Zinky Boys (28 page)

‘Just a few more parasites hanging round our neck,' whispered a man sitting next to me in the train.

At a seminar at city Communist Party HQ the following question was posed: why did we allow Amin to kill Taraki?
*
The seminar leader, a Moscow functionary whose job it was to lay down the Party line, replied: ‘The strong had to be replaced by the weak.' This left an unpleasant taste in the mouth.

At the time, the official justification for the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan was that ‘the Americans were on the brink of an airborne invasion which we anticipated and thus prevented by less than one hour.'

Afghan sheepskins were suddenly all the rage. Women envied their friends whose husbands were in Afghanistan. The press reported that our soldiers were planting trees and rebuilding bridges and roads.

Leaving Moscow by train I found myself sharing a compartment with a young couple. We began talking about Afghanistan and I more or less spouted the official line, which they ridiculed. They were doctors who'd spent two years in Kabul. They strongly defended soldiers who bought goods there to resell in the Soviet Union. They said life out there was very expensive and the pay was inadequate. In Smolensk I helped them down with their luggage, which consisted of a large amount of Western-made articles, such as radios, videos and sophisticated kitchen equipment.

When I got home my wife told me the following story about a neighbour of ours. This woman had no husband and her only son had been posted to Afghanistan. She went to whoever it was she had to go to, went down on her knees to beg him, kissed his boots, and returned satisfied. ‘I've got my boy out!' she said. She also coolly described how ‘the top brass are buying their own sons out'.

My son came home from school and told us that some Green Berets, the parachute force, had been to the school to give a talk. ‘You should have seen their Japanese watches!' he said wonderingly. I later asked one such veteran how much his watch had cost and how he could afford it. After some umming and aahing he admitted, ‘We stole a truckload of fruit and sold it.' He told me that everyone particularly envied soldiers on petrol-tanker duty. ‘They're all millionaires!'

I can't forget the harassment of Andrei Sakharov. I certainly agree with one thing he said: ‘We always prefer dead heroes to living men and women who may have made a few mistakes.'

I heard recently that some rank-and-file soldiers and a couple of officers were studying for the priesthood at the seminary at Zagorsk [a famous monastery not far from Moscow]. What, I
wonder, drove them to it? Was it repentance, or a desire to escape from the cruel realities of life, or a thirst for some kind of spirituality? For them, apparently, the privileges their war veterans' cards bought them — the extra food, the flashy foreign clothes and the private land — were not enough to keep their mouths and eyes shut.

(N. Goncharov)

That was from a man who did not experience Afghanistan at first hand. The following is from a woman, a civilian employee, who did:

I'm one of those who went out there, although with every year that goes by I find it harder to answer the inevitable question: ‘You're not a soldier, so what did you go there for?' What business had a woman going out there? The more the war is condemned, the more we women are disapproved of and the less we are understood.

People like me were victims of blind faith. We believed all the talk about the April Revolution and accepted everything we'd been taught since our earliest schooldays. But we came home different people. We wanted the truth to be known. I waited and waited for it to start coming out.

If I could live my life again I wouldn't go to Afghanistan. ‘Be done with the whole thing! And try and make everyone forget you were there!' my friend wrote to me. No, I don't want to just wash it away, but I would like to sort things out. My life might have turned out differently if I hadn't gone — but to be absolutely honest, I don't regret it. I still remember that sense of sharing our troubles and aiming at higher things. We realised we'd been deceived, and wondered why we were so gullible.

I was amazed when I saw how many women there were there. I'd thought I was the only little fool and somehow assumed I wasn't quite normal. There were thousands of us! We all had some practical reason for going, of course, whether to earn money, or carve out a career, or solve some personal problem, but inside all of us there was still that …
faith.
We wanted to be needed and we wanted to help. I personally felt that there ought to be
women wherever wars were being fought. Perhaps I was naïve to think that every war was like our Great Patriotic War against the Nazis, but how could a hospital, for example, function without women? Those defenceless, mutilated men needed them, even if only for the comforting touch of a soft hand. It was simple charity and a woman's proper work. I met boys there who actually volunteered for dangerous action. They showed true heroism and didn't stop to think they were going to their deaths.

I'm sorry these thoughts of mine are coming out in such a jumble. I'm upset and there's so much I want to say …

The myth about brotherhood at the front was dreamed up here at home. It didn't exist. Everything was for sale, including women. Yes, it's true! But that wasn't the most important thing. In spite of all that we were still idealists. We had our faith. The worst came later. We were sent to Afghanistan by a nation which sanctioned the war and returned to find that same nation had rejected it. What offends me is the way we've simply been erased from the public mind. What was only recently described as one's ‘international duty' is now considered stupidity. When was that frontier crossed? That's the most important question of all.

I'm trying to think of a comparison. It's like … a mountaineer, climbing up very high … then he falls, breaks his leg, but for the rest of his life he still longs for the mountains. That's the nostalgia we feel — especially the men. They risked their lives and became killers — and because of that they think they're somehow special. They've been touched by something unique. Perhaps it's some kind of illness within us. Or perhaps we still haven't come home?

(G. Khaliulina, civilian employee)

My son had just left school to enter a military academy when the war in Afghanistan began. Throughout those ten years, when other mothers' sons found themselves in a foreign land with guns in their hands, I was sick with worry. I knew my son might be there one day. It's not true that the public didn't know what was going on. Everyone could see parents opening their doors to those zinc coffins or having their sons returned to them broken and crippled. Such things weren't mentioned on radio or television, of course, or in the newspapers (until you recently dared to), but
it was plain for all to see. And what did our ‘humane' society, and we ourselves, do about it? Well, we handed out medals to the ‘great' old men, Brezhnev, Andropov and the rest, at every conceivable opportunity.

We fulfilled, and over-fulfilled, one five-year plan after the other (while the shelves of our shops stayed as empty as ever), built our dachas and amused ourselves while eighteen- and twenty-year-olds were being shot and killed on foreign soil. What kind of people are we, and what right have we to ask our children to do the things they had to do there? How can we, who stayed at home, claim that our hands are cleaner than theirs? And although their suffering, their torture, has cleansed
them
of their sins, we have not yet been cleansed of ours. The machine-gunned and abandoned villages and ruined land are not on their consciences but on ours. We were the real murderers, not they, and we murdered our own children as well as others.

These boys were heroes! They weren't fighting for any so called ‘mistaken policy'. They fought because they put their faith in us. We should kneel before every one of them. If we truly faced up to the comparison of what we did here with what befell them there, we might go mad.

(A. Golubnichaya, construction engineer)

Today, of course, Afghanistan is a profitable and fashionable subject. That will no doubt please you, Comrade Alexievich, because your book will be all the rage. Nowadays in this country a lot of people are crawling out of the woodwork who are fascinated by any opportunity to smear the good name of their Motherland, including some Afgantsi. And it's people like you who give them the ammunition they need to defend themselves with. ‘Look what we were forced to do,' they say. Decent people don't
need
to defend themselves — they stay decent whatever circumstances they find themselves in — and there are plenty of such veterans of Afghanistan, but they weren't the ones you sought out.

Although I wasn't in Afghanistan, I fought all through World War II and I know there was plenty of dirt in that war too; but I don't intend to bring it all up and I won't allow others to either. It's not just that that war was different. We all know that we have
to eat in order to live, and that eating also implies going to the toilet (if you'll pardon the expression), but we just don't mention such things.

So why couldn't you and those like you observe the same taboo in your books about these wars? If Afgantsi themselves protest against the ‘revelations' in books like yours we should respect their wishes. And I know what makes them object so violently: it's a normal human emotion called shame. They're ashamed. You picked up that emotion accurately enough, but you had to go further, and take it before the court of public opinion. In telling us that they shot camels and killed civilians you wanted to demonstrate the futility and wickedness of war, but you don't realise that in doing so you insult those who took part in it, including a lot of innocent boys.

(N. Druzhinin, Tula)

Then there were the phone calls:

‘OK, we aren't heroes, maybe, but now we're murderers, according to you. We murdered women, children and their animals. Maybe in thirty years I'll be ready to tell my son that not everything was as heroic as the books say it was. But I'll tell him myself, in my own words and in thirty years' time. Now it's still an open wound which is only just beginning to heal and form a scab. Don't pick it! Leave it alone! It's still very painful.'

‘How could you? How dare you cover our boys' graves with such dirt? They did their duty by the Motherland to the bitter end and now you want them to be forgotten …

‘Hundreds of little museums and memorial comers have been set up in schools all over the country. I took my son's exercise books and his army overcoat to his old school to serve as an example.

‘Who needs your dreadful truth? I don't want to know it!!! You want to buy your own glory at the expense of our sons' blood. They were heroes, heroes, heroes! They should have beautiful
books written about them, and you're turning them into mincemeat.'

‘I had my son's stone engraved with these words: “Remember, friends, he died that the living might live.” I know, now, that that was not true — he did not die for the sake of the living. I was lied to when I was young and continued the process with him. We were so good at believing. “Love the Motherland, son, she'll never betray you and love you always.” I used to repeat to him. Now I would like to write something different on his grave: “Why?” ' (A mother)

‘My neighbour brought me a newspaper with the excerpt from your book. “Forgive me,” she said, “but this is the war you told us about.” I couldn't believe my eyes. I didn't think it possible to write such things and have them printed. We've got so used to living on two levels, one according to what we read in books and the press, and the other — totally different — according to our own experience. It's more shocking than comforting, when newspapers actually start to describe life as it really is. Everything you wrote is true, except that the reality was even more terrible. I would like to meet you and talk to you.' (A woman)

‘I see my son leave the flat every morning but I still can't believe he's home. When he was over there I'd tell myself, if they send him back in a coffin I'll do one of two things: go on a protest march or go to church. I was invited to his old school. “Come and tell us about your son and how he won the Red Star twice over,” they begged. But I didn't go. I'm forty-five. I call ours the “obedient generation” and the Afghan war the acme of our tragedy. You've hit a nerve by daring to ask us and our children this question: “Who are we? And why can they do what they want with us?'” (A mother)

‘ “Oh, they're dreadful people!” I heard someone say at work, talking about the Afgantsi. But so are we all. The war didn't make them any worse than they were before. In fact I sometimes think the war must have been a cleaner experience for them than our
day-to-day life was for us here at home. That is why they long to go back.' (A woman)

‘How much longer are you going to go on describing us as mentally ill, or rapists, or junkies? We were told the opposite over there. “When you get home you'll be in the vanguard of
perestroika.
You'll clean up the whole stagnant mess!” they said. We thought we'd be restoring order to society but they won't let us get on with the job. “Study!” they keep telling us. “Settle down and have a family!”

‘It was quite a shock for me, the black marketeers, the mafia and the apathy — but they won't let us get on and do something serious about it. I felt utterly bewildered until some clever guy said to me, “What can you actually do, apart from shooting? Do you really think that justice comes out of the barrel of a gun?” That was when I began to think, to hell with my gun. I'll have to stop thinking it's still hanging over my shoulder, I told myself.'

‘I cried when I read your article, but I shan't read the whole book, because of an elementary sense of self-preservation. I'm not sure whether we ought to know so much about ourselves. Perhaps it's just too frightening. It leaves a great void in my soul. You begin to lose faith in your fellow-man and fear him instead.' (A woman)