veterans are} the golden fund of the army . .. We must treat them with care, train them solicitously and promote them. Marshal Akhromeev 1

Whatever the conscripts may have felt, the war had been a boon for the officer corps. It brought not only sizeable perks but the chance to hone military skills in battle and win a reputation that could propel the lucky few to higher, even the highest ranks. The military chronicler and ideological camp-follower Aleksandr Prokhanov called them the 'Afghan Brotherhood', a charmed circle of able and battle-tested professional soldiers bound by common experiences and a common solidarity. For the rise and mutual support of cliques based on such ties was by no means unique to the USSR, but was certainly an entrenched part of its history. Khrushchev had his 'Stalin grad group', including the Second World War hero, Marshal Zhukov. Brezhnev had served at the front - albeit in rather less illustrious manner than his later hagiographies claimed - and had personal ties with three Defence Ministers: R. D. Malinovskii, A. A. Grechko and his friend and ally Dmitrii Ustinov. In 1966, 32 per cent of the Politburo had spent at least seven years in military or military-related occupations, though this had fallen to 15 per cent by 1987. Andropov had also been active in the war, especially coordinating partisan operations in the north-west, and had established at least cordial relations with the military during his tenure at the Lubyanka. Chernenko inherited Brezhnev's stable. The assumption was that these veterans of the USSR's only 'proper' war for 40 years would be no exception. Of course, a difference this time was that Gorbachev was the first post-war Soviet leader not to come to office both with military experience and a ready-made array of uniformed friends, clients and contacts. In a circular process, the most promising officers either volunteered for at least one two-year tour in Afghanistan or were sent there, and those showing combat-proven ability became high-fliers of the future,

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producing a general rise of afganets officers in the Soviet military. But this is neither surprising nor especially indicative. Given the importance of combat experience as much for peer group credibility as for developing one's understanding of military art, officers with any ambition clearly sought service in Afghanistan. There is a natural desire to test oneself and one's professional skills for real and there were also very real immediate advantages to combat service, including substantially increased salaries, some paid in the form of cheki, priority 'hard ruble' coupons, and special pension rights. A senior lieutenant's peacetime pay of 210 rubles a month became over 600, while a captain's 270 would become 270 rubles plus 540 rubles' worth of cheki, which could be redeemed in special shops for imported goods which could either then be used or resold at a fat profit. There was also the allure of a standard of living superior to that of most peaceful billets, with good supplies of food, swimming pools and spacious flats for officers and their families. After Afghanistan, the army sought to hold onto them: it needed experienced, professional soldiers as nationalist protests were bringing the conscription system to its knees and new-generation weapons systems were increasingly just too complex for the average draftee, and the term of service not long enough to train them properly. For all sorts of reasions, then, afgantsy joined and remained within the military. As of 1991, there were 70,000 under orders, overwhelmingly officers, out of a total of 3.4 million, including 400,000 officers and one million career NCOs and other professional soldiers. The men involved in planning and executing the invasion in 1979 certainly benefited from it, yet there is little real evidence to suggest that such a 'brotherhood' links the afgantsy with anything more than the sentiment of men who share common memories. One can, rather, tentatively suggest signs of not one, but many and overlapping alliances or at least acquaintanceships not just within the military but also with political figures, perhaps including Gorbachev, owing something to the war. Detailed analysis of Soviet officials' careers is, after all, a timehonoured Kremlinological technique, even though it can be misleading, reading conspiracy into coincidence and alliance in mere proximity. The established wisdom, for example, would presume that officers whose careers kept meeting had a personal link or alliance. Life is rarely so mechanical and easy to plot, and given the tenuous nature of the exercise, all it can do is conjure up some possibilities which require further analysis. Yet there are four broad conclusions which can be drawn: 1

After the first 'invasion generation' came what could be called the 'Andropov brotherhood', commanders whose experiences in the war and exposure to the shortcomings of their system had led them

THE AFGHAN BROTHERHOOD

2

3

4

173

to support the Andropovian (and early Gorbachevian) concept of reform as a means to revitalising a moribund economy and polity. Even this was by no means a monolith, and the pressures and traumas of the Gorbachev era served to break this group down into various subgroups, while also raising a new, 'post-Gorbachev generation'. The August Coup, by bringing loyalties and alliances into sharp relief, revealed the collapse of the relative functional and ideological unity of the military segment of the nomenklatura elite. This underscores the fact that the real significance of the 'brotherhoods' was not as autonomous political blocs or actors but rather more subtle, as symptoms of change within the military elite.

While the proportion of officers with genuine war experience clearly reached some form of 'critical mass' - with an important impact on military doctrine and practice- what is most interesting is the way these numerous 'brotherhoods' arose against the backdrop of the collapse of the Party-state's authority and legitimacy. As the old bonds of socialisation and tradition loosened and decayed, the military began to lose its common identity within a homogeneous nomenklatura elite. Whether this proves the prelude to future political division or the early steps towards developing genuine functional autonomy, the 'brotherhoods' were just a symptom of the wider changes taking place within the officer corps.

THE INVASION TEAM

Although in the aftermath of the war it became politically expedient for many to minimise their involvement with it, one can be pretty certain about the prime movers in the operational planning behind the invasion once the political decision had been made. Overall command was assigned to First Deputy Defence Minister Marshal Sergei Sokolov, with operational planning the responsibility of General Valentin Varennikov, First Deputy Chief of the General Staff and head of the Defence Ministry Operations Group that actually ran the war for the period 1985-89. The actual invasion was conducted by units from the Turkestan and Central Asian Military Districts (TurkVO and SVO), commanded by Colonel Generals Yurii Maksimov and Petr Lushev, respectively. That the actual execution of the plan was not seen as such an important role is shown by the selection of Lieutenant General Tukharinov, a reliable warhorse rather than a high-flier, to head the 40th Army and his subsequent transfer to a military academy lectureship.

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TABLE 10.1

The Invasion Team Post

Officer

Further promotion?

Overall command

Mar S Sokolov

Defence Minister (1985)

Operational Planning

Gen V Varennikov

Command, Ground Forces (1989)

~

Turkestan VO

Col Gen Yu Maksimov

Command, Strategic Rocket Forces (1985)

~

Central Asian

Col Gen P Lushev

Commander-in-Chief, Warsaw Pact (1989)

Operational command

Lt Gen V Tukharinov

lectureship

vo

Hero of the Soviet Union?

Marshal Sokolov went on to replace Marshal Ustinov as Minister of Defence in 1985, until being retired on political grounds following Mathias Rust's flight to Moscow in 1987, when a young German misfit thumbed his nose at the mighty Soviet air defence forces and landed his Cessna light airplane in Red Square. General Varennikov, on the other hand, after his command of the Operations Group, was made Ground Forces Commander in 1989. His experience in both the invasion and endgame in Afghanistan, moreover, was a key factor in winning him the dubious honour of becoming, in effect, the Kremlin's 'troubleshooterin-chief' from 1990, co-ordinating responses to nationalist pressures in Azerbaijan and Lithuania. This shadowy but distinguished career was brought to a sudden and ignominious end by his involvement in the abortive August Coup of 1991. Most spectacular was the rise of Colonel General Maksimov, mired in the backwater of the TurkVO. As the war escalated, the district began to assume key importance and he suddenly went from strength to strength: within a few years he was a full General, Commander of the 40th Army and, in 1985, Commander of the Strategic Rocket Forces, the senior arm of service. Like Varennikov, he was also made Hero of the Soviet Union, the USSR's highest honour. Lushev's rise, while hardly so rapid, was none the less indicative of the way the war could kick-start a rather sluggish career. Late in 1980 he was appointed to head the politically sensitive Moscow Military District and granted the political honour of a seat on the Central Committee of the Party. He

THE AFGHAN BROTHERHOOD

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TABLE 10.2

Commanders of the 40th Army Date

Commander

High promotion?

invasion-23 Sept. 1980

[lectureship]

23 Sept. 1980--7 May 1982 7 May 1982-4 Nov. 1983

Lt Gen Yu V Tukharinov Lt Gen B I Tkach Lt Gen V F Ermakov

4 Nov. 1983-19 April 1985

Lt Gen I E Generalov

19 April 1985-30 April 1986 Lt Gen IN Rodionov 30 April 1986-1 June 1987

Lt Gen V P Dubynin

1 June 1986-end of war

Lt Gen B V Gromov

Deputy Defence Minister [Personnel] (1990) Commander, Carpathian vo (1985) Head, General Staff Academy (1989) Commander, Northern Group of Forces (1987) First Deputy Interior Minister (1990); First Deputy Defence Minister (1992)

went on to command the prestigious Group of Soviet Forces in Germany and hence the whole Central European Theatre of Military Operations. A year later he was made a Deputy Defence Minister and in 1989 became the last Warsaw Pact Commander-in-Chief.

AN AFGHAN BROTHERHOOD?

Yet these men all went their separate ways, and there is no evidence to suggest any closer ties other than sharing the kudos for an intervention which, while conceptually flawed, was operationally textbook. Nor is there an obvious pattern to the careers of the men who commanded the 40th Army. Some rose to senior administrative posts, some to important military commands, yet others could do little more than nudge their way to the top of a less than prestigious military district or be honourably rusticated to a military academy. The Chief Military Advisers, the OKSV's liaisons with the Kabul regime, were an even more mixed collection. There were five in the decade of the war: Generals A. M. Maiorov, G. I. Salmonov, M. I. Sorokin and Colonel Generals V. A. Vostrov and M. M. Sotskov. This was clearly a post of some responsibility and moment and required senior officers, yet their fates have been less than glorious: Colonel General Vostrov, commander of the Siberian VO before his term in

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Kabul and then head of a Main Directorate for military education in 1988 is about the most high-flying, and he owed his rise largely to the patronage of the then Defence Minister Yazov. More broadly, though, while some afgantsy demonstrably did well out of the war, in other cases, this is far from proven. Looking at General Vladimir Lobov, for example, a study by Jacob Kipp could find little evidence that his period as commander of the Central Asian Military District in 1984-87, at a time when the region was being used to support operations in Afghanistan, had any real impact on his career. When his career did begin to take off again, briefly, after the August Coup, this was at the expense of other afgantsy. There is also a particular problem in distinguishing how far it was that soldiers clearly on the rise- and men like Gromov were undoubtedly high-fliers- would routinely be sent to be blooded in Afghanistan, and how far the war had a definite impact on their careers. Similarly, a look at the men who ran the Soviet military, the Defence Ministers and their Deputies, reveals no especially significant penetration of veterans of the war into senior posts, even if one accepts the argument that Marshal Yazov should be counted as an honorary afganets on the grounds that he was heavily involved in developing new training programmes drawing on the experience of Afghanistan. This is open to debate, though, since the whole point about the notion of the Brotherhood was that they had been tempered not in training but in real action. Besides, many of the lessons that he was incorporating into training programmes before his appointment as Defence Minister were drawn more from general experience and the lessons learnt from the new technologies than from Afghanistan. Nor can one accept the argument that it takes time for any cohort to reach the apex of the hierarchy. The Gorbachev era saw a rapid tumover within the military leadership and the promotion of younger officers into key posts. Colonel General Achalov, for example, was promoted from command of the Airborne Forces to a new Deputy Defence Minister's post (in charge of internal security) in 1991 at the age of 45, yet he was no afganets. Marshal Shaposhnikov was able to rise from an operational post to command of the Air Force to Defence Minister in just two years, despite his lack of combat experience. If there was a single, compact and self-helping 'Afghan Brotherhood' within the high command, then it was singularly ineffective. THE 'ANDROPOV BROTHERHOOD'

The greatest afganets penetration of the high command was in 1985, with Sokolov as Defence Minister, Maksimov heading the Strategic

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TABLE 10.3 Afgansty in the highest military posts, 1979-91 Post

Period

-1984 1984-87 1987-91 1991Chief of the General Staff -1984 1984-88 1988-91 1991 Main Political Admin. -1985 1985-90 1990-91 C-in-C, Warsaw Pact -1989 1989-90 1991First Deputy Minister -1985 1985-86 1986-89 1989-91 1991 Ground Forces -1980 1980-84 1985-88 1989-91 1991 Strategic Rocket Forces -1985 1985Air Defence Forces -1987 1987-91 Air Force -1984 1984-90 1990-91 1991 Defence Minister

Officer

Mar D Ustinov Mar Sokolov Mar D Yazov Mar E Shaposhnikov Mar N Ogarkov Mar D Akhromeev Gen Moiseev Gen Lobov Gen A Epishev Gen A Lizichev Col Gen N Shlyaga MSU V Kulikov Gen P Lushev Gen V Lobov Mar S Sokolov Gen V Petrov Gen P Lushev Gen V Kochetov Col Gen Grachev Gen I Pavlovskii MSU V Petrov Gen E I vanovskii Gen V Varennikov Col Gen V Semenov CMA V Tolubko Gen Yu Maksimov CMA A Koldunov Gen I Tret'yak CMA P Kutakov MA A Efimov Mar E Shaposhnikov Col Gen P Deinekin

Afganets?

Yes

Yes Yes planning

Yes Yes

Yes planning Yes Yes analysis

The Navy has been omitted for obvious reasons.

Rocket Forces and Akhromeev (in Afghanistan 1980-81, as head of the Operations Group) Chief of the General Staff and a possible candidate to replace the ailing and ageing minister. This was, after all, the time of the ascendancy of perhaps the most interesting 'afganets brotherhood', one which spread to link afgantsy with 'outsiders', in a technocratic

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circle that formed before and in Afghanistan and whose political position and outlook provides an interesting window onto the condition of the officer corps during perestroika. After all, there were clear reasons why the High Command would support reform of some kind in the early 1980s. A new military technological revolution was looming, with neutron bombs, cruise missiles, stealth aircraft, new-generation command, control and communications systems and, above all, the chimerical 'Star Wars', the Strategic Defence Initiative, which threatened to render the USSR's hard-built nuclear arsenal all but obsolete. Soviet industry and technology simply could not keep up, and while effort could be concentrated on matching a project here or a system there, or having stolen Western items copied, the general base of Soviet defence technology was falling behind. Meanwhile, the military came face to face with the social and political consequences of Brezhnevism, from the need to indoctrinate an increasing proportion of ever more disaffected youths (especially Central Asians) to the rise of pacifism, drug abuse and indiscipline in the ranks. Chto de/at'? What was to be done? For some what was needed was for the state to brandish the knout, a new discipline. For others, the remedy was intelligent and cautious reform, the classic 'reform that ye may preserve' kind of sophisticated conservatism. Andropov, in his dry, cerebral and yet, thanks to his experience at the KGB, reassuringly authoritarian way seemed to promise, as Archie Brown put it, discipline and reform. Consider Colonel General Boris Gromov, last commander of the 40th Army in Afghanistan. From his activist creed that soldiers may forgive an officer his mistakes but never forgive one who fails to provide leadership, to his much televised gesture of being the last soldier of the OKSV out of Afghanistan, he fitted the media archetype: brave, able, decisive, unconventional. On one level this was intentional; part of Gromov's job in the 40th Army was to be front man while Varennikov planned and engineered an orderly withdrawal. But there was also much truth in the image, and this was reflected in his career. A mere colonel in 1980, that year he was transferred to Afghanistan as a divisional chief of staff, alongside divisional political officer (later to be Gromov's political deputy for the 40th Army) Lev Serebrov and under Yurii Shatalin, the man who would command the Interior Army under Gromov during the latter's brief period as First Deputy Minister of the Interior. After graduating with a gold medal from the General Staff Academy, Gromov returned to Afghanistan in 1986-87. Then, after a brief spell heading a military district, he came back a third time as 40th Army commander in June 1987. There he also came into direct contact with General

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Varennikov, later to describe Gromov as 'one of the most hard-working and responsible members of the armed forces today'. So far this may appear to be simply the natural friendships and contacts that might develop between officers serving in the same theatre at the same time. But it is possible to theorise on connections going beyond the purely personal and military. Gromov graduated from the Frunze Military Academy in 1972, alongside Major Mikhail Moiseevlater Colonel General and Chief of the General Staff. Furthermore, this was in the immediate aftermath of Colonel General Aleksei Radzievskii's appointment to head the Frunze. An unconventional military theorist, Radzievskii both emphasised the importance of technology in war and encouraged initiative on the part of the students. Secondly, Gromov distinguished himself in the North Caucasus Military District in the mid-1970s, and was even the subject of a report by the district commander to the District Military Council which highlighted his professionalism and his concern to develop initiative at lower levels than was the norm in Soviet forces. Since at least 1969, Mikhail Gorbachev had been a member of that Council. Hence there arose a circle of progressive technocrats, interested in maintaining technological parity and therefore supportive of the early plans for reform under Andropov and then Gorbachev. It included Varennikov, Moiseev, Rodionov (OKSV commander, 1985-86) and Gromov as wen as Chief of Staff Akhromeev. Linking afganets and nonafganets officers in a mutually supportive union, they regarded themselves at first solidly within the mainstream of army politics, resisting both the extreme liberalism of some junior officer factions and the obdurate and rather short-sighted conservatism of other military groups. Yet as perestroika gained its own momentum, Gorbachev increasingly distanced himself from their Andropovian concept of reform, as a means solely to modernising and legitimising the existing order. Many of the circle, moreover, found themselves trapped or discomfited by events. Akhromeev was forced to resign in 1988, when Gorbachev's unilateral declaration of arms cuts at the UN General Assembly destroyed his credibility with a conservative military bureaucracy. Moiseev was required to preside over the dissolution of the military structure in Eastern Europe and the imposition of those cuts. Varennikov's soldiers became riot policemen, desperately struggling to hold the line against the pressures unleashed, he felt, by the politicians. Rodionov's career - one tipped by many for the top - was blocked by public opinion when he obeyed his orders and dispersed Georgian nationalists with riot gas and violence. Gromov himself, while making the right noises about the lack of threat from a united Germany and the possibility of the disbandment of

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the Warsaw Pact, was also, in his own eyes, being put into an increasingly untenable position. Having endured the scorn of Ukrainian nationalists while heading the Kiev Military District and been drafted in to advise Varennikov on the investiture of rebellious Baku in 1990, he was later that year transferred to the Ministry of the Interior, where he became First Deputy to hard-liner Boris Pugo. There his role clearly was to preside over the expansion and development of the MVD's Interior Army, then commanded by Colonel General Yurii Shatalin, once his superior officer in Afghanistan. Gromov's 'dowry' was a number of army units which were brought under MVD control, including the 55th Irkutsk-Pinsk Motor-Rifle Division, commanded by a fellow afganets, Major General Vladimir Neverov. This was during Gorbachev's brief 'winter alliance' with the hard-liners, and Gromov took part in the planning of what would, in effect, be a 'state coup', a reimposition of central authority on the fragmenting USSR. This project, a development of the Brezhnev-era Operation Mete/' ('Snowstorm') emergency plan, became a focus for this circle, and involved Gromov, Shatalin, Varennikov, Rodionov and Moiseev, as well as allies in the KGB. The plan had a couple of isolated dress rehearsals, with the suppression of Lithuanian nationalism in January 1991 and a war-game exercise to hold Moscow against serious unrest in February 1991. But when Gorbachev repudiated the alliance and turned instead towards faster, deeper reform, the operation became directed towards replacing, not reinforcing the national leadership. The depth of this group's involvement in the coup, and the centrality of its role, is borne out by the initial post-coup 'purge'. While Rodionov, on the sidelines by virtue of his post as head of the Voroshilov General Staff Academy, managed to survive the immediate aftermath, Gromov, Moiseev, Shatalin and Varennikov were all removed from their posts. Akhromeev, the self-confessed 'last of the Mohicans', committed suicide, although not personally implicated, at the destruction of the state, Party and system he had held so dear. Yet while Moiseev and Shatalin were retired and Varennikov arrested, Gromov was simply transferred back to the Ministry of Defence. He was later to be fully rehabilitated as having acted to prevent military action being used against Russian president Yeltsin. This seems hard to believe. He had played a pivotal role in the preparations for such an operation. His MVD troops spearheaded the operation. He had apparently signed the open letter Slovo k narodu ('A word to the people') which was effectively the manifesto of the coup. He was later to claim to have been on holiday during the coup and in ignorance of it, while the signature was, according to him, not his own. Whether his escapology reflects a belated decision to distance himself from the plotters, genuine opposition

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or the protection of powerful allies (Russian Vice-President, one-time political rival yet fellow afganets Rutskoi, perhaps?), it underlines just how fragile and temporary such alliances can be. EASTERNERS AND TURKS

In their involvement with the coup these afgantsy worked with another, overlapping circle which arose in the eastern commands, especially through Chief of the General Staff Moiseev, who may turn out to have been a critical 'matchmaker'. Defence Minister Yazov and Moiseev had generally been seen as closely allied, but they did not quite prove to be the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of military perestroika, the latter developing a rather harder and more hawkish line on defending the military against civilian 'meddling'. Indeed, the Easterners may have been dragged into the coup by their more activist comrades, wellconnected Moiseev and charismatic, forceful Varennikov who was, after all, to show a great knack for collecting allies and admirers including Colonel General Achalov, tellingly the Deputy Defence Minister in charge of internal security in the period 1990-91. For the Easterners cohered around the former senior staff of the Central Asian and Far Eastern Military Districts (SVO and DVO, respectively), which were closely affiliated not only with each other, but also with the forces in Afghanistan. One of the two main invasion forces was formed of troops from the SVO- the 360th and 201st Motor-Rifle Divisions - and both districts were used to train, supply and muster forces for the war, as well as base out-of-theatre transport and combat aircraft. The appointment of Marshal Y azov as Defence Minister in 1987 finally brought the Easterners into the centre. Yazov had had a long association with both SVO and DVO, having been the DVO's First Deputy Commander during 1977-79, Commander of the SVO, 1980-84 and DVO, 1984-87. When he became Defence Minister, at his first opportunity he brought his Chief of Staff from DVO, Moiseev, in as Chief of the General Staff, while his successor in the SVO, General Lushev, was made Commander-in-Chief of Warsaw Pact Combined Forces. General Tret'yak, Yazov's predecessor and former commander of DVO, was shifted to command of the Air Defence Forces at a time when the threat of a new generation of cruise missiles and stealth bombers was making the service increasingly important. Colonel General Vladimir Vostrov, who had served under Yazov in both SVO and DVO, became chief of the Main Directorate of Military Educational Establishments in 1988. Another Afghan-related circle appears to have developed around the structures of TurkVO, the main district involved in supporting the

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war effort. Again, along with many of the troops involved in the invasion (the 66th and 357th Motor-Rifle Divisions), hospitals and supply systems for the war were based in the area, as well as many aircraft which flew over Afghanistan. Just as importantly, the district established the key training centres for the OKSV, both to prepare troops for the war, and to learn and propagate its lessons. Anecdotal evidence suggests that relations between the 'in-country' commanders and the structures in TurkVO were not always harmonious, and this would seem likely. It is, after all, a constant of war that the men at the sharp end believe that they have a right to whatever they want, whenever they want it, while those in the rear area- which was, after all, TurkVO's function- are more concerned with budgets, resources and practicalities. Such differences in priorities and experiences provide fertile soil for disputes and mutual antagonism. Hence the Turks seem to have kept themselves at something of an arm's length from the 'genuine' Afghan Brotherhood and their Easterner allies. Colonel General Grigori Krivosheev, for example, TurkVO chief of staff in 1979-84 and member of the General Staff Operations Group 1987-89, was as crabby and cantankerous a critic of reform and decay as could be found, not least due to his thankless task in supervising the draft. Yet he played no apparent part in the coup, either because he was not approached by the plotters or was unwilling to participate. His previous commander, and the Turks' most elevated member, General Maksimov, also played no role in the coup and was not compromised by it, whereas Yazov ended his career on trial for treason and Moiseev and Tret'yak were promptly relieved of their duties. THE AUGUST COUP

It is worth dwelling on the August Coup of 1991, because it revealed

loyalties and forced people to declare their allegiances. The resistance to the coup also brought to light another Afghan-related circle, or rather two specific groupings of younger officers who could be characterised not so much as 'liberals' or 'democrats' as 'post-Gorbachevians', within the paratroopers and the Leningrad Military District (LenVO). Pavel Grachev, commander of the airborne forces, emerged as a key player. The airborne forces - VDV - had had a key role in Afghanistan, and senior figures such as Grachev and Colonel General A Slyusar', who went on to command the VDV training academy at Ryazan', had done well from the war. Indeed, Grachev, ironically enough, had also gained from the rise of the military conservatives: the promotion of Achalov to his shadowy Deputy Defence Ministership

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opened up the command of the VDV to Grachev and prompted a general reshuffle. Grachev had begun to acquire a political profile in January 1991, when he publicly opposed the use of paratroopers in ethnic conflicts, seeking to shift the burden more squarely onto the KGB and MVD. This was an essentially parochial defence of his own interests, and it clearly was not seen by the coup plotters as reason enough to feel especially wary of him. None the less, this, plus the fact that his former political deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Sergei Kudinov, went on to become a senior member of the reformist unofficial (and essentially impotent) officers' union Shchit, was enough to provide him with the 'liberal' credentials he needed to establish himself as a 'democratic general' when he opposed the coup. Len VO developed quite a liberal and afganets profile while led by Colonel General Viktor Ermakov, the OKSV's commander in 1982-83. It may well be significant that he had been TurkVO deputy commander in 1983--84, and hence retained links to this particular circle. Representatives of veterans' groups who met him found him realistic and openminded, and his successor, Colonel General Samsonov, inherited a command team with more than its share of afgantsy, in Lieutenant General Valerii Mironov, First Deputy Commander in 1989-91 and Major General Ivan Ryabchenko, a deputy commander in 1990. Ryabchenko had been the paratroop commander involved in the original intervention in 1979, while Mironov was to be appointed commander of the politically sensitive Baltic Military District after the coup. It also seems that the presence of such afgantsy in the 'enemy' ranks convinced Gromov (possibly assigned the task of clearing the way for an assault on Yeltsin's parliament building, the so-called 'White House') not to throw his weight behind the coup. Certainly men like Grachev and his charismatic ally and fellow afganets Major General Aleksandr Lebed would have had more weight than the half-hearted Yazov, while Mironov had been Gromov's commander once and had handed the 108th division on to him as his successor. Grachev had also contacted the commander of the air forces, Shaposhnikov who, in turn, was a personal friend of Russian Vice-President Rutskoi, from their days serving together in the Odessan Military District. The coup failed not because of Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank, nor yet the bravery of the ordinary citizens who demonstrated their defiance, whether in Kiev or Kishinev, but because of such informal connections and the collapse of the functional unity of the military and security forces. The presence of so many cliques and circles, created in part by the new variations that had crept into what had been an essentially homogeneous military establishment (such as between combat veterans

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and the rest, radicals and Andropovian conservatives) and the new political environment in which they operated, destroyed that unity. There had always been differences of opinion and faction within the military, such as the pre- and post-Great Patriotic War generations and supporters of Marshal Zhukov versus those of his rival and comrade Konev during that war, but new pressures opened these fissures wide. PROFESSIONALISM AND POLITICAL CONTROL

The Soviet military had, after all, become an integral part of the Partystate elite, nomenklaturists in shoulder-boards. The question of the military's role within the Soviet system has certainly been a hotly debated one. Roman Kolkowicz portrayed it as a distinct interest group and pulled this into a model based on Weber's 'castration of charisma': as the Party's authority waned over the 1970s while foreign commitments mushroomed, it had to turn to alliance and then fusion with the army to gain both a necessary tool and some basic and symbolic mystique, putting the soldiers in an increasingly dominant role. Yet in practice, the soldiers, in both formal and functional terms, were unequivocally subordinated to a Party doctrinally bound to fear and suspect Bonapartism. The KGB thoroughly penetrated the military, and far from being able to dictate to the political leadership, the military became the Party's 'Swiss army knife', used for every needy task from bringing in the crops to teaching Uzbeks Russian. Gorbachev kept Defence Minister Yazov a mere candidate (non-voting) member of the Politburo, and when generals like Ogarkov, Chief of the General Staff until 1984, sought to question the political line, they were swept aside without real effort. Given that all senior Soviet officers were also Party members, and incorporated into every level of Party and government, William Odom has contended that military politics were simply bureaucratic politics, that generals were, as Richard Gabriel put it in his The New Red Legions, 'bureaucrats in uniform, serving the military [as in]. . . any other government position'. The military could not even rely on alliances within a 'military-industrial complex', since the defence industry establishment was quite separate and often at odds with a military establishment that felt it provided them with the weapons that it wanted to build rather than those that they needed. While the military, like any other large functional body, would fight its political corner, it was, as often as not, riven by internal competition, picking up allies within and outside the military. In the late 1970s, for example, the experiences of the Middle East wars sparked a debate about the future of the tank in the days of the guided missile. The infantry and helicopter lobbies

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agitated for an increased share of the budget, the tankists and the tank industry for more and better armour, and the latter won. In the 1980s, the prospect of the US SDI 'Star Wars' programme brought its own turf wars. The navy and the shipyards claimed that the answer was a larger fleet of nuclear missile submarines hiding beneath the ice caps. The air force and its related industries extolled the virtues of air-breathing cruise missiles fired from the new 'Blackjack' bomber. The air defence forces lobbied for lasers and particle beams of their own. Yet these were essentially situational, practical and temporary divisions and alliances. The USSR was not a militarised society. Instead, it had a socialised military, one which had become integrated within the overall state structure; divisions between groups of comrades or arm of service interests meant less than the common identity provided by membership of the Party-state's elite. The Russian and Soviet tradition had, after all, been one of permeable civil-military boundaries, since Peter the Great's 'service state' and the tsarist use of the army as administrative tool, agent of modernisation and instrument of socialisation. The formative experience of the Civil War had kept that tradition close to the heart of the Soviet state, as evidenced by the high level (95 per cent) of Party and Komsomol membership in the military, the high level of involvement in real and ceremonial policy fora and the close links that developed between civilian politicians and military figures. This has been weakest during the coincidence of wars, which exalt professionalism over political correctness and create personal bonds far stronger than those of peacetime, and a period of crisis or transition in the state ideology. In the First World War, soldiers, even aristocratic officers, found themselves cast adrift by the collapse of tsarism, building new loyalties to the Bolsheviks or other forces and traditions. In the Second World War, morale and identity that had been shattered by the 1937 purges of the Red Army were rebuilt, while Stalinism as an ideology floundered and had to rely instead on a pragmatic melange of Russian patriotism and day-by-day expediency. Afghanistan plus perestroika was to bring its own revolution to the identity of the officer corps. FROM SOCIALISED TO PROFESSIONALISED?

The result of the chaos and economic collapse of the later Gorbachev era was to increase the officers' sense both of their distinct professional identity and their grievance at the increasing burden that the state was putting on them. For its ability to reward and provide for them was dwindling at the very time when its need for them increased. Officers began resigning in droves, predominantly the younger and more educated among them, and in a survey for the Military Political

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Academy, almost three-quarters cited the poor conditions of service as the reason. As of September 1990, more than 173,000 professional soldiers were without their due accommodation, even before the withdrawal of troops from Eastern Europe; by December 1991, the figure was over 400,000 - of whom at least 74,000 were living in the worst possible conditions, including unheated tank sheds, outside toilets and overcrowded hostels without running water. Meanwhile, inflation was eating into their salaries, with regimental commanders earning half as much as city bus drivers, and a promised pay rise of 90 per cent for 1992 comparing poorly with projected inflation of 200+ per cent. Similarly, the Party's authority and unity were destroyed by the corrosive mix of ideological decay and demokratizatsiya, the elites being forced to find new constituencies and legitimators. The military had already contained all sorts of circles, alliances and communities of opinion. These ranged from service loyalties (the VDV, like paratroopers the world over, looked down on the 'mudfoot' infantry, while the fighter pilots scorned the messochniki, 'porters', of the transport aviation), through groups of cadets from the same year at academy to simple comrades-in-arms, alliances and acquaintanceships which were multiple and overlapping. General Igor' Rodionov, for example, was an afganets, but he was also a conservative, and an army man. He was a member of a circle of friends who had all served in the 24th Samaro-Ul'yanovsk 'Iron' Division in the 1970s, which also included General Generalov. It is difficult to say which identity would have felt stronger at which time. It would thus have been surprising had Afghanistan not featured, not least given the heightened emotionalism and the common memories provided by genuine experience in a war zone. Yet the Afghan brotherhoods were just part of the process. There were also the 'liquidators' of the Chernobyl' operation (especially within the air force and the chemical troops), 'Transcaucasians' who served in the gritty and ultimately futile peace-keeping operations in Armenia and Azerbaijan, even a 'Coup generation' united in their resistance to the August putsch, looking to men like Rutskoi and Grachev for leadership. Against the backdrop both of the collapse of the Party's central authority and the increasing technical demands on the officer corps, this may mean that the new Russian military is in the process of becoming a distinct interest group. Bengt Abrahamsson's theory, for example, is that the increased complexity of war is inexorably professionalising armed forces and establishing them as autonomous (because of their specialised skills), cohesive and organised political actors. If this is true, the chaos and factionalism within the military is part of the collapse of the old model, and will eventually stabilise with the appreciation that

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more unites the professional soldiers than divides them. Others see the military's lack of a unifying myth or clear notion of an 'enemy' in the wake of the end of the Cold War as both cause and product of a crisis of identity, underlining this transitional, potentially metamorphic stage in the Soviet/Russian military. In this light, the various 'Afghan brotherhoods' should be seen as symptoms of social and political change. Yet it might also prove to be Afghanistan that prevents this evolution. Leaders such as General Rutskoi, powerful in both political and military circles, retain the potential to halt this divorce of politics and the military. There may be a coup, or a martial law regime or a reassertion of Russia's traditional close linkages between the political and military spheres. Either way, the traumas of the war ensured that the military was not only unable or unwilling to prevent the dissolution of the USSR, but unable to insulate itself from the wider political turmoil and realignment of that dissolution and the rise of the successor states. THE RISE OF THE AFGANETS OFFICER

There was, therefore, no single 'Afghan Brotherhood', no tight-knit band of 'combat brothers' sharing a common outlook and bonded for life. Instead, the war contributed to the creation of a new officer corps, one with genuine combat experience and internal loyalties and alliances, all of which contributed to the slow and patchy emancipation of the military from the Party-state. This was a process which both contributed to and was confirmed by its failure to support the putschists in August 1991. If on the whole the war probably neither made nor broke careers, resulted in no major changes in the criteria by which officers were promoted and brought no 'outsiders' to the top, it certainly provided the rising cohort of junior and middle-ranking officers with a vivid 'mid-life formative experience'. It introduced a new paradigm of conflict and a new idiom for relationships within the 400,000-strong officer corps and provided a spur to genuine professionalism. This is particularly true of those officers who operated on the 'tactical' level, of ranks up to colonel- the men who, in other words, saw the war close up. While anecdotal evidence is rife, there are also more empirical sources allowing the compilation of a profile of the afganets officer. It is possible to study the capsule biographies in the army's Voennyi vestnik ('Military Herald'), a journal aimed at a junior officer readership, and which covered the tactical lessons of the war in greatest detail. In the period 1985-86, the decorated or praised Afghan veterans were mainly captains and majors (64 per cent) and came predominantly from the airborne forces or the combat engineers (53 per

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TABLE10.4 Soviet military operations, 1979-91

1979 1982 1986 1988 1989 1990 1991

Invasion of Afghanistan (fighting until 1989) Involvement in Israeli-Syrian air war over Lebanon 'Military advisers' involved in clashes in Ethiopia Disaster relief: Chernobyl' nuclear accident Internal security: riots in Kazakhstan Internal security: Armenian-Azeri civil war begins (continuing after the collapse of the USSR) Disaster relief: Armenian earthquake Disaster relief: Ufa railway disaster Internal security: demonstrations in Tbilisi Internal security: riots in Uzbekistan Internal security: Reimposition of central control on Baku Internal security: 'Vilnius events' Internal security: Joint Army-Militia patrols on the streets Internal security: Vilnius TV station seizure Internal security: 28 March protest in Moscow August Coup

'Military operations' here includes disaster relief and other major deployments of the military in an emergency role.

cent - 59 per cent if one includes the elite reconnaissance troops), underlining the extent to which these services bore the brunt of the 'road war' and the counter-insurgency effort. All but one (transferred to a military commissariat) had gone on to command larger formations, and a quarter had been immediately assigned to military academies for the sort of advanced training regarded as a prerequisite for rapid advancement. An underlying leitmotif to all accounts of these officers was that they learned how war really is fought and had acquired or retained the flexibility needed to adjust to new technological, doctrinal and political conditions: a 'golden fund for the army' in Colonel General Akhromeev's words. While some Soviet claims could be discounted as attempts to encourage reform by using them as exemplars, the same message was received by those Western observers who had been able to get to know officers and sample their mood outside the pages of the military press. Of course, Afghanistan was not the only source of genuine experience: glasnost' finally brought to public record the number of troops serving overseas, the contingents of 'internationalists' from Syria to Ethiopia, while the decay of the USSR provided its fair share of experience within its boundaries, from Chernobyl' to NagornoKarabakh. The war was also a very limited one: to take the most often

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cited parallel, at the peaks of their respective interventions in Vietnam and Afghanistan, the USA was deploying 21 per cent of its forces (1970) while the Soviets deployed no more than 2.1 per cent (1985). Overall, though, the rise of combat experienced officers within the Soviet military, at a time in which political, social and technological changes were throwing the very precepts of Soviet military doctrine into question, was also inevitably to play a part in the debate that this engendered, not least given that afgantsy had moved to head several key military educational institutions: Slyusar' at the Ryazan' VDV academy, Major General Denisenko at the Tbilisi Higher Artillery Command School, Colonel General Kizyun at the Lenin Military-Political Academy and, critically, Rodionov at the Voroshilov General Staff Academy. As on so many other issues, the war was to contribute to changes already in process and to highlight problems already noted; to accentuate and accelerate rather than to reverse and change, and this is the second key aspect of the war's consequences for the professional soldiers. NOTES 1. D. Leebaert and T. Dickinson (eds), Soviet Strategy and New Military

Thinking (1992), p. 173

11

The Art of War Of course you had to learn. It is much easier to learn when the alternative is a zinc coffin, you know. Captain, afganets

The Soviet army came a long way in the course of the Afghan War, and two examples seem to illustrate this to perfection. One soldier recalled an operation in March 1980, when a unit of mechanised infantry, a mix of tanks and soldiers in wheeled armoured personnel carriers (APCs), was sent to flush out some Afghan army deserters, gone to ground in a village to the east of Kabul. The force rolled serenely in single file down the only road, fully 'buttoned up' -in other words, with all the hatches shut and bolted and everyone locked safely behind inches of armour plate. The major problem with this is that the only visibility came from little periscopes or through thick slabs of dust-caked armoured glass, and no one saw the Afghan soldier who calmly stood up alongside the road and threw a hand grenade under the leading personnel carrier, whose front wheels then obligingly blew in opposite directions. While the second APC's gunner frantically swung his machine-gun to bear on the enemy, the driver failed to realise what was going on and piled straight into the back of the disabled leader. Relying on the rather more primitive means of a clean pair of heels, the Afghan promptly escaped in the ensuing smoke and confusion. It took another ten minutes for the unit to reform in rather more effective combat order, tanks to the fore, infantry on foot to screen the carriers, which in turn were ready to provide covering fire, all according to the training manuals. By this time, the deserters had already fled into the hills. So the unit settled for burning the village to the ground and trundled disconsolately back to base, pausing once to repair a tank which had thrown a tread when an out-of-practice driver gunned his engine while negotiating soft sand, and once to bargain with a passing Afghan for some grain for the commissary, which was eventually confiscated anyway. This is a particularly ludicrous episode, admittedly, but by no means uncharacteristic of the

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mayhem when, after the elite spearhead forces had done their work, the second echelon units rolled in, manned by fat reservists ten years out of uniform, callow conscripts scarcely sure which bit of the gun was the dangerous end and lazy, time-serving officers who had counted on being given a soft posting in some remote spot on the southern border of the Union. Lev, the soldier who recalled the operation, would have laughed himself silly at the memory, had he not lost a leg when that single grenade blew a red-hot wheel-axle up into the troop compartment. A contrast could be made with another operation, in November 1987. A spy satellite with infra-red cameras picked up an anomalous trace in the eastern province of Kandahar, near the Pakistani border. That night, a high-flying reconnaissance aircraft took more pictures, which were digitally transmitted to the intelligence headquarters in Kabul. By the next morning, the pictures had been evaluated and it was clear that a supply caravan with arms and ammunition from Pakistan was heading westwards. Up to date maps and intelligence reports were used to plot the three most likely routes that it would take, and the next night, Spetsnaz commandos were lifted by helicopter to the area. Landing far enough away from the rebels to avoid suspicion, they travelled the rest of the way on foot, at a steady jog, and by dawn had settled in ambush sites, in camouflaged hides. There they stayed, scarcely moving, until mid-afternoon, when one of the outposts reported that the caravan was on its way. Immediately, a force of assault troops back at base was loaded into helicopters and rushed towards the location. Other helicopter gunships and attack aircraft, which had awaited the signal, also took off. Once the helicopters were almost within earshot, the commandos sprang the ambush, raking the convoy with machine-gun fire and rockets and blanketing it with coloured smoke grenades to confuse the rebels and pin-point them for the attack jets, which were already dropping out of the sky: three planes, each carrying several hundred rockets and a heavy cannon, can turn a valley into a killing zone with great ease. Then the gunships crested the rise, while the assault troops disembarked from their helicopters and moved in to mop up what little opposition there was left. In less than a quarter of an hour, the rebels lost over a hundred men and two hundred pack animals' loads of materiel, including Chinese long-range rockets; the Soviets lost three men. Maksim, the hale and hearty soldier involved, recalled the operation with satisfaction: 'that was my kind of battle'. Of course, the comparison is unfair, a single triumph to set against an isolated blunder. Yet these two examples do exemplify the way in which the war changed, and the way that the Soviet army evolved during its prosecution. It would have been surprising had it not, especially given that the Soviet High Command was the earnest inheritor of a

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supremely intellectual approach to war. Subsumed within a greater Communist tradition, of the 'scientific' distillation of human experience in the quest to uncover and solve the dialectic, the logic that drives history, this should have produced an unparalleled concentration on learning its lessons. Of course, as with every other facet of Soviet life, things were often not as they should be, and the quest to find convenient carpets under which to sweep embarrassing findings thrown up by Afghanistan for too long obscured the issue. Indeed, many professional soldiers maintained that the conditions in Afghanistan were so unique, so far removed from other operations they might be called upon to fight, that the long-term lessons were almost irrelevant. But those self-same officers were also, clearly, gearing up to fight a very different kind of war in the 1990s, a war based on smaller units, operating with far greater independence in a mobile and fluid, lower-density battlefield. In part this was the product of changing military technology and the demands and budgetary constraints put on them by political developments, but it also reflected lessons learned in the mountains and 'green zones' of Afghanistan. In addition, as the USSR increasingly relied on its military to keep the peace at horne, Afghanistan clearly had an impact on perceptions of the 'inner frontline'. Whatever the training manuals said, the probable enemy of the 1990s was not GI Joe or Tommy Atkins, but someone speaking the same language, using the same Kalashnikovs, and in a guerrilla war zone rather closer to home. THE SOLDIER

On one level it is easy to discern the changes of the 1980s just by looking at the Soviet soldier, kitted and caparisoned for war. The soldiers who invaded Afghanistan in 1979 looked much like their counterparts of the 1941-45 Great Patriotic War. A few scouts and commandos wore bulky, clumsy camouflaged coveralls, the rest made do with crudely made uniforms and greatcoats of khaki, grey, brown and every shade in between, emblazoned with the sort of large, brightly coloured insignia to make a sniper's heart sing. Lacking body armour of any kind, they were only protected by their 1940-vintage steel helmets. The soldiers who rolled back across the Friendship Bridge in 1989 looked very different. Over their camouflaged battledress they wore armoured vests, and all insignia on them were in muted tones of low visibility. Their headgear consisted of either the old SSh-40 helmet or the newer SSh-60, but both were camouflaged or covered with netting to make them less obvious targets. Alternatively, the impractical little pilotka side cap had been replaced with a new, peaked forage cap, also

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in camouflage material. In short, the army that left Afghanistan looked like a modern one. The changes in personal equipment were not just cosmetic. The venerable AKM-47 rifle, essentially a refined version of a 1943-vintage Nazi German weapon, was replaced by the new AK-74. A light, but equally reliable weapon, its smaller, higher-velocity bullets would spin and mushroom inside the target, to messy and lethal effect. The American army had made a similar change in Vietnam when they traded the M-14 rifle for the M-16. Underneath the rifle, a soldier might fit the new BG-15 grenade launcher or he might carry one of the new RPG-18 or -22 rocket launchers, or the squad rocket-propelled grenade launcher: not the faithful old RPG-7 that had lasted the Soviet army from 1962, but the newer RPG-16 or even the RPO or RPO-A flamerocket launchers or AGS-17 automatic grenade launcher. Along with new machine-guns and automatic grenade launchers, these gave the infantry a terrific increase in their available firepower, and reflected the realities of guerrilla war, where one can not always rely on neatly preprogrammed fire support from behind the lines or from accompanying tanks - ultimately the infantry unit must be able to operate as an independent force on the battlefield. BRONYA: MILITARY SUPPORT VEHICLES

Not that the infantryman would necessarily have to act alone. Afghanistan also acted as a stimulus for the Soviets actually to deal with problems that had been evident for years but which no one had ever put any political will into solving, as well as shortcomings of the sort that only come to light in real war. The much-maligned BTR-60 armoured personnel carrier, the bronya ('armour') or, more evocatively, 'wheeled coffin' in Soviet slang, went through several incarnations. The hatches on the roof that made so much sense from a design point of view but which were a deathtrap for troops debussing under fire were first enlarged (BTR-70) then supplemented by side doors (BTR-80). The twin engines, first used to avoid the expense of designing a new, single, more powerful one, but which were forever becoming unsynchronised, were eventually replaced altogether (BTR-80). Similarly the BMP-1 carrier/combat vehicle, whose sharkish lines had so impressed many Western and Soviet military observers, found itself evolving at speed. It shed the fuel tanks built into thinly-armoured rear doors that a single well-aimed bullet could so easily explode. Its low-pressure antitank gun, big enough to annoy a tank, but too small and inaccurate to kill it, was traded for a lower calibre but more effective and versatile autocannon, able to rake a mountainside in a

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burst and elevate high enough to cover the ridgeline, too. The original version proved so dangerous in battle that soldiers would often ride on top of their vehicles where they felt safer, rather than inside them. Whereas the tank is hardly the ideal weapon for low-intensity mountain warfare, and the last divisional tank regiment in the OKSV- the 5th Guards Motor-Rifle Division's 'Prague' Regiment - made a wellpublicised withdrawal from the country in 1986, the BMP could provide the infantry with mobile, protected close-in fire support. SUPPORTING THE TROOPS: ARTILLERY

A lesson quick to be appreciated, if not so quick to solve, was that fire support, from artillery or from aircraft, had to be there when it was needed by the troops on the ground, not just when it was scheduled by the overall tactical plan. This was an issue noted as early as 1981 in reports of 'tactical exercises' in Afghanistan, just another stage in the progressive, de facto decentralisation of control down from the grand masters to the pawns and knights of the board. Artillery played a key role in operations in Afghanistan, as the 'Gods of War' had in all Soviet and Russian wars, and as they tend to in all counter-insurgency operations. Given the difficulties in coming to grips with guerrillas on their home terrain, and the political pressure to keep casualties to a minimum, the high-tech invaders were forced to fall back on their longrange, advanced but also characteristically undiscriminating artillery. A battery of howitzers or rocket launchers could, after all, lob shrapnel and explosive from a safe distance, and if a village also got in the way, that was a sad but unavoidable by-product of war, the sort to discount with such sanitised terms as 'collateral damage'. Doctrine and technology, as ever, evolved in symbiosis, and the 1980s saw the deployment of new weapons systems able to meet and also requiring this more mobile, flexible approach. The S0-120 selfpropelled gun/howitzer, for example, was built to provide paratroopers with a fast, responsive and powerful artillery system of their own, and was in due course adapted to a more conventional chassis for the mechanised infantry. Hence artillery and infantry operated increasingly closely together. Whereas until 1983, the artillery would support the ground forces from separate command structures, by 1984, the two were beginning to be brought together: artillery units would combine several different systems, such as mortars, howitzers and rocket launchers, and they would liaise far more closely with the troops on the ground. A token of the importance of the artillery in Afghanistan may be the rise in 1983 of Major General A. P. Lebedev to Deputy Chief of Artillery Troops with special responsibility for combat training. Lebedev was

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commander of TurkVO's artillery forces in 1979, and in 1979-83 was charged with co-ordinating operations in Afghanistan and deriving tactical lessons from them. Already possessed of a reputation as an expert on mountain warfare, he brought to his new post a commitment to developing the artillery's responsiveness to technological and doctrinal change and its ability to operate in new and rapidly changing environments and situations. SUPPORTING THE TROOPS: AIR-POWER

If you want to know how they came out of the Afghan conflict, you could say they wiped out the US lead built up over Vietnam. Just in general terms, their helicopter people and our helicopter people are now about even. US intelligence analyst 1

Thank God for the choppers! Yuri, ex-motor rifleman

In Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, Algeria, Nicaragua and all other modern counter-insurgency wars, airpower was the key force multiplier, enabling fewer soldiers to do the work of many. The mobility, fire-power and flexibility of the helicopter, in particular, earned it unprecedented attention from the Soviets. With helicopter pilots in Afghanistan clocking up many more flying hours than their fixed-wing counterparts (1,000 hours was quite usual although some had over 3,000 which was well above Soviet norms; in fact, a helicopter pilot in Afghanistan could fly more hours in a year than a ground-attack shturmovik pilot flew in the whole of the Great Patriotic War), these vertoletniki showed the greatest readiness to develop tactics to meet changing operational needs and experiment with their crafts' capabilities. At first aircraft were used without flair, flexibility or sophistication. The ground attackers, in particular, showed minimal initiative, flying only in the morning in predictably stereotyped formations. But this changed, and the lessons learned were general ones, transferable to other situations: effective responses to anti-aircraft (AA) fire, the importance of allowing for local conditions and terrain, the use of initiative, decentralised air control and greater integration of ground and air forces. Colonel General and later Marshal and CIS Defence Minister Shaposhnikov underlined the way in which the experiences of Afghanistan fed into general combat training. The war forced the Soviets to come to terms with hostile AA, especially light surface-to-air missiles (SAMs): first the Soviet SA-7 and

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its Chinese and Egyptian copies, then the British Blowpipe and the US Stinger, feted, not least by its manufacturers, as 'the weapon that won the Afghan war'. Some Soviet and Western observers (notably Mark Urban and Yossef Bodansky) disagree, and with good reason. The arrival of Stinger certainly provided a nasty moment or two, and in the early days of use it brought down an impressive number of aircraft, though losses to accident almost certainly exceeded those to the rebels. But the Soviets rapidly formulated a series of counter-measures: solutions to clear-cut, conventional threats were, after all, always their forte. Commandos intercepted rebel supply caravans and captured Stingers. Agents of the KGB and its Afghan counterpart bought them from rebel groups, often at bargain prices. Counter-measures on aircraft masked the infra-red signatures of their exhausts, so that the missiles could not 'see' them or blinded them with ceramic 'hot bricks' that put out a very strong infra-red signal or confused and misdirected them with flares. Transport aircraft were escorted by flare-scattering helicopters. Combat aircraft flew at irregular times and low levels to surprise the enemy. Hyperbolic claims of Stingers sweeping the skies clear owed far more to Gorbachev than Reagan, since once the political decision had been made to scale down the war, offensive operations were also stepped down, and thus there was far less need for air operations in support of ground forces. Despite pilot skills that rarely reached theoretical targets, the Soviets developed tactics to maximise their airborne edge. Aircraft were used in all sorts of roles, from spotters and spy planes to transports and ground-attack, the expensive and indiscriminate carpet bombing of 1983-84 giving way to increasingly precise attacks by new Su-25 attack jets with laser-guided bombs. Hardware evolved alongside tactics. Helicopters acquired extra armour protection, flare dispensers and, often, extra guns or door-mounted weapons. Prototype Su-25s were deployed in Afghanistan as early as 1980, and lessons learned from their performance led to a modification programme in 1988. Helicopters were extensively used to airlift rapid-response forces and assault troops into action, ranging from operation Konar, where 11,000 men were landed by helicopter to the smaller raids launched by Spetsnaz special forces, typically just two Mi-8 transports and two Mi-24 gunships, skimming in fast and low to smash a caravan or raze a supply base and then leave before the rebels could realise what was happening. These operations became so central to Soviet operations that Colonel General Yurii Grekov, 40th Army Chief of Staff 1986--88, deemed them one of the critical lessons to be drawn from the whole war, while the helicopterborne Assault Landing Brigades (Desantno-shturmovie brigady DShB) were elevated to the status of a specific service (Desantno-

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shturmovie voiska - DSh V), a signal honour for a force which found its true place in the war. SUPPORTING THE TROOPS: AMMUNITION AND ADMINISTRATION

An army does not march solely on its stomach - it requires a whole variety of supplies, from fuel and lubricant to ammunition and medicine. Afghanistan was sometimes described as a 'road war', reflecting the critical importance to the Soviets and the Kabul regime of keeping open the land transport routes, all just part of a massive exercise in logistics and administration, the largest since the Great Patriotic War and the most sophisticated in Soviet history. New Material Support Battalions (Batal'ony material'nogo obespecheniya) replaced the old Motor Transport Battalions and divisional supply elements, and fully 30 such units were deployed at the same time, alongside a separate Transport Brigade, in the struggle to keep the roads open and supplies moving. Land convoys were routed in through transshipment depots at Termez and Kushka and typically numbered 100-300 vehicles, perhaps a third of them security carriers or gun trucks. The routes were difficult (convoys consumed 70-90 per cent more petrol or 30-40 per cent more diesel than they would under European conditions) and the convoys were vulnerable to mines or ambushes, despite the evolution of Convoy Protection Units and their increasing co-ordination with the DShV. This was deemed dangerous duty, and more than 9,000 drivers received Soviet or Afghan government decorations over the period 1980-89. The Salang Tunnel, 2,700m long, through which half of the Soviet truck tonnage into Afghanistan had to pass (in the period 1980-89, transport units of the OKSVA moved 8,000,000 tons of supplies through it), was defended by military policemen of the Commandant's Service, engineers, Afghan troops and paratroopers. Pipelines were equally vulnerable, and the twin line along the Termez-Salang-Kabul road was so often breached that a special Pipeline Battalion had to be assigned to it, whose 'patrol-repair teams', often of no more than five-seven men, faced regular ambushes: in 1986 alone, for example, nearly a third of one Pipeline Battalion was decorated. Nevertheless, the Soviets were often forced to resort to expensive and vulnerable 'air bridges' using aircraft to supply urban centres encircled by strongly rebel-held territory, such as Khost in 1987. Given the propensity of Soviet equipment to break down (and the fact that they usually also had to provide maintenance support for the more poorly trained Afghan troops), the legendary ability of Soviet soldiers to 'make do' was put to the test, and they often came through

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with flying colours. A wide range of stories, both apocryphal and documented, deal with such exploits as salvaging a personnel carrier's tracks with an ordinary belt and some masking tape. Expedience, though, was also supplemented by procedure, increasing attention being given to the decentralisation of repair capabilities, thus reducing the need to send equipment to specialised workshops with the consequent loss of their availability. The Aviation Engineering Service, for example, started issuing portable repair kits and attaching qualified specialists to smaller units, while trouble-shooting training for vehicle crews was made more extensive and serious. TINKERING VS. THINKING

These various changes were just part of the natural, evolutionary development one would expect in any army, especially one with the experience of, in effect, a ten-year live ammunition exercise upon which to draw. It is noteworthy, though, how many of these shortcomings had, in fact, already come to light. The Arabs, for example, were well aware of the defects of the BMP and BTR from their conflicts with the Israelis and each other, but their experiences had not really penetrated the armour of inertia and Soviet resistance to the idea of consumer-driven planning. Yet it also represents a deeper, more significant evolution in the Soviet approach to war, one focused on the key issues of the role of the individual and the small unit, and of mobility and precision as a substitute for quantity. These are, after all, the lessons of modern technology and psychology: the individual squad now packs the firepower of a full Second World War platoon, but also costs almost as much. Modern vehicles, especially helicopters and the future generations of hovercraft, tilt-rotored aircraft and the like will give that squad unprecedented mobility on a battlefield unlikely to show clear front lines. But Afghanistan, for all its distance from the predictions of future, high-technology war, provided a taste of the future, a hint of what will be expected of the individual soldier, and an idiom and incentive to begin to explore the future battlefield. One lesson, which, it seems, armies need to relearn on a periodic basis, is that of paying sufficient attention to local conditions and circumstances and, by extension, providing scope for the initiative of the men on the spot. The Soviets paid a bloody price to learn it:

When the plane landed in Kabul and the paratroopers went out, it occurred to me that this was the first time I had consciously violated instructions. Oddly, I had no feeling but deep satisfaction ... : no instruction is dogma. afganets pilot 2

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A key weakness of the Soviet military had been, after all, its rigid, inflexible preplanning, a leftover from other wars and from staff exercises seemingly arranged more to prove points than explore possibilities. Once this had been a war-winning strength, that of absolute concentration and discipline, but not all terrain is like the rolling plains of Central Russia, not all weather Russian, not all conflicts similar to those of the Great Patriotic War. It had worked against Hitler and Napoleon, but the Afghan resistance proved ill-mannered enough to refuse to fight stand-up battles in the sort of terrain where Soviet tanks could roll over them and Soviet artillery and airpower chew through them. As it became clear that no obliging Afghan Napoleon was around to fight, the Soviets had to adapt. An interesting case study is to be found in the control and allocation of air resources, where too often avianavodchiki (officers assigned to ground units to provide forward air control and co-ordination) lacked the requisite signals training, were actually army officers ignorant of the basics of air force tactics and procedure, or were denied the operational flexibility to apply their skills. Over time, they began to improve, through both better training and combat experience. Indeed, the Soviets showed a humourless determination to develop their skills. One aircrew that failed to co-ordinate with ground troops, bombing empty trenches, found itself 'volunteering' for a spell in the infantry, the better to appreciate life on the ground. Airpower began to be genuinely integrated into overall fire support plans and used with decision and independence. In the attack a battalion avianavodchik would usually command at least four helicopters; if they were already airborne, he could call them in with at most a five-minute reaction time, a critical asset in many operations. Increasingly, ground commanders were permitted direct contact with air units rather than having to petition higher authorities for resources from the operational 'pool'. By 1988, for example, eight staging posts had been set up on the road from Kandahar to the Soviet border. Just matting sheet landing pads for four-five helicopters, with associated fuel bowsers and security units, they were spaced so that their helicopters' radii of operations overlapped. As a convoy approached the edge of one post's cover, its commander simply radioed the next to take over from him. A relatively simple, perhaps obvious procedure? Perhaps, but one striking at the heart of Soviet traditions of centralisation. It had always been a basic principle of Soviet military art that only very senior commanders could be trusted with such important decisions. After all, how could the officer on the ground appreciate the big picture? Again to use the obvious analogy, this was no free-for-all brawl, but war as chess, where the pawn was simply there to be deployed by the grandmaster.

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Yet as in so many other aspects- from ground tactics to personal politics -the experience of the Afghan war was to exalt the individual, and the qualities of initiative and flexibility over rigid pre-planning, economies of scale and monolithic unity. At first, the Soviets grappled with the problem of how to impose their centralised command structure on a low-intensity, unconventional mountain war. A satellite communications link was established between the 40th Army in Kabul and the General Staff in Moscow and between Kabul and most of the seven military district HQs in Afghanistan. Yet problems in maintaining secure and efficient communications soon become clear. Telephone and land lines were too easily cut. Microwave line-of-sight links needed regular repeating stations (seven along a single 320 km 'route') again, easy to destroy or disable. Antiquated vacuum-tube equipment overheated in the hot Afghan summers. Such measures proved increasingly inadequate, especially when the rebels began to acquire Western communications equipment themselves, and this proved a further spur to the effective decentralisation of power, as a virtue was made out of an obvious necessity. The Soviets had already been experimenting with the notion of the Operational Manoeuvre Group, a unit which would break through the enemy front line and operate semi-autonomously, destroying the enemy's supply and communications lines and thus their general will and ability to fight. The OMG was envisaged as a division-strength unit, some 10,000-15,000 strong, but the basic concept began to be applied at a lower level. The result was the Combined Arms Reinforced Battalion, around a ninth of the OMG's size, yet given the extra artillery, support and above all independence to fight a new kind of war in a new way: mobile, flexible and above all, autonomous- a pawn made into a rook, at the very least. THE HUMAN FACfOR: THE ABILITY TO FIGHT

As a result, the role of the individual became of vital importance. The previous model used by the Soviets was, in effect, based on military feudalism. The individual conscript was rote-drilled in a few, basic skills and then expected to do nothing more than obey the orders of his highly-trained, increasingly hereditary professional officers and their coopted conscript NCOs. In a way this was a paradigm of the ideal Soviet society: disciplined, effective, loyal and wholly at the disposal of the elite who alone had the facts and the authority to be able to judge the best course of action to take. This was, after all, the way in which the Great Patriotic War was won, but Afghanistan threw its limitations into stark relief. For this was a dusty, low-intensity guerrilla conflict, where the set-piece offensives so beloved by the High Command, with their

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pre-programmed artillery barrages and carefully choreographed manoeuvres counted for little when the ambush, the counter-ambush and the mine were more representative combat experiences. The necessity of fighting in rough terrain and guarding extended and vulnerable supply routes and defensive perimeters, forced the Soviets to break all their cardinal rules. Troops were broken into small units, far from their commanders and, often, even from the personnel carriers on which they had come to rely. Hence the need to give the individual infantry squad, platoon or company more integral fire-power, and to develop the morale and qualities of leadership commensurate to the task. Having been moulded into pawns, the Soviet soldiers largely could not cope. Nor could their sergeants, conscripts plucked from the ranks and given an intensive but brief three-month course before being flung into a war that they were not equipped to fight. Short-term measures were introduced to meet the immediate needs of the war, with more training and more effective selection of non-commissioned officers, but of more long-term importance, was the dawning understanding that these were not just problems specific to Afghanistan, or even to guerrilla warfare as a whole, but to the future battlefield. First of all, technology is acting to speed up the tempo of warfare, while providing jammers and decoys to counter the equivalent growth in command and communications technology. The result will be a battlefield where even small units will be faced with ever greater technical and professional challenges, needing to respond ever more swiftly to situations changing with increasing rapidity and unable to rely on any useful instructions from above. Besides these military-technical trends, political pressures were driving the High Command to a glum contemplation of professionalisation, of a future where a Soviet people would be unprepared to accept call-up - or unable to cope with these new challenges. Happening when it did, the Afghan war was in a unique position to feed into these deliberations, and play its role in shaping the 'future soldier' inherited by the new Russian military. As has been discussed previously, the forces were to become increasingly professionalised, following the example of the Interior Troops, with greater proportions of 'contract recruits'. One element of this would be renewed emphasis on creating a cadre of the long-service non-commissioned officers and warrant officers (praporshchiki), who showed their real worth in Afghanistan, where, amidst the high turnover of semi-trained conscripts, they represented one of the few repositories of hard-won combat experience. Soviet writings had from about 1987 begun to stress that NCOs should be given increasing responsibility and independence, and this, in turn,

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became a call for a stable NCO corps. After all, Boris Gromov admitted that when it came to genuine combat situations in Afghanistan, fully 80 per cent of sergeants were not up to the task and it is significant that afganets Colonel Rusian Aushev, who achieved spectacular improvements in a notoriously under-achieving regiment in Ussurisk, did so by concentrating his reforms on the sergeants who, after all, are the vital, first layer of command in any army. Individual soldiers were to become far more effectively trained and conditioned. At the XIX Party Conference, Gromov articulated his frustration at having to cope with training programmes that were both too inflexibly conceived and too laxly administered, while the intricate system of pre-draft training in schools and military-sports clubs was either collapsing or had never been properly developed. Hence the Soviet press became increasingly sharp in its criticisms of existing inservice training, while new latitude was granted commanders to experiment with new approaches and new equipment such as laser gunnery simulation systems rushed into service. As the soldier becomes more skilled and hence valuable, more effort must be devoted to protecting him and saving him if wounded, and this was already becoming a factor in Afghanistan. As opposed to the disastrous state of the civil health service, the Military Medical Service seems to have managed to develop considerably as a result of the war and even to learn from the constant shortages which bedevilled most Soviet activities:

The Afghan experience made us review all aspects of medicine. Recently, we completed a comprehensive study of the Afghan experience. The significance of the study could hardly be overestimated. Now, even some tenets of military-medical doctrine have been radically reviewed. Lieutenant General Eduard Nechaev, Chief of the Military Medical Service. 3

While lurid press stories concentrated on operations to remove unexploded grenades from soldiers' chests and the like, the work was like any battlefield medical service and 'meatball surgery': underresourced, under-staffed, over-stressed. Nevertheless, 93 per cent of wounded troops received initial medical aid within 30 minutes, and full medical assistance within six hours. To a large extent, this was facilitated by an extensive system of airborne medical assistance and evacuation, which linked main ground units to regional hospitals and airstrips and ultimately to Kabul and the Main Medical Hospitals at Tashkent and Moscow, using a variety of special 'casevac' aircraft, from the Mi-8 Bessektrisa ('Indiscretion') helicopter (helicopters evacuated

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90 per cent of casualties from combat areas) to the An-26 Spasitel ('Saviour'), Il-76 Skal'pel ('Scalpel') and Il-18 Sanitar ('Orderly') aircraft. THE HUMAN FACTOR: THE WILL TO FIGHT

Yet the war also highlighted deeper developments within the country, for if the shape of the future soldier that the High Command would wish to recruit, train and field was predicated on the likely shape of the future battle, then the shape of the USSR would determine how likely it was to get him. The stop-gap approach was a new concentration on personnel management within the armed forces. At best, this was a belated appreciation of the new sophistication, aspirations and even cynicism of the 1980s generation of conscripts. Even the Military Political Administration's staid journal Kommunist vooruzhennykh sit ('Communist of the Armed Forces') began featuring articles on youth subcultures and attitudes. The seminal article here, in 1989, was a round table, that favoured vehicle for broaching new and delicate issues, where one participant accepted that perhaps 20 per cent of the draft-age youth cohort were members of avowedly counter-cultural tendencies and that this was an inevitable, 'objective' phenomenon. This was reflected in a new sensitivity to the chelovecheskii faktor, the 'human factor', and initiatives such as twinning new recruits with veterans both to encourage the transfer of skills and undermine the 'age solidarity' that bred bullying. At worst, though, in true late Soviet style, it bogged down in a familiar mire of unimaginative propaganda, hollow rhetoric and counter-productive disciplinarianism. Attempts to ensure that each crew or squad included at least one CPSU or Komsomol activist were even expanded to be applied in exercises elsewhere, such as Shchit-84, but soon dropped out of sight, even before the Party and its youth wing collapsed. In the longer term, though, it was increasingly clear that what was needed was a new social structure within the army, a new 'social contract', which would also require a different relationship between state and people in general. The new emphasis given to rescuing prisoners, evacuating casualties and locating downed airmen is an interesting micro-scale example of this new 'contract', as the military was forced to accept the importance of its soldiers as individuals, in stark contrast to the coldly logical arithmetic of the Great Patriotic War. Just as the military had come reluctantly to support economic reform in the early 1980s as the only viable route to acquiring an industrial base able to supply reliable and high-technology weapons systems, so too did many afganets officers broaden their own experiences out to be applied

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on the general political scene. Ruslan Aushev made clear his feelings that the first and main lesson of the war was the need to close the gap between officers and men, a gap which was the root cause of so much that went wrong. In purely military terms, this was reflected in a new strand in Soviet military literature that sought to create the model of the 'democratic' commander, friendly with his men, staunch in their defence but- and this was the main way the 'new' model differed from the 'old' one prepared to be flexible, bend the rules and ignore the propaganda in his unit's interest. Of course, this was to take place very much within the established structures. Few officers, for example, wanted to dispose of their political officers, merely modify their roles. Of course, as has been discussed already, for some this became an issue far larger than a solely military one, and was carried through into activism within Soviet and post-Soviet Russian politics. LOCAL WARS: THE MISSING LINK

The war in Afghanistan demonstrated the huge chasm between theory and practice . .. [which was] the most important weakness. General Boris Gromov4

In theory, the Soviet military was driven by its doctrine, its theoretical understanding of how wars were going to start and be won. Unfortunately, as Scott McMichael has convincingly argued, the General Staff found its doctrine lacking, predicated as it was on massive, conventional wars in Europe or along the Chinese border. Without a doctrine for lowintensity warfare, their intellectual strengths - consistency, discipline, pre-planning - became handicaps. This was particularly ironic given both the rich tradition to which the Soviets were heir - ranging from the experiences of nineteenth century Russian imperialism to Frunze's suppression of the basmachi rebels in the 1920s and the liquidation of anti-Soviet partisans in the Ukraine, Belorussia and the Baltic states after the Second World War- and the political environment in which they operated, with military advisers involved in many guerrilla and counter-guerrilla wars, from Vietnam to Nicaragua. Nevertheless, Marxist-Leninist doctrine envisaged four main types of war: wars between socialist and capitalist states, class-based civil wars, wars of imperialism or national liberation and wars between capitalist states. Hence 'local wars' (the Soviet term for what, in the West, are termed 'low-intensity conflicts') could only take place within the third, imperial-

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ist, context. This belief that they were an essentially capitalist problem permeated Soviet writing and thinking, especially the basic 'bibles', such as Reznichenko's Taktika (Tactics, 1966, 1984 and 1987), Savkin's Osnovye printsipy operativnogo iskusstva i taktiki (Basic Principles of Operational Art and Tactics, 1973) and even Shavrov's Lokal'nye voiny (Local Wars, 1981). This is a quite extraordinary example of the way in which an ideology dogmatised into a faith can inhibit otherwise intelligent and resourceful minds. Soviet low-intensity doctrine, far from flowing from intellectual assessments of threats, capabilities and requirements, evolved through a murky and bloody process of ad hoc trial and error. As Colonel Safronov, in the first authoritative study of the war, admitted: Our own significant experience of dealing with banditry in Central Asia through the years of Stalinism was totally forgotten . . . and the rich, modern experience of other countries in conducting guerrilla and counter-guerrilla operations in regional wars 1945-80 . .. Besides, our army had never been intended to fight in such circumstances. That is why our soldiers, officers and generals, sent to Afghanistan, were forced to discover, starting with the wheel, the tactical ABCs of the science. 5 So this was the war's role in Soviet military art. A useful chance to debug the equipment, test the officer corps in action and measure the conscript army against the new demands placed upon it. But the High Command would have had sympathy for the Vietnam era US commander, who exclaimed 'I'll be damned if I will permit the US Army, its institutions, its doctrine and its traditions to be destroyed, just to win this lousy war.' This was a time of great change, of a military revolution driven by new technologies and thus a new age of war. Technology has traditionally swung its pendulum between defence and attack, weight and speed; the Roman infantry model was eventually mastered by the cavalry, who were duly countered by pike and musket. Napoleonic, fastmoving squares of hussars and riflemen were ultimately brought to a halt in the mud of the First World War by shrapnel, barbed wire and machine-guns, until the tank brought blitzkrieg to the world. The rockets and missiles of the 1960s and 1970s turned every humble infantryman into a tank-killer until the pendulum swung again. The new age is of fast, fluid, integrated three-dimensional combat, in which the infantryman is at home in helicopter as personnel carrier, of long-range artillery, cruise missiles and Stealth bombers that can strike so deep that

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the concept of the 'front line' begins to lose its meaning. It was this reality, not Afghanistan, that dominated the High Command's thinking, and Afghanistan became a test-bed for new ideas.

There are times when I almost feel that the High Command was happy to keep us there, as rats in their mazes. No, I don't really mean that, but I do know we learned a lot. If we had ended up fighting the West, we certainly would have done a better job of it, thanks to Afghanistan. Captain, afganets

NOTES 1. D. Harvey, 'Soviet helicopter tactics: lessons from Afghanistan', Rotor &

2. 3. 4. 5.

Wing International (Oct. 1988). S. Gevoin, 'Two flights, two lessons', Soviet Military Review (Nov. 1989). V. Klimov, 'Chief Surgeon of the Soviet Army', Soviet Soldier (Aug. 1991). B. Gromov, 'Pravda vyshe sensatsii', Sovetskaya Rossiya (15 Nov. 1989). V. Safronov, 'Kak eto bylo', Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal (May 1990).

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Russia's Next Wars

'Afgan' is stalking through our Motherland. Afganets and journalist Aleksei Karatetskii, 1991 1

The Soviet Union may have retreated from a policy of globalism, but the Soviet Union did not last that long. For the new Russia state, its military capabilities ensured that policy would be torn between two conflicting impulses. This is always the dilemma: new tactics and new weapons open up new opportunities to the policy makers, and an awareness that something could be done very easily becomes a belief that it should. In the light of the problems besetting Russia, the temptation to use military force in diplomacy proved near irresistible. This was despite the best efforts of those who took Afghanistan and effective defeat in the ruinous game of financial beggar-my-neighbour that we called the Cold War as proof positive that Russia's interests could only be advanced by diplomacy, co-operation and regional and global integration. Men like Foreign Minister Kozyrev, for example, for whom the only future for Russia lay in close alliance with democratic states in Europe, Asia and the Americas, and for whom the Cold War was definitively over. Heirs of the backlash that followed the war, these 'Atlanticists' were the champions of a moral and open-handed foreign policy, of transparency in global dealings, of 'normal' diplomatic relations. But on the other hand, there were heirs to a rather different tradition, a new breed of Clausewitzians, for whom war was a logical extension of politics. For a start, they drew on a deep and rich national tradition of imperialism and intervention, whether it was Tsar Nicholas I, sending his troops around Europe as gendarmes of the nineteenthcentury status quo, or the Brezhnev Doctrine, which sanctioned, in the name of 'proletarian internationalism', the crushing of the idealistic socialists of the 1968 Prague Spring under tank treads. Unquestioning in their belief that Russia was right to protect her interests by whatever means possible, they drew rather different lessons from Afghanistan. A

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silly little war, fought on the cheap, with no coherent political objectives and never with the resources it needed, it had none the less taught the military how to fight such conflicts. The strength was there, in their view, waiting only upon the political will to use it.

DOCTRINE: THE SHAPE OF THE FUTURE BATTLEFIELD

For while one should not necessarily overstate the impact of Afghanistan in isolation in developing military doctrine, when combined with the social, political and technological revolutions of the late twentieth century, its real importance in wider military thinking was four-fold: 1

2 3

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it accelerated the rise of new commanders, a generation eager to make its presence felt in a time of change and with a different set of formative experiences; it uncovered problems and identified weaknesses within existing thinking; it provided a new fund of combat experience at the very time when new-generation weapons, vehicles and communications systems were having their impact on Soviet doctrine; it forced the Soviets to come to terms with low-intensity warfare at the very time when perestroika was sparking such unrest within the USSR itself.

For example, as the Soviets made increasing use of aircraft, especially helicopters, and became increasingly flexible in their use, the principle of 'combined arms', whereby tanks, artillery and infantry would fight in co-ordinated units, also became a vertical process, integrating forces on the ground and in the air. Aircraft landed troops, supported them in battle, supplied them, evacuated them when they were wounded and, ultimately, flew their bodies home. The real age of the three-dimensional battle had arrived, and the war cemented the Soviet army's love affair with its helicopters, just as the US Army had been wooed in Vietnam. At the same time, the Soviets began to approach fighting in conditions other than those of well-lit daytime and environments other than the rolling European plain in an increasingly serious and realistic way. Despite paying extensive lip-service to fighting a 24-hour war in all conditions, the Soviets had lacked the training, equipment and preparedness for it. The war went some way towards translating intent into capability, even if it was still only the elite forces who would ever willingly venture outside their fortified cantons after dusk or take on the rebels in their home mountains. Nevertheless, while air-power would give the troops new mobility, new training would

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in due course allow them to use it to the fullest, at any time or in any situation. These lessons of Afghanistan were fed into attempts to deal with internal unrest. It was hardly accidental that it was afganets commanders who were entrusted with these operations from 1986. Afganets Colonel General Shatalin commanded the Ministry of the Interior's security troops. Afganets General Varennikov co-ordinated the investiture of Baku in January 1990 when the city was swept by anti-Armenian pogroms and attempts to cow the Baltic states in 1990 and 1991. Afganets Colonel General Gromov was made First Deputy Interior Minister in 1990. But military establishments are very conservative organisations, and many claimed that the lessons of Afghanistan were either specific to that particular war or only relevant when fighting guerrillas and thus hardly of more general import. After all, even as the USSR was falling apart, the official line was still that NATO or China were the most likely enemies that the Soviet army would face. At other times, the simple inability of many officers to change their thinking was to prove a stumbling block, and the military press was full of numerous examples, from the afganets pilot down-graded for flying in weather conditions which would usually have cancelled an exercise but to which he had become used in real combat, through to veterans denied promotion simply for bucking the trend. Colonel Valerii Ochirov was particularly critical: Virtually nothing is being done in the forces to learn a serious lesson from the Afghan war. Only its participants are doing their best to generalise their experiences. 2

Nevertheless, one should not take all these reports at face value. The fact that the military press kept hammering away at this theme was in fact proof of the importance given by the High Command to overcoming such conservatism and ensuring the experience of the afgantsy was put to fullest use. This was reflected in the penetration of afgantsy into the training establishment. After his appointment to head the Voroshilov General Staff Academy, for high-fliers tipped for the top, Colonel General Igor' Rodionov, a former commander of the 40th Army, made an effort to recruit other afgantsy onto his staff. Lieutenant General Malyakshin, appointed to head the Frunze Military Academy's Faculty of All-Arms Tactics in 1981, presided over the expansion of the faculty and its reorientation to incorporate the experiences of Afghanistan into the academy's training manual. At the top of the training structure, Colonel General Vostrov, Chief of the Soviet Military Advisers Group in Kabul 1986-88, was appointed Chief of the Military Educational Main Directorate of the Defence Ministry on his return to

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Moscow, with the explicit brief of revamping the system to take the new lessons into account. Besides, whence came the rising young stars of the war? Most either came from the paratroopers or had close links with the special forces. After all, if you were organising combat operations in the war, you would most likely be relying on these units to do the real fighting. Thus, beneath the Gromovs and Varennikovs was a whole layer of soldiers who had fought hard and well in the war, relatively young men eager to see their arms of service given greater prestige and resources and thus for the Soviet army to expand the scope and role of its so-called 'power projection' forces, the sort of units which, in one captain's words, 'can go and fight a war on someone else's territory'. The Soviet Union had never really capitalised upon its power-projection forces before Afghanistan. Whereas the USA had its large Marine Corps, and proved willing to use it in war zones from Vietnam to Beirut to Grenada, the Soviets had built up paratroop divisions. Yet they lacked the transport aircraft to lift them and the desire to use them except in specific instances in Czechoslovakia in 1968 and to turn the tide in the Ogaden in 1978. The new breed, characterised by Lieutenant General Grachev, appointed to head the paratroopers at the end of 1990 and his deputy for training, Major General Aleksandr Lebed', were proud of their men and keen to see their capabilities used to the fullest. On balance, then, Afghanistan provided the Soviet military with a useful, arguably necessary opportunity to test theory against the unforgiving measure of real combat and to develop new concepts for the high-mobility, air-land war of the late twentieth/early twenty-first centuries. Thus was laid the doctrine, the intellectual framework and military capabilities which would allow Moscow to adopt a forward policy in imposing its will on the successor states of the former Soviet Union. Still, policy was balanced on a knife-edge in the early months of post-Soviet Russia, needing a pretext to tip it one way or the other. There were still those within the military who were determined that the army should never be used in such a war again, or those who saw only the West and China as the likely enemy. Besides which, Andrei Kozyrev was fighting hard to ensure that Russian foreign policy would be built on Gorbachev's 'New Political Thinking' and liberal principles. But the collapse of the USSR and the ramshackle order for which it had stood, was to leave them marginalised as policy once again swung to Empire. POST-SOVIET DILEMMAS

The fragmentation of the Soviet Union following the 1991 August Coup totally upset generations of orthodoxy. Russia suddenly found itself

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surrounded by new states, some hostile, some neutral, few stable, all uncertain quantities and many with sizeable minorities of ethnic Russians. Its economy was dependent on these neighbours as suppliers and markets, and its domestic politics could charitably be described as precarious. Suddenly, and conclusively, the Afghan lessons returned to the centre of the political agenda. First of all, this was because of economics. With the collapse of the USSR, so too had its unified economic system shattered. The old Soviet economy had relied extensively on regional specialisation and planned integration. Why bother building several widget factories when one big plant could meet the same need and more efficiently? Then the Union breaks apart and one republic has a ludicrous overcapacity in widgets and the others have none. Worse, the factory depended on raw materials from another republic, which have to pass through a third, and the whole system is in chaos, bogged down in red tape, trade boycotts, customs restrictions, ignorance, confusion and poor communications. The result was economic collapse. At first Boris Yeltsin listened to his coterie of sharp-suited young radicals and libertarians, with their glib talk of shock economic therapy. As their optimistic projections began to sound increasingly hollow, he came to rely more on the older technocrats who had once been stalwarts of the old order, but now were concerned with protecting their own interests and the gut Russian nationalism that had always been a mainstay of Soviet Communism, for all its pretty talk of international brotherhood and a new world of proletarian harmony. The replacement at the end of 1992 of radical Prime Minister Gaidar with the older Chernomyrdin, a former Party bureaucrat and industrial manager, consummated this alliance. For them, there were both practical and sentimental reasons to pay close attention to the fates of the 25 million ethnic Russians living in other republics. First of all, Russia and all the other successor states were experiencing an upsurge in nationalism as people scrabbled desperately for new identities and causes in which to believe following the sudden collapse of the Soviet identity and the Party. The people of Russia began to show a new interest in their cousins in other states at the very time when this diaspora was feeling the pinch of local nationalisms, local peoples keen to get their own back for decades or centuries of Russian imperial rule. In the Baltic states, Russian minorities were finding themselves disenfranchised or discriminated out of jobs. Taking Estonia as a particular case, Russian State Counsellor Sergei Stankevich alleged that the ethnic Russians were facing 'systematic violation of their human rights'. In the Ukraine, President Kravchuk - himself a former Party boss turned nationalist politician - was sensible enough to avoid

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discriminating against the large Russian community of the eastern provinces. Yet, eager to live down his past and prevent himself from being outflanked by radical nationalists, and also concerned to construct an alliance to limit the power of the new Russia, Kravchuk sought to make himself the champion of opposition to Moscow. After all, as the second most powerful of the post-Soviet states, Ukraine represents about the only credible counter-weight to Russia. In Moldova, a country largely formed of parts of Romania annexed after the Second World War, the Russian community, fearing enforced 'Romanianisation', reacted by seceding and forming the 'Dneister Republic'. In Transcaucasia, the Georgian nationalist Gamsakhurdia was elected president and launched a campaign of persecution against minorities which included the Ossetians, a people living on both sides of the border with Russia. The Ossetians pleaded to Moscow for help. Armenia and Azerbaijan remained locked in their bloody but inconclusive war. In Central Asia, the spectre of fundamentalist Islam had never seemed so substantial. Clever politicians such as Rutskoi knew that to espouse the cause of the expatriate Russians was to ride the tide of pan-Russian nationalism. Besides, there were practical advantages to be won for Russia, since these communities could give Moscow some leverage in the other republics. Even in Russia itself, ethnic enclaves such as the Tatar region, Chechnia and Tuva began to be swept up in this tide of nationalism, Chechnia going so far as to declare virtual independence. RUTSKOI AND THE YOUNG TURKS

I have said that these words are sacred to me: once the Russian flag has been raised, it can never be lowered. Aleksandr Rutskoe

In the midst of such turmoil, Russian nationalism appealed to many as much for practical as emotional reasons. It was, they argued, time for Russia to stand up for herself, and fight her comer just as every republic was doing. As a Russian nationalist who had shown himself prepared to bully and victimise his enemies, from Chechen nationalists to Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin was inclined to agree. But Yeltsin could and would only push this line so far. On the one hand, he did display a genuine distaste for the indiscriminate use of coercion. Perhaps more important, as head of state, and very conscious of the need not to alienate the West or provide anti-Russian nationalists such as Kravchuk with any ammunition, Yeltsin had to maintain a moderate front. Instead, Vice-President Rutskoi enjoyed the ideal politician's combina-

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tion of power without responsibility, the public profile to make his populist views known and yet not the formal authority for them to be dangerous. While Y eltsin may have been thinking what Rutskoi was saying out loud, it was his maverick Vice-President who accrued the public support for his strong line on the 'persecution' of Russians or the failures of the reform programme to which he nominally pledged his support, describing it variously as 'chaos', 'shameful', 'beggary' and 'a crime'. When he called instead for a 'state of economic emergency' and the use of the army to protect Russian rights abroad, he was, after all, merely giving the arch-populist Yeltsin a taste of his own medicine, criticising from the sidelines, substituting rhetoric and outrage for a viable alternative. Along with his personal support, Rutskoi had clear and close links with the post-Soviet generation in the military High Command. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Commonwealth of Independent States was established, with its own military structure under CIS Defence Minister Marshal Shaposhnikov. This controlled the nuclear forces and a few other common assets, yet was essentially dominated by the Russians. Russia also appointed its own Defence Minister in 1992, General Grachev. Shaposhnikov was an old colleague of Rutskoi's, from the days when they served together in the Odessa Military District, while Grachev and Rutskoi not only knew each other from their Afghan days but worked together during the August Coup. Through Grachev, Rutskoi had contacts with his paratrooper comrades, who are now occupying a series of key posts. Rutskoi was thus building up a powerful, if heterogeneous, collection of allies, united by little more than disillusion with Yeltsin and the young generation of laissez-faire capitalists who first surrounded him, and a commitment to Russia that was more than simple pride in one's nationhood, but assertive, aggressive and even expansionist. Within this coalition, along with the new Russian and CIS High Command, there were the 'red managers', the directors of the major industrial enterprises whom Arkady Vol'skii had managed to unite into a powerful and vocal lobby, the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, with its own political arm, the Civic Union. They may all have had their roots in the old communist order, but they knew their jobs, and after six months of economic chaos, Yeltsin began to accept that it is better to deal with competent cynics than starry-eyed amateurs. Rutskoi even managed to forge strong links with the bizarre Cossack movement. Cossack traditions had effectively died out following the Bolshevik Revolution and the ensuing backlash against these erratic and independent peoples who had become identified with the whip-wielding enforcment of the Tsarist order. Yet such was the hunger

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for some sense of identity and belonging in post-Soviet Russia that all sorts of people began digging through their family trees in an effort to prove that Uncle Vanya or Grandpa Misha was a Cossack and reviving or, sometimes, inventing Cossack traditions to go with this new identity. But this was not just a quaint reclamation of a buried culture, a charming and picturesque anachronism. Alongside the overweight men spending their weekends squeezing into tight trousers and gingerly putting sprightly ponies through their paces while waving sabres in an unconvincing manner, there were the quiet, matter-of-fact born-again Cossacks, stockpiling weapons and ammunition for the day that they might be called on to protect their communities. This was tribalism with Kalashnikovs, a reflection of the crippling loss of faith that most former Soviet citizens had not just in the old Kremlin, but in any central government. More dangerous still, for many Cossacks, the defence of their families, towns and nation would have to be pre-emptive, and they sought also to revive their role as the gung-ho guardians of Russia and the pioneers who pushed its frontiers outwards. Cossack volunteers began arming in the ethnically Russian regions of northern Kazakhstan and joined the fighting alongside ethnic Russians in Moldova, Christian Armenians in Nagorno Karabakh and anti-Georgian Ossetians in Georgia. Others lobbied hard for a formal role in the Russian armed forces, and although Shaposhnikov remained sceptical, Rutskoi's support ensured that the decision was taken to establish specifically Cossack regiments from 1993. Meanwhile, Yeltsin himself came to accept the harsh logic of the interventionist line. As his popularity declined, as economic reform brought hardship and dissent and the unfolding tragedy of Yugoslavia looked set to repeat itself on Russia's doorstep, bringing with it the threat of refugees and cross-border incursions, the master opportunist changed his tune. His ally and adviser, Sergei Stankevich, once heralded as the apostle of Westernisation, began talking openly of the value of emulating tsarist foreign policy. Given that this was a policy based largely upon expansion into the civilised heartlands of European Poland and the tribal territories of Central Asia and the Far East, coupled with a preparedness verging on the eager to use force to crush threats to Russian national interests, this was nothing less than a wholehearted espousal of the new imperialist line. Kozyrev, for all his high profile on the international diplomatic circuit, began to look increasingly isolated at home. In Georgia, Russian impatience with an elected leader who gloried in the title of the 'Georgian Mussolini' and gleefully challenged Moscow's hegemony finally led to the active support given a coup which toppled him in 1992. Tactically, the policy was a success. Gamsakhurdia

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was forced to flee into impotent opposition, and Shevardnadze was at once removed from Moscow (why retain a rival who, even if he could never challenge Russian-born Yeltsin for the Presidency, could certainly put him in the shade?) and installed as saviour of Georgia. There was no time for celebrations in Moscow, though, for the coup led to an explosion of ethnic and regional violence in Georgia. By July, Moscow was having to deploy Russian troops into Ossetia in a bid to quieten a civil war that threatened to spill over its southern borders - as with Afghanistan, it proved easier to intervene than withdraw. Shevardnadze had expected Moscow to deploy second-line troops on their way back to Russia from bases inside Georgia: instead, crack paratroopers were sent from Russia, and more of them than he had anticipated. When the Abkhaz people also revived their opposition to rule from Tbilisi, Shevardnadze began to suspect a Russian hand behind them. The feeling grew that this was Moscow's way of warning the new leadership that it should remember who had helped it come to power and act accordingly. By 1993, relations with Russia were as strained as they had ever been. The civil war in Moldova likewise revealed Russia's preparedness to meddle explosively in others' affairs. Ever since the Moldovan government began trying to assert its independence in late 1990, Moscow had used its heavy military presence there to bring pressure to bear, supporting the Russian communities along the left (eastern) bank of the Dniester river. After the failure of the August Coup, relations between the self-proclaimed 'Dniester Republic' and the newly-assertive government of Moldova worsened and the 14th Army began providing ever more open support for the Russian rebels. When the rebels declared that Colonel General Yakovlev, commander of the 14th Army, was also their acting defence minister, Yakovlev was duly recalled to Moscow, yet his replacement, General Netkachev, proved no less supportive. This could have been seen as the private initiative of local commanders happy to support 'their own' at a time when the centre was too weak to impose any discipline. Yet in June 1992, command of the 14th Army was entrusted to Major General Aleksandr Lebed', a former paratrooper and close ally of Grachev and thus, by extension, of Rutskoi. Far from signalling a return to neutrality, the arrival of Lebed' saw the army's support for the break-away enclave become increasingly overt, as weapons were transferred to them and nothing was done to prevent the arrival of Cossacks, mercenaries and the rebels' other allies. Lebed' went on to accuse the legitimate Moldovan government of being on a par with the Nazis and intent on genocide, for which he received nothing more from Moscow than a token slap on the wrists, and a prompt promotion to Lieutenant General. This was no 'loose cannon'.

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By the end of 1992, then, the interventionists had come to dominate policy-making. They did not have everything their own way, of course. Sometimes they had to operate at arm's length through notionally maverick local commanders. Sometimes they had to beat tactical retreats because of some upset back in the corridors of the Kremlin or from a need to placate the West. In theory, after all, Russian membership of international organisations such as the International Monetary Fund, Council for Security and Co-operation in Europe and UN should have limited its scope for such policies. The depressing truth, though, seems to have been that no outside states felt sufficiently exercised to bring Russia to book. In short, there could be little doubt that the new Russia was heir to all the imperial pretensions and arrogant confidence of her history. There is no guarantee that this will continue to be the case. Russian politics are just too fluid for any certainties. In addition, Yeltsin himself was careful to avoid making any overt commitment to the new line, permitting him to jettison it if it should prove necessary. This is the approach he had adopted in domestic politics, letting the reformist Egor Gaidar develop and introduce a radical programme of economic reforms then distancing himself from his hapless agent when popular resentment at the costs of the package became too great to ignore. In addition, Yeltsin also managed to maintain close personal and political links with Kozyrev, notably through Gennadi Burbulis, his erstwhile State Secretary, ally and all-round henchman. Nevertheless, as of late 1992, the 'new imperialism' was clearly well ahead on points, having mustered powerful arguments in its defence: that Russia had the capability to throw its muscle about in the pursuit of its interests in what had been the Soviet Union; that in an age of nationalism, the stark choice was to defend Russians living in other republics or throw them to the wolves; that Islam represented not just a threat, but an opportunity, a chance for Russia to find common cause with the West under the banner of 'Christendom'. ISLAM: THREAT AND OPPORTUNITY

The early manifestations of the new imperialism were quite specific. Gamsakhurdia is an irritant? Remove him. Then Shevardnadze refuses to dance to Moscow's tune? Pressurise him. On the whole, these interventions represented not a coherent policy, but a series of ad hoc responses to the presence of Russian minorities in neighbouring countries or particular political or economic issues. Perhaps Russia will manage to carve itself out an informal empire of dependent allies from the post-Soviet successor states, perhaps not, but in the longer term

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there also exists the broader possibility, given new vigour by the Gulf War, of Russia finding itself in the front line of a wider, global clash between the largely Christian 'North' and the Islamic nations of the 'South'. Admittedly, this is by no means inevitable. If Afghanistan bred anti-Islamic feeling in Russia, it also produced a very deep aversion to getting involved in military adventures. Besides which, there are those, especially afgantsy, working to ease tensions between Christian and Moslem. There are also some with very practical reasons to close this potential divide, notably Kazakh president Nazarbaev, presiding over a country evenly divided between Russians and Kazakhs. Should underlying tensions come to the surface, the Kazakhs of the south would have legitimacy and natural justice on their side, but the Russian colonists of the north have the industrial and military muscle that more than makes up for this. Kazakhstan would not survive, and the divorce would be disputed, bloody and prolonged. Nevertheless, it seems a depressing but inescapable constant of human nature that societies need bugbears, threats to fear and enemies to mistrust. One can see the Pacific Rim beginning to replace the USSR as the USA's. Islam, in a potential 'Asiatic alliance' with China, could represent the post-Soviet Slavs. So long as the Islamic Conference Organisation calls for an 'Islamic Afghanistan' and extends its hand to the Central Asian republics and Azerbaijan, so long as Iranian president Rafsanjani feels Azerbaijan will become part of Iran, it is hard for the Russians not to feel a sense of encroachment. As one Afghan put it: 'We have begun to push the Russians back. They will have to keep retreating, all the way to the Urals. ' 4 THE NEW IMPERIALISM

But in the short term, Russian policy was concerned with more immediate problems, and when, in mid-1992, Russian troops intervened as 'peacekeepers' in Tajikistan, it was for the practical reasons of avoiding another civil war on Russia's doorstep and preventing Afghan groups from opening up even wider channels to smuggle guns and drugs into southern Russia. For beneath a new commitment to 'peacekeeping' in the nations of the Commonwealth of Independent States, the 'new imperialism' of Rutskoi and his allies was in the process of being enshrined in a new military doctrine and expressed through the formation of a new military structure. Although Kozyrev had moved quickly to bring like-thinking figures into the Foreign Ministry, the liberal civilian foreign policy establishment was locked in fruitless and all too often forlorn struggle with the

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armed services and their political godfathers. When his foreign policy draft programme was submitted to the Supreme Soviet in February 1992, it was savaged and decried, and in July it was unceremoniously returned to the Foreign Ministry for revision. Kozyrev's solidly proWestern line on the use of United Nations sanctions to punish Serbian aggression in the Yugoslav civil war sparked further criticism from a Supreme Soviet steeped in the nationalist 'pan-Slavism' that had, indeed, been so central to the old Tsarist world view. As discussed elsewhere, the Soviet and Russian military establishment set great store on the notion of their 'doctrine', which is effectively a statement of national policy, an expression of the country's beliefs about the nature of conflicts in which it might become involved and how it would behave in such circumstances. The importance of this is that it drives every other aspect of military and even diplomatic planning. Under Khrushchev, the doctrine had been based on the idea that the only real war in which the USSR might become involved was a nuclear one with the West or China. Thus, it was a priority to construct nuclear missiles, and then build up protected forces of tanks and armoured infantry which, sealed in their little boxes, could roll into and through radioactive battlefields and follow up the nuclear phase of the war. A cornerstone of Gorbachev's 'New Thinking' was that wars were more likely to be avoided, by diplomatic means, rather than merely deterred. Thus, it was perfectly sensible for him to announce sweeping arms cuts at the United Nations in December 1988, even if it reduced the strength and deterrent capability of the Soviet armed forces, because this was warranted by the improvement in the international atmosphere. In May 1992, a draft Russian military doctrine programme was published, developed by military experts and endorsed by Vice President Rutskoi. In many ways it represented the definitive manifesto of the 'new imperialists', and a shocking and depressing statement it proved to be. In it, Russia not only reserved to itself the right to protect its interests at the expense of the other successor states, it claimed the duty to act as the policeman of the region, imposing its writ and protecting Russian communities. The USA and NATO remained a genuine threat to Russia, requiring her to retain large armies and even forward staging posts in the other republics. War, which had been described in a doctrine drafted under Gorbachev, as 'totally outdated, unacceptable and inadmissible as a means of achieving political objectives', was back on the agenda as a possible policy option. For the first time ever, Moscow entertained the possibility that it might actually start a nuclear war, launching a first strike, where previously Soviet doctrine had described the use of atomic weapons as purely for deterrence and retaliation.

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This draft was just that, but even before it was discussed in parliament, the military had begun to act upon it, unwilling to let such constitutional niceties cramp its style. The first concrete expression of this new doctrine was the decision, in June 1992, to begin forming a new arm of services, the Mobile Forces (Mobilnye sily). Built around the paratroopers, the heli-mobile DShV and four 'light' motorised brigades, this force was envisaged as a strategic-level asset intended to cope with a wide range of emergencies, from insurrections and brushwars to natural disasters and, presumably, the evacuation or support of ethnic Russians in other republics. In other words, the creation of the Mobile Forces represented the culmination of two separate trends, the military shift towards high-mobility, low-intensity warfare, and the political drift towards interventionism. After all, a nation in the midst of economic crisis only spends its meagre resources on a force fit only to fight guerrilla wars and interfere in other nations' affairs if it expects to do so. For a while, it looked as though Russia might break with Soviet tradition and appoint a civilian defence minister. For a while, there was some hope that Moscow could shrug off the Tsarist and Soviet legacy of imperial chauvinism and an instinctive reliance on brute power and military postures. At the time of writing, though, such prospects still appear, while not inconceivable, certainly distant. NOTES 1. A. Karatetskii, 'Sily dukha vsem!', K sovesti 2.91. 2. V. Cherkasov, 'People's Deputy Valerii Ochirov', Soviet Soldier (April 1990). 3. 'Rossiya' TV, 18 June 1992, in BBC Summary of World Broadcasts (22 June 1992). 4. TASS (20 Feb. 1990).

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Anatomy of a Small War

The days when wars were fought by mercenaries or by representatives of a caste half-isolated from the people have gone for ever. Wars today are fought by peoples. V. I. Lenin, The Fall of Port Arthur

Arrogance, vanity, ignorance and prejudice all played their parts in bringing Soviet troops into Afghanistan. A coup that foisted an urban leftist regime onto a country torn between the centripetal instincts of government and the fiercely centrifugal interests of the tribes should hardly have counted for much in global affairs, especially given the isolation and poverty of Afghanistan. Yet such was the inexorable logic - the term is used at its loosest - of the Cold War and superpower rivalry, that once the USSR had grudgingly accepted it as nash- 'ours' then it could not be abandoned. This 'tar baby' principle illustrates graphically how little effective autonomy the great nations really had in this period, webbed by invisible but near-irresistible ties of expectation, insecurity, prestige and 'Cold War etiquette'. A quick, surgical show of force became a gruelling and lasting guerrilla war, one for which the Soviets were doctrinally, psychologically and technically unprepared. They should have listened to Lenin. In 1921, he had co-authored an Instruction to the Russian envoy in Kabul, warning that 'we neither can nor must measure Afghanistan with a yardstick applicable to industrialised nations. We must never forget or play down the major difference existing between the Communist programme and the programme being carried out by the Afghan government.' He had also monitored and endorsed the political-military strategy Frunze used to defeat the basmachi, which displayed a sophistication alien to the strategists of the Afghan War. After his abortive attempt to turn a successful defensive war against the Poles into a military expansion of the Revolution in 1920, Lenin had also come to the conclusion that Soviet troops should never be used directly to support, let along impose, revolution abroad. For his successors,

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CONCLUSIONS

withdrawal proved harder than intervention. Brezhnev had no particu~ lar attachment to the war, but lacked the political will or theory to swallow his pride and withdraw, let alone pursue the rebels into Pakistan. Andropov would have been delighted to write off this politically costly blunder, yet was too old, sick and busy. Chernenko, Homo Sovieticus to the end, looked for little but new ways to bomb and burn these 'blackass' renegades into submission. Only Gorbachev had the requisites to arrange the withdrawal: political will, pressing practical justifications, a new theoretical framework for Soviet foreign policy and, perhaps above all, time. THE 'LOST WAR': AN AUDIT OF AFGAN

In military terms, the war was neither a defeat nor a particularly significant operation of its kind. In the ill~fated 'Winter War' with Finland, the Soviets suffered 200,000 dead in four months. Fighting the Japanese in 1938-39, the Red Army lost 30,000 men, twice as many as died in the whole Afghan war. Some 65,000 died annually on Soviet roads. The 60 billion rubles (according to the official figures) that the war cost in total up to 1988 was equivalent to that spent in one year subsidising basic foodstuffs. This helps set in context the usual compari~ son with the Vietnam War. The USSR spent about 1-2 per cent of its total defence budget on its war, the USA 23 per cent (in 1969) on its Southeast Asian theatre operations. US forces in~theatre reached almost 500,000 men in 1969, and attained a force~to~space ratio of more than seven troops per square mile; the Soviets peaked at under 150,000 and never attained more than 0.7 troops per square mile. The USA lost nearly 40,000 men, the Soviets 15,000. A common complaint over Vietnam was that of the US establishment's lack of institutional memory; as John Vanhn put it, 'We don't have 12 years experience in Vietnam, we have one year's experience 12 times over'. This is unfair and far too sweeping, an expression of US exasperation as much as anything else. Yet there is some contrast with the way that the Soviet military, for all its sluggish bureaucratism, did Jearn from Afghanistan, from the nuts and bolts performance of its latest equipment in a genuine combat situation to the skills and procedures necessary to manage soldiers in the new political, technical and doctrinal environments of late twentieth~century warfare. Perhaps a better comparison would be with the Algerian War of Independence of 195.5-62, a war in which some 21!2 million French conscripts fought in a vain attempt to maintain metropolitan rule. Their doctrine of the guerre revolutionnaire and how to combat it, developed in Indo-China, was far in advance of anything the Soviets had con-

ANATOMY OF A SMALL WAR

225

ceived, with its understanding of the interrelationship between military and political factors and strategies. With it, the French halted and ultimately reversed the rise of the nationalist FLN. Yet ultimately, the French lost, or rather abandoned, Algeria, as a result of new perceptions of the value of empire, new political pressures at home. Indeed, the French military establishment's tradition of abstention from politics was worn away by this very doctrine. Finding itself involved in political operations and working within a highly politicised environment, it came increasingly to regard itself as an autonomous political entity, providing fertile soil for the later development of the OAS. For the USSR, too, the war's true costs were largely political, arising primarily from its coincidence with the desperate and unsuccessful attempt to reform the decaying Soviet system. EXIT OLD-FASHIONED IMPERIALISM ...

The action of the Soviets had made a more dramatic change in my own opinion of what the Soviets' ultimate goals are than anything they've done in the previous time I've been in office. US President Jimmy Carter1

The war certainly brought about the final collapse of an already moribund detente. Never a genuine attempt to create a new international modus vivendi, always an uncomfortable and pragmatic pause in the Cold War, it had already started to die as the USA began to shed its 'Vietnam syndrome' and once again look to globalism, and as it became clear in Moscow that the new line would not produce a deus ex machina for the Soviet economy in the form of Western investment and technology. SALT II collapsed, and the 1980 Moscow Olympics, intended as a showcase for Soviet propaganda, was boycotted and devalued. Western communist and socialist parties moved further from the Soviet camp: the Italian EuroCommunist PCI made its final, symbolic break with Moscow in 1982, denouncing the CPSU as having exhausted the creative potential in the Bolshevik Revolution. In Eastern Europe, the renunciation of the 'Brezhnev doctrine' permitted the collapse of the 'Soviet bloc'. Afghanistan may have crystallised views about the doctrine, and certainly provided the reformists with a vivid banner to wave in their struggle to introduce 'New Thinking'. Given that the underlying issues were the bankruptcy of the Soviet state and the erosion of the satellite states' value to Moscow, the war was of inevitable relevance in colouring views of the price of empire. What price a 'strategic glacis' when the threat was not

226

CONCLUSIONS

in Germany but in the food queues in Minsk or the drying-out cell in Magadan? In the Developing World and within the Non-Aligned Movement, the invasion ruined decades of bridge-building. To some nations it showed the Soviet Union as just another imperialist. More pragmatically, it suggested that the USSR was by no means as militarily effective and politically prescient as might be hoped for in an ally. On 14 January 1980, the UN General Assembly passed a motion of censure by 104 votes to 18 (with 18 abstentions). China, a rival since the 1964 Ussuri river clashes, had been enticed into talks at deputy foreign minister level in September 1979; the invasion led to Beijing calling off the talks and Washington's decision to woo China by offering the sale of 'dual-use' technologies (with some military utility). The USA was let off the hook regarding its farcical intervention to retrieve hostages in revolutionary Tehran. Relations with Iran and the Islamic world in general suffered a particular setback. Even India, otherwise keen to see pressure on its rival Pakistan, was uncomfortable with the invasion and doubly dismayed when its role in supporting the rebels allowed Pakistan to lobby for dramatically increased support from the USA and Saudi Arabia . . . . ENTER 'NEW POLITICAL THINKING'

Yet in the longer term, these costs might in many ways have been hidden assets. Lasting, core security interests were not harmed, and the eventual result was Gorbachev's 'New Thinking', largely beyond the reach of this study, which emphasised global interdependence and the rise of the post-industrial society in a way which not only sought a more stable and positive future world order but would also avert superpower rivalries at the very time that the USSR could no longer afford to play the game. As ever, Gorbachev's bid was to turn a liability into an asset or at least an irrelevance. The withdrawal of the OKSV, force reduction along the 7,200 km Sino-Soviet border and renewed trade links eased relations with Beijing. By 1989, the USSR had become China's fifth largest trading partner, worth $2,600M where in 1983 the figure had been just $363M, while exchanges of military delegations resumed in early 1990. Relations with Tehran improved steadily, and the war provided an example to push Vietnam into withdrawal from Cambodia, which also proved an asset in Moscow's dealings with Beijing. Thus, one could argue that in terms of foreign policy the war was a salutary blow to profligate Soviet globalism, a useful weapon in the armoury of those hoping to shift Soviet foreign policy from its previous

ANATOMY OF A SMALL WAR

227

model, which smacked all too much of nineteenth century 'place in the sun' diplomacy, lightly coated with an ideological veneer.

In Zaryad', in the Kuzminsks, in Presna, The war will arrive at your door And perhaps is already turning up in your insipid Life in 'civvy street' Lines from the poem 'Afgantsy'2

The external costs are relatively easy to tally, the internal ones less so. For as often as not, they were rooted less in the war as such than in the public and elite perceptions of it, the role that the war could assume, often spuriously, in the wider political debates and disputes tearing the country apart. Perhaps most telling is the example of the veterans themselves, who came to be characterised as a random but unredeemable collection of misfits, cripples, drug abusers and vigilantes, heavyhanded riot policemen or potential suicides. THE 'LOST GENERATION': BLEEDING HEARTS AND POOR ARITHMETIC

Every man has been tempered through countless, pitiless days; every man is a complete soldier, no more and no less. But for peace? Are we suitable? Are we fit now for anything but soldiering? Erich Maria Remarque, The Road Back

Of course they were. Remarque's German veterans of the Great War had survived a cataclysm of vastly greater magnitude which had shattered an entire continent, an epochal break in cultural, political and social traditions, and which had left a veteran community large enough to sustain itself, to spawn Freikorps, Arditi and similar manifestations of its discontent. Yet even these veterans, on the whole, adapted and survived, healed and forgot. The public plaints and anguish that surrounded the afgantsy, soldiers from - if it is appropriate to distinguish between shades of barbarity - a far less apocalyptic theatre owed more to Slavic sentimentalism, political considerations and the novelty of glasnost' than anything else. Even the most modest arithmetic illustrates the extent to which the vigilantes, invalids, soldiers and lunatics were just the pressworthy and eminently visible tip of an iceberg otherwise happy to remain concealed and melt gradually and inconspicuously into the rest of the Soviet population. Out of some 750,000 afgantsy, there were, as of 1991, 70,000 in the armed forces, 14,000 in the MVD, 11,500 invalids

228

CONCLUSIONS

(including the most serious psychological casualties), 3,000 in prison on serious offences. In all, then, these were but 98,500, some 13.1 per cent of the total. Even allowing for the monstrous slur that lumps together policemen, invalids and murderers, this still should prove how large a majority of afgantsy failed to fit the more extremist stereotypes. Besides which, the range of experiences facing the afgantsy further fragmented them and limited their ability to find a common set of memories and beliefs around which they could cohere. Nor were the popular assumptions about the ethnic composition of the soldiers any more justified. This was no more an exclusively Slav war than an act of callous genocide, constructed to bleed the Baits and Transcaucasians of their young menfolk. Instead the burden rested where it always has, whether in a capitalist society or the selfproclaimed 'proletarian state', on the poor, the ill-educated, the unstreetwise, the workers; the same victims of the system who were to serve out their lives in the cheerless drudgery of the machine shop or the farm, raising a new generation of disenfranchised underclass to fill their shoes in tum. Polemics apart, the point to be made is that in all respects the war itself was nothing special. The principles behind the decision to intervene, the manner in which the war was prosecuted, the way the 'usual suspects' were rounded up to man the OKSV, all these were the usual operational principles of the late Soviet state. Hence the importance of the war. Firstly, as a case study into those operational principles and how they were stretched, broken and revised through the years of Andropov, Chemenko, Gorbachev and collapse. And second, in that the war - or rather its mythologised doppelganger - could for a while become a powerful idiom in late Soviet politics for the very reason that it was a textbook example of the habits and failings of the old order, and one framed in a very emotive and dramatic context. These two issues are inextricably linked, for what is clear about the changing rules of the new political game - and a depressingly zero-sum game it was - is that such marginal groups as the afgantsy had no opportunity to develop a lasting and powerful identity before being swallowed up or pushed aside by those great engines of late Soviet politics: elite redefinition, nationalism and collectivism.

MYTH-CONCEPTIONS: AFGHANISTAN IN ELITE POLITICS

We need the truth ... In the past- I mean in the conflict with Yugoslavia in 1948, and the events in Hungary in 1956 and the troops sent into Czechoslovakia in 1968- we were too lenient on

ANATOMY OF A SMALL WAR

229

ourselves. Nowadays, in the years of perestroika, we cannot permit this. Aleksandr Bovin, political commentator

Aleksandr Bovin and his colleagues may have wanted the truth, but the truth is a commodity often hard to acquire and then all too easily adulterated, repackaged, sold off cheaply or hoarded - and usually by the Bovins, Prokhanovs, Gorbachevs and Sakharovs of the world, not the Private Ivanovs. Of course glasnost' did bring the Soviet people far greater openness about the war. Yet this was by no means out of altruism, nor from some natural diffusion of information. All societies are run by elites. To them, information management is a key element in the maintenance of their control. It also allows them to prosecute internal debates and disputes encoded within the press and public discourse. Through the 1980s and the early 1990s, the traditional Soviet elites, the closely linked institutional and corporate groups which had cohered within the nomenklatura system of the Party-state apparatus, were undergoing profound change in the face of new tensions and dilemmas. The old consensus had been worn away by the economic crisis of the state; a structure built in a time of plenty, based on the generous expenditure of resources, was now failing to adapt to a time of scarcity. Increasingly, the elite's homogeneity was breaking down through disputes over resources and in the face of the great debates about reform and its dangers, debates which sometimes cut along functional boundaries (most secret policemen, for example, aware of the looming dangers, supported Andropovian reform) and sometimes cut right across them. Afghanistan was to play its part in these indirect struggles for power, role and authority. For professional soldiers, it underlined the folly of trusting military decisions to ill-informed civilians. For academics and analysts, it proved their point that they should be incorporated far more strongly into the decision-making process. For journalists it presented the opportunity to invent themselves credentials as independent-minded commentators by lambasting the very intervention that they had previously championed so obediently (Aleksandr Prokhanov, while perhaps one of the most egregious cases, was by no means alone). MYTH-DIRECTION: AFGHANISTAN AND NATIONALISM

Of course, some of the most extreme of these intra-elite duels took place within the field of nationalism, especially outside Russia. Although this falls largely outside the purview of this study, it is clear

230

CONCLUSIONS

that there were established elites as keen to use the war as part of their struggle to redefine and relegitimise themselves through nationalism as there were other groups still trying to break into power. At first, the underground nationalist dissidents tried to use the war to undermine the Moscow-aligned local proconsular elite. The illegal Lithuanian Youth Association's Juventus Academica drew parallels between the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states and of Afghanistan, while the Lithuanian samizdat Ausra claimed that studious young nationalists were being selected specially to serve in the war. Ukrainian samizdat made comparisons with the brutal collectivisation of the Stalin era. Unofficial Moslem groups and sects such as the Wahhabis in Central Asia played on the war as a crime against their faith and one in which the Moscowsanctioned Islamic leaders were implicated. These groups, though, were often to be outflanked as the existing elites, or elements thereof, began to deck themselves in nationalist costume. While Ukrainian nationalist leader Pavel Movchan tried to use Afghanistan as a stick with which to beat Moscow and, by extension, the local Party leadership, born-again nationalist and former ideology secretary Leonid Kravchuk moved to champion afganets' rights and incorporate them within his new national army. It was Kravchuk who was to go on to be elected first President of an independent Ukraine. Elsewhere, the war was used even more audaciously; when Tajikistan's KGB chairman Vladimir Petkel sounded the alarm about the penetration of Afghan fundamentalists bearing guns and Korans, it was in part a bid to discredit the Moslem opposition as both extremist and under an alien thumb. Petkel's deputy, Anatolii Belusov, went further, claiming the rebels were acting at the behest of Pakistan's lSI secret service in an operation known as 'Programme-M'. MYTH-ANTHROPY: THE AFGANTSY AND THE KOLLEKTW

If the vlasti, the mighty, were interested in making use of Afghanistan,

what was left for the nizi? The veterans and those other groups and individuals affected by the war certainly tried to play their part in the turbulent social and political developments of the last decade of the Soviet Union. Faced with an array of practical problems, from the lack of housing common to all young members of the Soviet working class to their own very specific needs, they were forced to co-operate and connive to meet those needs. Then perestroika and the unfettering of civil society appeared to offer them an avenue towards representation and redress. Yet late Soviet political culture proved more heavily dominated by the old continuities of the kollektiv than many had realised, intolerant of

231

ANATOMY OF A SMALL WAR

minorities (especially those petitioning for resources in a resource-poor state), unwilling to discover the truths of the war. Glasnost' ended up not so much publicising the truth as pushing the new orthodoxies, the received wisdom which served only to marginalise or silence the real afgantsy. After all, why try to fight the collective? You can't go on repenting and praying for forgiveness all your life. I want to get married and I want a son. The sooner we shut up about all this the better it'll be for everyone. The only people who need this 'truth' are the know-nothings who want to use it as an excuse to spit in our faces. afganets4

Most afgantsy did not even try to make anything of their participation in the war. The quarter or so who did play an active role in the 'afganets movement', as well as the wider umbrella mothers' associations, did their best to tug on heartstrings and make their case for access to resources, to the media, to power. Sometimes they were given it, when it suited someone's interests or when someone needed good copy for their newspaper or a touching theme for a speech. Yet scapegoating soon ensured that Afghanistan was a stigma, and not a key. The Council of Soldiers' Mothers and Widows moved into the broader issues of bullying and resistance to conscription and suddenly found a wider audience and a more receptive political leadership. Figures like Rutskoi and Gromov would wear their medals, but they soon learned that Afghanistan had done all it could for their careers, and their futures lay in finding new issues upon which to campaign and new constituencies to woo. Consider the case of the afgantsy and the August Coup. The political leaders of the opposition to the putsch were happy enough to have afgantsy manning their barricades and watching their backs in those few days. After the coup, the new Russia even set up yet another official body to monitor their affairs. Yet throughout 1992 and 1993, the fate of the afgantsy only worsened, their benefits either ignored or overtaken by rising prices, their leaders once again pushed from the centre and also ignored- until, presumably, the next time. THE WAR IN RUSSIAN HISTORY

All the wars that Russia lost led to social reforms, while all of the wars it won led to the strengthening of totalitarianism. Soviet general 5

Victory against Napoleon in 1812 seemed to vindicate Russian reaction and to prove that the dangers in conservatism were far less than those

232

CONCLUSIONS

potentially in reform. Defeat in the Crimea in 1856 is widely seen as the final proof to the Tsarist administration of the need for an emancipation of the serfs. The debacle of the 1904-5 Russo-Japanese war provided the final spark for the so-called 1905 Revolution, a spasm of rural and urban unrest which forced the regime to establish its first parliament. Count Sergei Witte, one of the most intelligent and forethoughtful defenders of the old order, noted in his memoirs: The unrest that has seized the various classes of Russian society cannot be regarded as the consequence of partial imperfections of the political or social order, or as the result only of the activities of organised extremist parties. The roots of unrest lie deeper, in the imbalance between the ideals of thinking Russians and the reality of their lives. Russia has outgrown the existing regime and is striving for an order based on civic liberty. Therefore the forms of Russian public life must be brought into conformity with the ideas animating the reasonable majority of society.

After defeat in the First World War brought Tsarism down, it was the successful prosecution of the Great Patriotic War which provided the Stalinist state with a legitimacy which it had hitherto lacked. As for Afghanistan, many critics would almost seem to be again echoing Lenin's assessment of the Russo-Japanese war, when he said that The incompatibility of the autocracy with the interests of social development, with the interests of the entire people (apart from a handful of bureaucrats and bigwigs), became evident as soon as the people actually had to pay for the autocracy with their lifeblood. V. I. Lenin, The Fall of Port Arthur

Yet to suggest that defeat in Afghanistan doomed the USSR is patently unfounded, even if we accept the popular perception that the Soviet Union was defeated rather than the more clinical verdict that it failed to win much of a success. The events of 1991 were rooted, after all, in economic decay and the associated loss of legitimacy for a state which had long since abandoned ideology in favour of legitimation by managerial success. From a personal point of view, having spent years studying it, it would be satisfying to be able to identify the war as a pivotal event in late Soviet history: the cause of perestroika, the last gasp of Sovietised Russian imperialism, the final nail in the USSR's coffin. Yet of course it was none of these things. It was part and parcel of the catastrophes, blunders, tensions and crises which brought the Soviet system down, from Chernobyl' to food queues, the Tbilisi

233

ANATOMY OF A SMALL WAR

massacre to the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. Perhaps at most it added a particularly sanguine red hue and some dramatic imagery to the collage. Its real role was what the Soviet people made it, from the anxious parents who would immerse themselves ever more deeply into the black economy to earn the cash or the favours to buy their sons' exemptions, through to the politicians and publicists who moulded the still-born truth of the war to their own political ends. The impact of the Afghan War on Soviet and Russian politics and society tells us something about the war, yet is above all a reflection, a relief map, a projection, of the greater issues and processes at work as the Soviet Union decayed and collapsed. Look closely at this war, for within each drop of soldier's blood you can see the death of our ideals, within each crack of rifle fire you can hear the voices of our peoples, and in each dead stare you can see the fate of our nation. afganets

NOTES 1. J. Nogee and R. Donaldson, Soviet Foreign Policy Since World War Two, RAM 3rd edition (1988), p.295. 2. Yu Drunina, 'Poeziya', Yunost' (Aug. 1987) 3. A. Bovin, 'Poluglasnost", Argumenty i fakty 51.88. 4. S. Alexievich, Zinky Boys (1992), p.l13. 5. Quoted in A. Borovik, The Hidden War (1990), p.14.

Select Bibliography

The doctoral dissertation upon which this book is based drew upon more than 2,000 separate sources; those wanting to study the full list are directed to the copies at the University of London and the London School of Economics (The Impact of the Afghan War on Soviet and Russian Politics and Society, 1979-1991, 1992). Listed below are those books and articles of particular importance as an initial guide to further reading. Mark Urban's War in Afghanistan and the relevant chapters of Steven Zaloga's Red Hammer provide the best guide to the military conduct of the war. For some understanding of the experiences of the soldiers (and, to a lesser extent, their friends and families), Svetlana Alexievich's Zinky Boys and Oleg Yermakov's Afghan Tales are absolutely essential. Comparing them with the initially triumphalist, then increasingly sober writings of the propagandist Alexander Prokhanov is a useful exercise.

1 BOOKS

a

In English

A. Alexiev, Inside the Soviet Army in Afghanistan (RAND, 1988) S. Alexievich, Zinky Boys (Chatto & Windus, 1992) A. Arnold, Afghanistan: the Soviet invasion in perspective (Hoover, 1981) G. Bocharov, Russian Roulette (Hamish Hamilton, 1990) A. Borovik, The Hidden War (Faber & Faber, 1991) J. Collins, The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan (Lexington, 1986) J. Fullerton, The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan (Methuen, 1984) A. Ghaus, The Fall of Afghanistan (Pergamon-Brasseys, 1988) M. Hauner and R. Canfield (eds), Afghanistan and the Soviet Union (Westview, 1989)

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

235

D. Isby, Russia's War in Afghanistan (Osprey, 1986) R. Klass (ed.), Afghanistan: The Great Game Revisited (Freedom House, 1987) S. McMichael, Stumbling Bear (Brasseys, 1991) E. O'Ballance, Afghan Wars 1839-1992 (Brasseys, 1993) A. Prokhanov, A Tree in the Centre of Kabul (Progress, 1983) 0. Roy, The Lessons of the Soviet/Afghan War (IISS Adelphi Paper 259, 1991) A. Saikal and W. Maley (eds), The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Cambridge University Press, 1989) M. Urban, War in Afghanistan, 2nd edition (Macmillan, 1990) 0. Yermakov, Afghan Tales (Morrow, 1993) S. Zaloga, Red Hammer (Presidio, 1995) b In Russian A. Dmitrenko, Aist (Kiev filial, Voenizdat, 1990) I. Dynin, Posle Afganistana (Profizdat, 1990) A. Karpenko, Tret'ya storona medali (Profizdat, 1991) G. Krivosheev, Grif sekretnosti snyat: poteri vooruhennykh sil SSSR v voinakh, boevikh deistvyakh i voennikh konftiktakh (Voenizdat, 1993) A. Lyakhovskii and V. Zabrodin, Tainy afganskoi voiny (Planeta, 1991) M. Mushunov and S. Volkov, Afganskie zvezdy (Patriot, 1991) N. Pikov, Voina v Afganistana (Voenizdat, 1991) V. Svetnikov, Zharkii mesyats saratan (DOSAAF, 1988) V. Verstakov, Afganskii dnevnik (Voenizdat, 1991) V. Vozovnikov, V gorakh dolgo svetaet (Voenizdat, 1990) A. Zhitnukin and S. Lyakoshin, Zvezda nad gorodom Kabulom (Molodaya gvardiya, 1990)

2 ARTICLES

a In English A. Barkhatov, '"What type of men shall we be, lads?"', Soviet Literature, August 1989 S. Belitsky, 'Authors of USSR's Afghan war policy', Radio Liberty Report on the USSR, 28 April 1989 S. Blank, 'Imagining Afghanistan: Lessons of a "Small" War', Journal of Soviet Military Studies 3,3 (1990) Cherkasov, 'Afghan war: The Beginning', Soviet Soldier, May 1990

236

AFGHANISTAN: THE SOVIET UNION'S LAST WAR

J. Derleth, 'The Soviets in Afghanistan: Can the Red Army Fight a Counter-insurgency War?', Armed Forces and Society 15,1 (1988) C. Donnelly, 'Afghanistan', Royal Military Academy Sandhurst SSRC Paper PB (1981) N. Ivanov, 'How the Afghan War started', Soviet Soldier, JulyDecember 1991 Z. Khalilzad, 'Moscow's Afghan War', Problems of Communism 35,1 (1986) V. Konovalov, 'Legacy of the Afghan War: Some Statistics', Radio Liberty Report on the USSR, 7 April 1989 Radio Liberty SAAOR audience poll reports The Soviet Public and the War in Afghanistan for the period 1985-88, AR 4-85, AR 1-87 and AR 4-88 b In Russian Anon., 'Posle Afganistana', Komsomol'skaya pravda, 21 December 1989 I. Belyaev and I. Gromyko, 'Tak my voshli v Afganistan', Literaturnaya gazeta, 20 September 1989 A. Bocharov 'Afgan', Literaturnaya gazeta, 15 February 1989 A. Borovik, 'Afganistan: podvodya i itogi', Ogonek No. 30 (1988) and No. 12 (1988) A. Borovik, 'Spryatnnaya voina', Ogonek Nos 40, 48, 50 51 and 52 (1989) B. Gromov, 'Zashchishchali, obychali, stroili', Voenno-istoricheski zhurnal, March 1989 A. Prokhanov, 'Zapiski na brone', Literaturnaya gazeta, 28 August 1985 I. Rudenko, 'Dolg', Komsomol'skaya pravda, 26 February 1984 3 GENERAL BOOKS ON THE LATE USSR AND POST-SOVIET RUSSIA

T. Colton and T. Gustafson (eds), Soldiers and the Soviet State (Princeton University Press, 1990) A. Dallin and G. Lapidus (eds), The Soviet System in Crisis: A Reader of Western and Soviet Views (Westview, 1991) M. Galeotti, The Age of Anxiety: Security and Politics in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia (Longman, 1994) G. Holden, Soviet Military Reform (Pluto, 1991) M. MccGwire, Perestroika and Soviet National Security (Brookings Institution, 1991) R. Sakwa, Gorbachev and his Reforms (Philip Allen, 1990)

SELECf BIBLIOGRAPHY

237

R. Sakwa, Russian Politics and Society (Routledge, 1993) R. Walker, Six Years That Shook the World (Manchester University Press, 1993) S. White, A. Pravda and Z. Gitelman (eds), Developments in Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics (Macmillan, 1992)

Index

Afganets press, 144; see also Glasnost', K sovesti and Pobratim Afgantsy: attitudes, 46-63, 120-38, 159; casualties, 27-9, 8~; composition, 25-30; decorations, 38, 55-6, 85-6, 197; experiences, 32-44; families, 48, 55, 62, 73-4, 79-81, 84-99; heroes, 88-90, 117, 151; invalids, 67-83, 122, 227-8; jobs, 56-62, 172, 227; perceptions of, 41, 47-8, 55-8, 59, 60, 61-4, 71-2, 74-8, 92-3, 150-2, 227-31; privileges, 56, 74-5, 122, 172; slang and customs, 43, 45-6, 103, 147-8; women (afganki), 40-3, 107 Afghan government: 'April Revolution', 3, 4; see also People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan 'Afghan movement' (informal groups), 103-9 Afghan War: assessments of, 139-41, 143, 150-4, 161-8, 198-206, 223-5; cost, 162, 224-5; invasion, 1, 10-15; withdrawal, 18-19, 87, 165, 226 Afghanistan: army, 7, 19, 197; geography, 3-4; people, 3-4, 17; map, 5; rebels, 6--7, 15, 19 Airborne Forces: 38-9, 46--7, 136, 182-3, 186, 187, 194, 210, 216, 220 Aircraft, 17, 191, 195-7, 199, 202-3 Akhromeev, Marshal Sergei, 3, 9, 171, 177. 179-80, 188 Alcohol, 33, 34, 36, 50-3 Aleksievich, Svetlana, 41-2, 143 Algerian War, 39, 224-5 Amin, Hafizullah, 4, 7, 9, 12, 13-15 Andropov, Yurii, 6, 9, 10, 12, 16--17, 74, 89-90, 129, 139, 142-3, 164-5, 178, 184, 224 Armed forces: see Airborne Forces, Aircraft, Army, Conscription, DShV, General Staff, Helicopters, Military Districts, Military Doctrine, Mobile

Forces, Officer corps, OKSV, Spetsnaz, Tactics, Weapons Armenia, 28, 54, 136--7, 160, 213, 215 Army, 58-9, 190-206 Art, Visual, 72, 144-5 Association of Reserve Soldiers' Councils, Soldier-Internationalists and MilitaryPatriotic Unions, 109-10, 114-16 August Coup (1991), 54, 118, 120, 131, 134-8, 167, 173, 174, 180-4, 186, 188, 210, 214, 231 Aushev, Colonel Ruslan, 123, 125-6, 202, 204 Azerbaijan, 28, 54, 79, 133, 137, 160, 174, 209, 213, 218 Baltic states, 26, 27-9, 96, 137, 167, 204, 209, 211, 228 Belorussia, 79, 122, 160, 204 Bogomolov, Oleg, 16, 164-5, 166 Borovik, Artem, 139, 143, 153 Bovin, Aleksandr, 90, 91, 143, 228-9 Brezhnev, Leonid, 6, 9, 12, 15-16, 54, 74, 90, 140, 142, 145, 153, 155, 163, 164, 171, 224 'Brezhnev Doctrine', 10, 90, 154, 161, 165, 207, 225 Bullying, 33-4, 36-7, 97 Bureaucracy, 56, 74-8, 83, 86, 108, 116, 128, 142, 184-5, 214 Burlatskii, Fedor, 90 Charity, 79-83, 93-8, 110-11, 116 Chernenko, Konstantin, 17-18, 90, 142, 151, 171, 224 China, 18, 156, 166, 204, 209, 226 Church, 93-5, 96, 159 CIA, 10 Commonwealth of Independent States, 125, 130, 131, 214, 218 Communist Party (CPSU), 26, 54, 110, 128-9, 130, 184

240

AFGHANISTAN: THE SOVIET UNION'S LAST WAR

Congress of Peoples' Deputies, 86, 93, 96-7, 113, 124--{;, 130, 136, 153, 164 Conscription, 27-30, 32-4, 36-7, 50, 56, 59, 87, 97-8, 104, 178, 182, 201-4 Convoys, 38, 197 Corruption, 29-30, 36, 43, 77, 79, 83, 142, 167 Cossacks, 54, 214-15, 216 Crime, 34, 36, 41, 53, 61, 70-2, 111 Cuba, 51,78 Czechoslovakia, 4, 78-9, 92, 156-8, 207, 210,228

Housing, 112, 116 Hungary, 4, 16, 92, 156, 158, 228

Defectors, 34 Disabled, 76-80 DOSAAF, 33, 104, 110, 111, 117 Drugs, 36, 50-3, 110, 142 DShV, 38-9, 196-7, 220

K sovesti, xi, 81, 92, 113, 114, 118, 144 Karatetskii, Aleksandr, xi, 144, 207 Karma!, Babrak, 7, 9, 10, 12, 15, 18, 154 Kazakhstan, 27-8, 215, 218 KGB, 8, 10, 13-15, 17, 61, 111, 164, 183, 184-5, 196 KhAD (later, WAD), 17, 18, 196 Kirghizia, 27-8, 60 Komsomol (Young Communist League, VLKSM), 32-3, 82, 106, 108-10, 117, 121' 125, 132, 133, 185 Komsomol'skaya pravda, 47-8, 73, 90, 121, 133, 142, 158 Kozyrev, Andrei, 207, 210, 215, 217, 218-19 Krivosheev, Col. General, 30, 182

Education, 32-3, 56-7, 104, 106-7 Epishev, General, 7, 9, 10, 177 Ermakov, Lt. General Viktor, 17, 175, 183 Estonia, 28, 29, 140, 211 Fascism, 92, 128, 130-1, 133-5, 152 Film, 91, 149-50 Fire service, 60-1 Foreign policy, 18-19, 161-8, 207-20, 225-7 General Staff, 10, 19, 130-1, 153, 164, 200,204 Generalov, Lt. General Leonid, 17, 175 Georgia, 1, 25, 28, 29, 52, 127-8, 179, 213, 215-16, 217 Germany, East, 57 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 1, 17, 18-19, 74, 82, 85, 87, 90, 98, 105, 129, 139, 143, 162, 165, 167, 171, 172, 179, 196, 210, 213, 219,224 Gorelov, Lt. General, 7-8, 10 Glasnost', 31, 52-3, 85-{i, 87-93, 98, 141-54, 161, 228-9, 231 Grachev, General Pavel, 177, 182-3, 186, 210, 214, 216 Gromov, General Boris, 19, 123, 126, 130-1, 132, 137, 175, 176, 177, 178-81, 183, 202, 209, 231 Gromyko, Andrei, 6, 10, 12, 153, 161, 164 Gulf War (1991), 124, 154, 162 Helicopters, 68, 191, 195-7, 198-9, 202-3, 205,208 Herat uprising (1979), 7, 42 History, 92, 105, 156-8, 231-2

India, 226 'Internationalists' (other than afgantsy), 98, 122, 156-8, 188 Iran, 3, 10, 159, 218, 226 Islam, 3, 11-12, 27-9, 52, 90, 140, 156-7, 158-{i1, 163, 213, 217-18, 226, 230 Italy, 79, 135, 225 Ivanov, Lt. General, 8, 9, 12

Latvia, 28, 60, 104, 140, 146 LA VVA (Leningrad Association of the Veterans of the War in Afghanistan), 80-2, 113, 114-18 Lebed', General Aleksandr, 183, 210, 216 Leningrad, 29, 54, 56, 73, 94, 109-10, 118, 134, 144, 183 Literature, 142-3, 145-{i, 152 Lithuania, 28, 54, 60, 87, 137, 140, 174, 180,230 Lizichev, General, 106, 177 Lobov, General, 176, 177 Lushev, General Petr, 173-5, 177, 181 Maksimov, General Yurii, 10, 126, 173, 174, 176, 177 Marx, Karl, 1 Massoud, Ahmad Shah, 28 Medical services and staff, 40-1, 42, 60-1, 67-8,69,74-9,82-3,202-3 Military Districts: DVO, 181; LenVO, 113, 118, 183; svo, 9, 173-4, 176, 181; TurkVO, 9-10, 173-4, 181-3, 195 Military Doctrine, 204-{i, 208-10, 219-20 Military-Patriotic Education (VPV), 33, 57, 104-11, 113, 115, 117, 132

INDEX Military Political Administration, 7, 86, 106,203 Mobile Forces, 220 Moiseev, General Mikhail, 115, 177, 179, 180-2 Moldova, 1, 28, 168, 213, 215, 216 Moscow, 29, 52, 54, 60, 111, 122-3, 128, 144 'Mothers' unions', 96--8, 110, 231 Music, 57, 146-9 Myth, 26, 27-9, 30-2, 62, 92, 120, 154, 228-33 Najibullah, Mohammed, 18-19, 115, 154 National Bolshevism, 128, 130, 132-3 Nationalism, 48, 130-5, 159-60, 213-20, 229-30 Nevzorov, Aleksandr, 61, 134 'New Imperialism', 211-20 Non-Commissioned Officers, 33, 51, 200-2 Officer corps, 37, 51, 126, 171-89 Ogarkov, Marshal Nikolai, 6, 9, 10, 15--16, 177 OKSV (Limited Contingent of Forces in Afghanistan), 88; 40th Army command structure, 9, 94, 173-82, 200; civil assistance, 15--19 Pakistan, 16, 17, 122, 127, 226, 230 Pavlovskii, General Ivan, 9, 16, 177 People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), 4-9, 15, 18-19 Petrov, Marshal, 16, 177 Pitirim, Metropolitan, 93-4, 115, 122-3 Pobratim, 57, 115, 118, 144 Poland, 34, 215 Police, 58-61, 110, 131, 132 Politburo, 6-7 Press, 88-92 Prisoners of War, 94-6, 122, 127 Private security, 58, 61 Prokhanov, Aleksandr, 145--6, 171, 229 Prostheses, 77, 78-80, 82 Psycho-social problems: 62, 68-75, 77, 86-7; emotional problems, 86-7; suicide, 72-4; tendency towards violence, 58 Puzanov, Ambassador, 8, 9, 12 Racism, 25, 48, 159--{)0 Radio, 89, 91, 141, 144 Reagan, Ronald, 18, 196 Rodionov, General Igor', 126, 127-8, 177, 179-80, 186, 189,209

241

Russian Federation, 79, 124-5, 127, 130-1, 163, 167-8, 207-20,231-3 Rutskoi, General Aleksandr, 2, 115, 120-1, 124-5, 127-30, 131, 137-8, 150, 183, 186-7, 213-16, 218-19, 231 Ryabchenko, Colonel Ivan, 13, 183 Ryumin, Valerii, 136, 138, 141, 150 Safronov, Colonel, 28-9, 205 Sakharov, Andrei, 91, 125, 140, 143, 163 Sex, 41-2 Shaposhnikov, Marshal Evgenii, 176, 177, 183, 195, 214-15 Shatalin, Col. General Yurii, 137, 178, 180, 209 Shet'ko, Pavel, 122-4 Shevardnadze, Eduard, 162, 216, 217 Sokolov, Marshal Sergei, 10, 173-4, 176-7 Spetsnaz commandos, 9, 10, 13-15, 38, 191, 196, 210 'Stinger' missiles, 18, 195--6 Stovba, Lieutenant Aleksandr ('Aist'), 89, 147 Supreme Soviet, 54, 55, 113, 164, 218; Committee for Soldier-Internationalists' Affairs, 94, 122-5, 137 Suslov, Mikhail, 6, 10, 12, 145, 164 Tactics, 16, 190-2, 195-7, 199-202, 204-6, 208-10 Tajikistan, 1, 27-9, 133, 160, 168, 218, 230 Taraki, Nur Mohammed, 4, 6-9 Television, 143 Torture, 42, 49 Tukharinov, Col. General, 9, 13, 173-5 Turkmenistan, 28-30, 52, 117 UK, 39, 73, 79, 120, 154 Ukraine, 28, 116, 133, 137, 160, 180, 204, 211-13, 230 Union of Veterans of Afghanistan (SVA), 61, 82, 104, 109-10, 114-16, 124-5, 144 United Nations, 140, 179, 217, 226 USA, 11, 17-18, 73, 95, 124, 161, 210, 218, 219, 225--6; see also Vietnam War Ustinov, Marshal Dmitri, 6, 9, 10, 12-13, 145, 153, 164, 171, 174, 177 Uzbekistan, 27-9 Varennikov, General Valentin, 115, 126, 130-1, 137, 173-4, 177, 178-81, 209 Vietnam War, 17, 30, 31, 39, 45, 48, 57, 62, 71, 79, 153-4, 159, 161, 188-9, 195, 205' 208' 224

242

AFGHANISTAN: THE SOVIET UNION'S LAST WAR

Volkogonov, General Dmitri, 7 Weapons, 190-6, 198-200, 205-6 World War, Second (Great Patriotic War), 56, 76, 95, 106, 116, 152, 157-8, 171, 184, 185, 195, 198-9, 203, 232 Yakovlev, Aleksandr, 19

Yazov, Marshal Dmitrii, 176, 177, 181-3 Yeltsin, Boris, 52, 92, 115, 120, 128-30, 131, 163, 164, 166-8, 183, 211, 213--17 Youth subcultures, 32-3, 53, 146, 203 Zaplatin, Maj. General, 7, 10 Zobnin, Yurii, 58, 59--60