From:
thangolossus@gmail.com
<snip russian crapola tainted with lies and completely unwanted here
and anywhere else>
No conflict has vexed Russia’s self-image more than the Soviet-Afghan
War. The quandary only begins with the fact that it ended in 1989 in a
defeat that helped bring down the Soviet Union. Equally problematic is
that it took place outside of the imagined space of the motherland
and, worse still, violated inherited tradition. Soviet Russia was the unqualified aggressor, invading a neighbor torn by a civil war, and
the conduct of its troops was often abominable. “You soon realize,” a veteran explained, “that what you find really objectionable is
shooting someone point blank. Killing en masse, in a group, is
exciting, even—and I’ve seen this myself—fun.”1
Such sadistic undercurrents were supposed to define Russia’s
opponents; now the near-genocidal practices of Soviet invaders pointed
to the darkest of precedents. “I couldn’t see any difference between
myself and a Nazi,” another admitted. “It’s the same thing: rolled-up sleeves, submachine guns, cries, villages.”2 If all wars abound with atrocity, this was one of a singular kind for Soviet Russia and helped
earn it, before the fighting ended, the unshakeable tag as an “empire
of evil.”
Equally agonizing is how the frightful mess began. Exactly why Soviet leaders—a mere handful in a secret meeting—chose to invade Afghanistan
in 1979 is still unclear. Assumed reasons run from the desire to shore
up a socialist ally in that country’s civil war to concern over the
ripple effect of Islamic revolution in neighboring Iran. What is not a
mystery is that they lied about it. Kremlin documents published after
the breakup of the Soviet Union include the actual blueprint of how
the war was to be scripted for public consumption and shines with gems
of mendacity. The country itself, reads one diktat, “does not have any connection to the changes in leadership in Afghanistan”—except that
Soviet commandoes killed its president in a coup that spearheaded the
invasion. Another falsehood, thought up by someone oblivious to the
irony, insisted that the sole purpose of sending the Red Army was to
protect the Afghan people in their “struggle against foreign
aggression.”3
An arsenal of lies accompanied the troops into battle as well. In the
war’s first years, there was little fighting, at least according to
the Soviet press; instead, troops stationed there were helping their
Afghan “friends” by building schools and hospitals. Only midway
through it, when Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet
Union in 1985 and then instituted the policy of glasnost, did the veil
begin to lift. A new generation of journalists, slowly breaking free
from the state’s monopoly on expression, started to raise questions,
and veterans’ voices, such as those cited above, gained public
attention.
Privately in the Kremlin, the same doubts were being expressed by
Gorbachev himself, who declared in a secret meeting that the war was
like a cancerous wound. After their opponent, the Mujahideen, acquired shoulder-fired missiles capable of knocking down Soviet jets and
helicopter gunships, the conflict was deemed unwinnable and plans for withdrawal were made. That process was completed in early 1989, and by
the year’s end the legislative body, the Congress of People’s
Deputies, ruled that the decision to invade had violated the
constitution. However, none of the gang of four involved in it—Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and the heads of the Foreign Ministry,
Defense Ministry, and KGB—was prosecuted since they were already dead, leaving as their collective legacy over a million Afghans killed and,
by official count, nearly fifteen thousand Soviet soldiers.
At that time, as the Soviet Union itself began to implode at the
beginning of the 1990s, chilling revelations became the war’s primary
face, not just in journalism but in fiction and film as well. A
veteran’s novel, like Oleg Ermakov’s Sign of the Beast, fed the image
of an army broken by self-inflicted blows as much as from the
Mujahideen; whereas the movie Afghan Fracture painted it as an immoral predator—so much so that at the end the protagonist, an officer, lets
himself be killed by an Afghan boy as if to atone for the sins
committed by all Soviets there. Nevertheless, journalists still led
the pack, and none more so than Svetlana Alexievich, whose 1990 oral
history Zinky Boys helped win her the Nobel Prize for Literature in
2015.
With a minimalist’s touch, she lets the soldiers speak for themselves.
They appear both as the war’s villains—one gloats over having shot up
an Afghan wedding party and dispatching the “happy couple”—and as its victims. “The lead vehicle in our column broke down going through a village,” another reported. “The driver got out and lifted the hood,
and a boy, about ten years old, rushed out and stabbed him in the
heart.… We turned that boy into a sieve.”4 Alexievich’s work showcases
a war in which, absent a concrete mission, atrocity became policy on
both sides, forming an endless cycle of terror. The Mujahideen
excelled at beheading, castrating, blinding, and flaying prisoners
alive, the Soviet military at flattening villages and sowing countless
mines, many disguised as toys and other knickknacks so as to attract children’s attention.
Appalling, too, were the conditions of service, which remind us of the
worst the Red Army soldiers experienced in World War II. Abused by
superiors, subjected to abject medical conditions, humiliated by
brutal internal hazing, wasted by typhus, forced to steal clothes from
the dead, driven desperate from hunger while being issued canned
rations dating from the 1950s stamped “eat within 18 months”—this is
what the common soldier faced off the battlefield. The only relief was
drug use, which crippled the army and exacerbated the very
circumstances that caused its decline in the first place.
Zinky Boys goes further by detailing how the war’s destructive impact
hit home as well. The accounts by anguished family members push its
physical and psychological toll even higher. Post-traumatic stress
disorder became rampant; anger at the government went unrelieved,
first for sending soldiers there and then, to compound the betrayal,
neglecting them when they came back.
Betrayal extended even to those killed and their families. Death
itself, in the words of one, was subject to a “conspiracy of silence” propagated by the state. A body would be placed in a zinc-lined coffin
so as to slow its decay and thereby generating the ghoulish nickname
given to Soviet soldiers and resurfacing again as Alexievich’s title.
Shipped back to the Soviet Union secretly, sometimes at night, the
coffin would arrive at an airport without any ceremony. From there it
would be delivered directly to the family’s home—often with no
forewarning. After relaying one mother’s account of meeting her son in
such fashion while she was coming down the stairs in the morning,
Alexievich gives us a string of others desperately trying to
understand the frigid heartlessness of this policy.
“It wasn’t like that for me. They [the soldiers who brought it] just
said: ‘The coffin’s outside. Where shall we put it?’ My husband and I were getting ready to go to work, the eggs were frying, the kettle was boiling.…”
“Mine was called up, had his hair shaved off, and five months later
they brought him back in a coffin.”
“Mine too.…”
“Mine—nine months.”
“ ‘Is there anything in there?’ I asked the soldier accompanying the coffin? ‘I saw him being laid in the coffin. He is there.’ I stared at
him and he lowered his eyes. ‘Something’s in there.…’ ”
“Did it smell? Ours did.”
“So did ours. We even had little white worms dropping on to the
floor.”5
Coffins could not be opened, depriving families of the all-important
ritual of washing the body and visually parting with the deceased.
Thus many could still believe that, no, it could not be their son. (In
one way, though, perhaps this was for the better. If not enough of a soldier’s body was recoverable, then dirt was added to give the coffin
proper heft and offer the impression of a loved one peacefully
intact.) As a final insult, dead soldiers were not buried with
military honors and were not grouped together in cemeteries so as to
hide their true number. (Many, in fact, believe the official figure to
be woefully low, estimating that it should be around fifty
thousand—closer to the mark of the Vietnam War for Americans.) And on
the headstone itself, only dates of birth and death were indicated,
thereby erasing the cause and place of death.
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