The Second Day

‘But another dies with a broken heart’

Author. He phoned again today. From now on I’m going to call him my leading character.

Leading character. I wasn’t going to call you again, but I got on a bus and heard two women talking. ‘Fine heroes they were! Murdering women and children over there. They’re sick. And just think, they get invited to speak at schools! They even get special privileges … ’ I jumped off at the next stop and stood there crying. We were soldiers obeying orders. In wartime you can be shot for disobedience, and we were at war. Obviously it wasn’t the generals themselves who killed women and children, but they gave the orders — and now they’re blaming us. Now we’re told that to obey a criminal command is itself a crime. But I trusted the people giving the orders. As far back as I can remember I’ve been taught to have faith in authority. No one ever told me to judge for myself whether or not to trust the authorities, whether or not to shoot. The message was hammered into us over and over again: have faith, trust us.

Author. It was the same for all of us.

Leading character: Yes, I was a killer and I’m covered in blood … But I saw him lying there, my friend who was like a brother to me, with his head cut off, and his arms, and his legs, and his flayed skin … I volunteered for the very next raid. I watched a funeral procession in a village, there were a lot of people there. The body was wrapped in white. I could see everything quite clearly through my field-glasses and I gave the order: ‘At the funeral — FIRE!’

Yes, I killed because I wanted to go on living and get home again. Why do you want to drag all this up again? I’ve only just begun to stop thinking about death night after night. For three years I spent my nights choosing between a bullet in the mouth and a noose made from my tie. Now I can smell that horrible stink of thorn bush again, it’ll drive me mad eventually … Author. Why is it that, as he slams down the receiver again, I have the feeling that I’ve known him for a long, long time?

Sergeant, Infantry Platoon Leader

It’s like in a dream, as if I’ve already seen this before in some film, and the feeling now is that I’ve never killed anyone …

I volunteered. I wanted to find out what I was capable of. I’m very ambitious. I went to university, but you can’t show — or know what you’re made of in a place like that. I dropped out in my second year. I wanted to be a hero and looked for a chance to be one. They say it was a man’s war but the truth is, it was a boy’s war. It was kids not long out of school who did the fighting. It was like a game for us. Self-esteem and pride were terribly important: can I do it or can’t I? He can — can I? That’s what we were worried about, not politics. I’d been preparing myself for a challenge of some kind since I was a young boy. My favourite author was Jack London. A real man had to be strong — and war makes you strong. My girlfriend tried to talk me out of it. ‘Do you really think writers like Bunin or Mandelstam thought that way?’ she asked me. None of my friends understood me either. Some got married, others got involved in Zen or yoga and suchlike. I was the only one who went to the war.

The mountains above you, scorched by the sun, down below, a little girl calling her goat, and a woman hanging out her washing. Just like at home in the Caucasus … To tell the truth, I was a bit disappointed, until one night they shot at our camp-fire. I picked up the tea kettle and there was a bullet under it.

On route-marches the thirst was sheer torture and utterly humiliating. Your whole mouth dried up, it seemed to be full of dust and you couldn’t work up enough saliva to swallow. We licked up the dew and even our own sweat. I was determined to get through it. I caught a tortoise, slit its throat with a sharp stone, and drank its blood. No one else could face it. I was the only one.

I realised I was capable of killing. I had a gun in my hand. The first time we went into battle I noticed how some of the lads were in a state of shock. They fainted, or started vomiting when they realised they’d killed people or saw human brains or eyes being blown out. I could take it though. One of the lads was a hunter who bragged that before he joined the army he’d killed hares and wild boar, but he vomited with the rest of them. It’s one thing to shoot animals, quite another to kill human beings. In battle you go as stiff as wood, cold reason takes over, you calculate … This is my gun and my life. The gun becomes part of your body, like a third arm …

It was a partisan war, and set-piece battles were rare. It was you against him. You grew as sharp as a lynx. You fire a burst — he stays still. You wait — what next? You feel the bullet whistle past you even before you hear the bang. You crawl from stone to stone, you hide, you race behind him like a hunter. Your body’s like a coiled spring and you don’t breathe until you pounce. If it comes to it you kill him with your gun-butt. You kill him and you sense you’re alive! ‘I’M ALIVE!’ But there’s no joy in killing a man. You kill so you can get home safe.

No two dead bodies look the same. Water, for instance, does something to the human face that gives it a kind of smile. After rain they all look clean. Death in the dust, without water, is more honest, somehow. The uniform may be brand-new but there’s a dry red leaf where the head should be, squashed flat like a lizard. You find bodies propped against the wall of a house: I saw one by a pile of nut-shells he must’ve just cracked, his eyes were open because there’d been no one to close them. You’ve only got 10–15 minutes to close the eyes after death — then it’s too late … BUT I’M ALIVE! I saw another, curled up, with his flies undone, he was relieving himself. They lie there the way they were at the last moment of their lives … BUT I’M ALIVE! I need to touch myself to make sure …

Birds aren’t scared of death, they sit and watch. Nor are children, — they sit there too, and look on calmly, like the birds. They’re curious.

Back in the canteen you eat your soup, look at your neighbour and imagine him dead. There was a time when I couldn’t bear to look at photos of my family. When I got back from action I wouldn’t look women and children in the face. Eventually you get used to it, go and work out next morning as usual — I was into weight-training. I was keen on fitness and wanted to be in good shape to go home. I admit I couldn’t sleep, but that was because of the lice, especially in winter. We sprayed the mattresses with some kind of dust, but it didn’t make much difference …

I only started to be afraid of dying when I was back home and my son was born. Then I was scared that if I died he’d grow up without me. I was hit seven times, I could easily have kicked the bucket, but I didn’t. Sometimes I even have the feeling I didn’t play the game to the end, or fight to the finish, rather …

I don’t feel guilty and I don’t get nightmares. I always chose honest combat — him against me. If I saw a couple of our lads beating up a POW with his hands tied behind his back, lying on the ground like a bundle of rags, I’d chase them away. I despised people like that. One chap started shooting eagles with his automatic and I socked his ugly mug for him. The birds hadn’t done anything wrong, after all.

When my family asked what it was like over there I’d just say, ‘Look, I’m sorry, I’ll tell you some other time.’

I graduated and now I’m an engineer. I just want to be an engineer, not a ‘veteran of the Afghan war’. I want to forget all that, although I don’t know what will become of us, the generation that went through it.

This is the first time I’ve talked about it, talking like we’re strangers in a train and getting off at different stops. Look, my hands are shaking, I’m upset for some reason. I thought I’d come out of it relatively unscathed. If you write about me don’t mention my surname. I’m not afraid of anything, I just don’t want to be involved again …

Civilian Employee

I was due to be married that December, but in November I went to Afghanistan. My fiancé laughed when I told him. ‘Doing your “solemn duty to defend the southern borders of our Socialist Motherland”, I suppose?’ You know what he said when he realised I wasn’t joking? ‘Aren’t there enough boys for you to sleep with here?’

I thought, I missed out on the BAM and tselina projects [the Baikal-Amor Railway and the Siberian Virgin Lands], but I’m in luck — I’ve got Afghanistan! I believed the songs the boys brought back, and sang them all day long:

So many of our Russian sons

Lie among the rocks and stones

Of Afghan soil …

I was an ordinary, rather bookish, Moscow girl. I thought I’d find real life only somewhere far away, where the men were strong and the women beautiful. I wanted adventure and escape from everyday life …

The three nights I was en route for Kabul I didn’t sleep a wink. At the customs they thought I was a drug addict. I remember I had tears in my eyes trying to convince them:

‘I’m not a junkie. I just need some sleep!’

I was lugging a heavy suitcase full of Mum’s home-made jam and biscuits and not a single man offered to help. And these weren’t just any old men, but healthy, strong, young officers! In Moscow I had all the boys running after me — they adored me. So I was utterly amazed. When I asked, ‘Can someone give me a hand?’ they looked at me as if to say, ‘We know what kind of girl you are!’

I had to hang about at the clearing-centre for another three days. On the first day a junior lieutenant came up to me. ‘If you want to stay in Kabul, spend the night with me,’ he said. He was fat and soft — later on a girl told me his nickname was Balloon!

I was taken on as a typist. We used World War II army machines. The first few weeks my fingers bled and I had to type all bandaged up — my nails were dropping off.

One night, a couple of weeks later, a soldier came to my room. ‘The CO wants to see you,’ he said.

Tm not going.’

He looked at me. ‘Why make life hard for yourself? You knew what you were getting into when you came here.’

Next morning the CO threatened to post me to Kandahar, which was generally recognised as the dirtiest and most dangerous dump in the country. For a few days I was really scared of being ‘accidentally’ hit by a car, or shot in the back. Two girls shared the room next to mine in the hostel. One had a job in electricity supply, so everyone called her ‘Elektrichka’; the other worked in water purification so she was ‘Chlorka’! Whenever I complained about things they just shrugged their shoulders: ‘Well, that’s life...’

Just at that time there was an article in Pravda called ‘Afghan Madonnas’. As a result we got admiring letters from girls from back home, and some of them were so impressed they went down to their local recruiting offices and asked to be sent to Afghanistan. The reality was rather different: we couldn’t walk past a group of soldiers without sneering comments like ‘Well, Bochkarevka! How’s our little heroine today? Doing our international duty in bed, are we?’ The name ‘Bochkarevka’ comes from the little houses (they look a bit like railway carriages) known as ‘bochki’ reserved for senior officers — majors and above, so the girls who, well, ‘serviced’ them were known as ‘Bochkarevki\ You’ll often hear soldiers who’ve served here say things like this: ‘If I hear that a certain girl’s been in Afghanistan she just doesn’t exist for me.’ We got the same diseases as they did, all the girls got hepatitis and malaria, we were shot at too, but if I meet a boy back home he won’t let me give him a friendly hug. For them we’re all either whores or crazy. ‘Don’t sleep with a woman like that, don’t soil yourself … ’ ‘Me? Sleep with that? I sleep with my gun’, etc, etc. It’s hard even to smile at a man after you’ve heard that kind of thing.

‘My daughter’s in Afghanistan,’ my mother told all her friends proudly. Poor naïve Mum! I wanted to write and tell her, ‘Keep quiet, Mum, unless you want someone to tell you your daughter’s a tart.’ Perhaps I’ll calm down and get over it gradually once I’m home. But here I feel broken to bits inside. You asked me what I’ve learnt in Afghanistan? Well, I’ll tell you what you can’t learn here: about goodness, kindness or happiness.

Little boys run after me shouting: ‘Khanum! [woman] Show us your … ’ They even offer me money, so presumably some of the girls take it.

I used to think I’d never make it home, I’m over that now. I have two dreams, over and over again. In the first, we go to a gorgeous shop, with carpets on the walls and jewellery everywhere … And I’m being sold by some of our boys. Sacks of money are brought out, they count the notes while two mujahedin twist my hair round their fingers … The alarm clock wakes me up and I’m screaming with fear, so I never find out how it ends.

In the other dream we’re flying in an Ilyushin-65 troop transport plane from Tashkent to Kabul. We can see the mountains through the portholes: then it gets dark. We begin to sink into some kind of abyss: there’s a layer of heavy Afghan soil over us. I dig like a mole but I can’t reach the light. I’m suffocating. I go on digging and digging …

If I don’t stop now I’ll go on talking for ever. There isn’t a day that passes without something terribly upsetting happening here. Yesterday a boy I know got a letter from his girlfriend back home: ‘I don’t want to be friends with you any more, your hands are dripping with blood.’ He ran to me and I held him tight.

We all think of home but don’t talk about it much. We’re superstitious. I’m longing to go home, but where is home? We don’t talk much about that, either.

We tell jokes instead:

Teacher: ‘Children, what do your Daddies do for a living?’

Hands go up. ‘My Daddy’s a doctor.’

‘My Daddy’s a plumber.’

‘My Daddy’s in the circus …

Little Vova stays quiet. ‘Vova, don’t you know what your Daddy does?’

‘He used to be a pilot, but now he’s got a job as a fascist in Afghanistan.’

At home I used to love books about war, but here I carry Dumas around with me. When you’re at war you don’t want to see it around you; although some of the girls did go and see some dead bodies. ‘They were lying there in their socks,’ they told me. There are so many men hopping about the streets on crutches here. Not everyone can take it. I can’t, really. I wanted to be a journalist, but now I’m not so sure, I find it hard to believe in anything.

Once I’m back home in Moscow I’m never going south again. Whenever I see mountains now I get the feeling I’m going to get bombed. Once, during a bombardment, I saw a girl just kneeling and crying and praying. I wonder who she was praying to. We’re all a bit secretive here, no one’s really honest about themselves. Everyone’s harbouring some disappointment or other.

I spend most of my time crying and praying for that bookish Moscow girl who doesn’t exist any more.

Private, Grenadier Regiment

I went to Afghanistan thinking I’d come home with my head held high. Now I realise the person I was before this war has gone for ever.

Our company was combing through a village. I was patrolling with another lad. He pushed open a hut door with his leg and was shot point-blank with a machine-gun. Nine rounds. In that situation hatred takes over. We shot everything, right down to the domestic animals. In fact, shooting animals is the worst. I was sorry for them. I wouldn’t let the donkeys be shot — they’d done nothing wrong, had they? They had amulets hanging from their necks, exacdy the same as the children. It really upset me, setting fire to that wheat-field — I’m a country boy myself.

When I was over there I only remembered the good things about life back home, especially my childhood, like the way I used to lie on the grass among the bluebells and marguerites, how we roasted ears of wheat over a log-fire and ate them …

The heat from the fire was so terrific that it melted the iron on the roofs of the little shops. The field was swallowed up by the flames in an instant. It smelt of bread and that reminded me of when I was a boy, too.

In Afghanistan night falls like a curtain. One moment it’s light, the next — night. A bit like me — I was a boy but I became a man all at one go. That’s war for you.

Sometimes when it rains there you look up and see the rain falling, but it never hits the ground. We watched TV programmes by satellite showing life at home going on as normal, but it was irrelevant to us somehow … I can talk about all this to you but I feel terribly frustrated, because I can’t get over to you what it was really all about.

Sometimes I want to write down everything I saw. Like, in hospital, the lad who’d lost his arms, his legs and his mate. I remember sitting on his bed writing a letter for him to his mother. Or the little Afghan girl who pinched a sweet from a Soviet soldier and had both her hands hacked off by her own people. I’d like to write it all down exactly as it was and without any comments. If it rained I’d say it rained, just that, without a lot of talk about whether it was a good or bad thing that it was raining.

When it was our time to go home we expected a warm welcome and open arms — then we discovered that people couldn’t care less whether we’d survived or not. In the courtyard of our block of flats I met up with the kids I’d known before. Oh, you’re back — that’s good,’ they said, and went off to school. My teachers didn’t ask about anything either. This was the sum total of our conversation:

I, solemnly: ‘We should perpetuate the memory of our school fellows who died doing their international duty.’

They: ‘They were dunces and hooligans. How can we put up a memorial plaque to them in the school?’

People back home had their own view of the war. ‘So you think you were heroes, were you? You lost a war, and anyhow, who needed it, apart from Brezhnev and a few warmongering generals?’

Apparently my friends died for nothing, and I might have died for nothing too.

Well, at least my Mum was looking out of the window, the day I got home, and saw me coming, and ran out on to the road shouting for joy. Whatever anyone says, and however much history gets rewritten, I know that those boys who died there were heroes.

I had a talk with an old lecturer at college. ‘You were a victim of a political mistake,’ he said. ‘You were forced to become accomplices to a crime.’

‘I was eighteen then,’ I told him. ‘How old were you? You kept quiet when we were being roasted alive. You kept quiet when we were being brought home in body-bags and military bands played in the cemeteries. You kept quiet over here while we were doing the killing over there. Now all of a sudden you go on about victims and mistakes … ’

Anyhow, I don’t want to be a victim of a political mistake. And I’ll fight for the right not to be! Whatever anyone says, those boys were heroes!

Artillery Captain

I was lucky. I’ve come home alive, with my arms, legs and eyes. I wasn’t burnt and I didn’t go mad. We soon realised this wasn’t the war we’d expected to fight, but we just decided to get it over with, stay alive and go home. There’d be plenty of time to analyse it later.

Mine was the first relief contingent to go to Afghanistan. We had orders, not ideals. You don’t discuss orders — if you did you wouldn’t have an army for long. You know what Engels said? ‘A soldier must be like a bullet, constantly ready to be fired.’ I learnt that by heart. You go to war in order to kill. Killing is my profession — that’s what I was trained to do.

Was I afraid for myself? I just assumed that other people might get killed, but not me. You can’t really comprehend the possibility of your own annihilation. And don’t forget — I wasn’t a boy when I went out there, I was thirty years old.

That’s where I learnt what life was about. I tell you straight — they were the best years of my life. Life here is rather grey and petty: work — home, home — work. There we had to work everything out for ourselves and test our mettle as men.

So much of it was exotic, too: the way the morning mist swirled in the ravines like a smokescreen, even those burubukhaiki, the high-sided, brightly decorated Afghan trucks, and the red buses with sheep and cows and people all crammed together inside, and the yellow taxis … There are places there which remind you of the moon with their fantastic, cosmic landscapes. You get the feeling that there’s nothing alive in those unchanging mountains, that it’s nothing but rocks — until the rocks start shooting at you! You sense that even nature is your enemy.

We existed between life and death — and we held other men’s life and death in our hands too. Is there any feeling more powerful than that? We’ll never walk, or make love, or be loved, the way we walked and loved and were loved over there. Everything was heightened by the closeness of death: death hovered everywhere and all the time. Life was full of adventure: I learnt the smell of danger — I’ve got a sixth sense for it now. We’re homesick for it, some of us; it’s called the ‘Afghan syndrome’.

We never bothered ourselves with questions about whether we were doing the right thing or not. We carried out our orders the way we were trained to. Now, of course, with the benefit of hindsight and a lot of information which we didn’t have at the time, the whole business is being reconsidered and re-evaluated. After less than ten years! At the time we had the clear image of an enemy, an enemy very familiar to us from books and school and all those films about the basmach [members of the anti-Soviet independence movement in Central Asia, particularly in the late 1920s]. The White Desert Sun, for instance. I must have seen that film five times at least. Just when we were complaining that we’d been born too late for World War II — eureka! A ready-made enemy appeared on the horizon. We were brought up to find inspiration in war and revolution — and nothing else.

As I said, we were the first relief contingent to be sent out. We were quite happy digging foundations for barracks, canteens and army clubs. We were issued with TT-44 pistols dating from World War II, the ones you see political commissars swaggering about with in old films. They were no use at all except to shoot yourself with, or sell in the bazaar. We walked around like partisans, in whatever we could find, usually sweatpants and trainers. I was like the Good Soldier Schweik. When it was 50° Celsius our superiors still expected us to wear ties and full uniform as per Army Regulations from the North Pole to the Equator!

In the morgue I saw body-bags with human flesh hacked to pieces. That was a nasty shock. But within a few months we’d be watching a film in the open air and if tracer shells flashed past the screen we’d just carry on watching … Or we’d be playing volley-ball and a bombardment would begin, so we’d check where the shells were coming from and go back to the game. The films they sent out were either about war, or Lenin, or wives cheating on their husbands. I’d gladly have machine-gunned all those women sleeping with other men while their husbands were away! We all wanted comedies but they never sent a single one. The screen was two or three sheets sewn together and strung between a couple of trees, with the audience sitting on the sand.

Once a week we had bath and drinks night. A bottle of vodka cost 30 cheki, so we brought it with us from home. Customs regulations permitted two bottles of vodka, four of wine but unlimited beer, so we’d pour out the beer and fill the bottles with vodka. Or else you might open a bottle of mineral water and find it was 40° proof! People drank used aeroplane kerosene and antifreeze. We’d warn new recruits not to touch antifreeze, whatever else they drank, but within a few days they’d be in hospital with their insides corroded.

We smoked hash. One friend of mine got so high in battle he was sure every bullet had his name on it, wherever it was really headed. Another smoked at night and hallucinated that his family was with him, started kissing his wife. Some had all-colour visions such as in a film. At first the traders in the bazaar sold us the stuff but later they gave it us for free. ‘Go on, Russky, have a smoke!’ they would say. The kids would run after us, pushing it into our hands.

A lot of my friends were killed. One touched the tripwire of a mine with his heel, heard the detonator click and, as always happens, looked at the noise in surprise instead of hurling himself to the ground. He died of dozens of shrapnel wounds. Then there was a tank which exploded so violently that the base opened up like a can of jam and the caterpillars blew off their rollers. The driver tried to escape through the hatch, we saw one arm emerge and that was all — he was burnt in his tank. Back in barracks no one wanted to sleep in his bed. One day a new recruit arrived so we told him to take the bed. ‘It doesn’t matter to you, you never knew him anyhow … ’

We were most upset by the ones with children, children who’d grow up without a Dad. On the other hand, what about those who left no one behind, who died as if they’d never been?

We were incredibly badly paid for fighting that war: we got twice basic pay (basic pay being worth 270 foreign currency vouchers), less all kinds of stoppages, compulsory membership-fees, subscriptions and tax. At that time an ordinary volunteer worker in the far north was getting 1,500. ‘Military advisers’ earned five to ten times more than us. The difference was particularly obvious going through customs at the border: we’d have a tape-recorder and a couple of pairs of jeans, they’d have half a dozen trunks, so heavy the squaddies could hardly carry them.

When we got back in the Soviet Union, in Tashkent, it was no easier.

‘Back from Afghan? Want a girl? I’ve got one for you as soft as a peach, dear … ’

‘No thanks, I’m trying to get home on leave. To my wife. I need a ticket.’

‘Tickets cost money … D’you want to sell your Italian sunglasses?’

‘It’s a deal.’

To get on the plane to Sverdlovsk cost me 100 roubles, those Italian sun-glasses, a Japanese lurex scarf and a French make-up set. In the ticket-queue I learnt the way things worked: ‘Why stand here for days? Forty vouchers slipped into your service passport and you’ll be home next day.’

I get to the ticket-window. ‘Ticket for Sverdlovsk.’

‘No tickets. Open your eyes and look at the board!’

I slip the forty vouchers in and try again. ‘Ticket to Sverdlovsk please, miss.’

‘I’ll just go and check. Oh, lucky you came by, we’ve just had a cancellation.’

You get home and land in a completely different world — the world of the family. The first few days you don’t hear a thing they say. You just watch them, touch them. I can’t explain what it means to stroke your child’s head after everything that’s happened. The morning smell of coffee and pancakes, your wife calling you to breakfast …

In one month you have to leave again. Why and where — you don’t know. You don’t think about it — you simply mustn’t think about it. You just know you’ll go because you must. At night, lying beside your wife, you still taste the Afghan sand, soft as flour, between your teeth. A few days ago you were lying in that red dust next to the APC … You wake up, jump out of bed — no, you’re still home, it’s tomorrow you’re going back.

Today my father asked me to help him slaughter a piglet. In the past I’d refuse and run out of the house with my hands over my ears so as not to hear the screaming.

‘Hold it a moment,’ says my father.

‘No, not like that, straight to the heart, like this,’ I say, and take the knife and kill it myself.

In the morgue I saw body-bags with human limbs hacked off. Yes, that was a nasty shock. You should never be the first to spill blood — it’s a process that’s hard to stop. Once I saw some soldiers sitting around while an old man and a little donkey passed by on the street below. Suddenly they lobbed a mortar and killed the old man and his donkey.

‘Hey, lads! Have you gone mad? It was just an old man and a donkey. What did they do to you?’

‘An old man and a donkey came by here yesterday, too. By the time they’d gone past our mate was lying here dead.’

‘But it might have been a different old man and a different donkey?’

Never be the first to spill blood, or you’ll forever be shooting yesterday’s old man and yesterday’s donkey.

We fought the war, stayed alive and got home. Now’s the time to try and make sense of it all …

A Mother

I sat by the coffin. ‘Who’s in there? Is it you, my little one?’ I repeated over and over again. ‘Who’s in there? Is it you, my boy?’ Everyone thought I’d gone insane.

Time passed, and I wanted to find out how my son was killed. I went to the local recruitment HQ. ‘Tell me how and where my son was killed,’ I begged. ‘I don’t believe he’s dead. I’m sure I’ve buried a metal box and my son is alive somewhere.’

The officer in charge got angry and even started shouting at me. ‘This is classified information! You can’t go around telling everyone your son has been killed! Don’t you know that’s not allowed?’

He had a long and painful birth, but when I realised I had a son I knew the agony had all been worthwhile. I worried about him from the day he was bom — he was all I had in this world. We lived in a little one-room hut with just enough space for a bed, pram and two chairs. I worked on the railways, switching points, for 60 roubles a month. The day I left hospital I went straight on nightshift. I took him to work with me in the pram, I had my little hot-plate with me and fed him and put him to sleep at the same time I was meeting the trains. When he was a bit older I left him at home alone; I had to tie his ankle to the pram and leave him alone all day long. Still, he grew up a fine boy.

He got into building college in Petrozavodsk, up in Karelia, near the Finnish border. I went to visit him there once. He gave me a kiss and then ran off somewhere. I was quite hurt — until he came back, smiling.

‘The girls are coming,’ he said.

‘What girls?’

He’d gone off to tell these girls I’d arrived and they were coming to inspect this mother of his they’d heard so much about.

No one had ever given me a present. He came home for Mother’s Day and I met him at the station.

‘Let me help you with that bag,’ I said.

‘It’s heavy, Mum. You take my portfolio-case, but be careful with it!’

I carried it carefully and he made sure I did. Must be important drawings, I thought. When we got home he went to change and I rushed to the kitchen to check on my pies. I looked up and there he was with three red tulips in his hand. How on earth had he managed to get hold of tulips up there in March? He’d wrapped them in cloth and put them in his case so they didn’t freeze. It was the first time anyone had ever given me flowers.

That summer he worked on one of those special intensive building projects. He came home just before my birthday. ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t get here earlier, but I’ve brought you a little something,’ he said, handing me a money order. I looked at it. ‘12 roubles 50 kopecks,’ I read out.

‘Hey, Mum, you’ve forgotten the noughts! That’s for 1250 roubles!’

‘Well, I’ve never had a crazy sum like that in my hands! How would I know how it’s written?’

He was very good-hearted. ‘You’re going to retire and I’m going to earn a lot of money for both of us. Do you remember when I was a boy, I promised I’d carry you in my arms when I grew up?’

And so he did. He was 6 foot 5 inches tall and he carried me around like a little girl. We loved each other so much because we had no one else, probably. I don’t know how I’d have let a wife have him. I don’t suppose I would have.

He got his conscription papers and decided he wanted to be a paratrooper. ‘They’re enlisting for the paras, Mum, but they won’t take me because I’m so big. They say I’ll break the parachute shroud-lines! And I just love those berets.’

All the same, he got into the Vitebsk Parachute Division. I went to the swearing-in ceremony, when they have to take the oath. I noticed he’d straightened up — he wasn’t ashamed of his height any more.

‘Why are you so tiny, Mum?’ he asked.

‘I’ve stopped growing because I miss you so much,’ I tried to joke.

‘We’re being sent to Afghanistan, but I’m not going because I’m an only child. Why didn’t you have a little girl after you had me?’

Lots of the parents came to the oath-taking ceremony. All of a sudden I heard someone on the platform asking, ‘Where is Mama Zhuraleva? Mama Zhuraleva, come up and congratulate your son!’ I went up to give him a kiss, but I couldn’t reach the 6 foot 5 inch bean-pole. ‘Private Zhuralev! Bend down so that your mother can give you a kiss!’ ordered the commandant. As he bent down and kissed me someone took a photograph of us. It’s the only photo I’ve got of him in uniform.

After the ceremony they were given a few hours off and we went to a nearby park. We sat on the grass. When he took off his boots I saw that his feet were covered in blood. He told me they’d done a 30-mile route-march, but there were no size 11 boots so he had to wear 9½s. But he didn’t complain — on the contrary. ‘We had to run with our backpacks full of sand, and I didn’t pour half mine out like some of the lads.’

I wanted to do something special for him. ‘Shall we go to a restaurant, dear? We’ve never been to a restaurant together.’

‘I tell you what, Mum — buy me a couple of pounds of sweets. That’s what I’d really like!’

Then it was time for him to go back to barracks. He waved me goodbye with his bag of sweets.

They put us relatives up for the night on mattresses in the sports hall, but we hardly slept a wink — we couldn’t help walking round and round the barracks where our boys were fast asleep. When reveille sounded I rushed outside, hoping to see him one more time as they marched off to the gym, even if it was only from a distance. I saw them running, but they all looked the same in their striped vests so I couldn’t make him out. They had to keep in groups all the time, even going to the canteen or the toilet — they weren’t allowed to go anywhere on their own because before, when the lads realised they were going to Afghanistan, some had hanged themselves in the toilets or slashed their wrists.

In the bus I was the only one who cried. I just sensed I’d never see him again. Soon I had a letter from him: ‘I saw your bus, Mum, and ran after it so that I could see you one last time.’ When we were sitting in the park they’d played that lovely old song over the loudspeakers, ‘When my mother said goodbye to me’. I hear it in my head all the time now.

His next letter began, ‘Hello from Kabul … ’ I started screaming, so loud that the neighbours rushed in. ‘It’s against the law and civil rights!’ I shouted, banging my head on the table. ‘He’s my only child — even under the Tsar they didn’t take an only child into the army. And now he’s been sent to fight a war.’ It was the first time since Sasha was born that I was sorry I hadn’t got married. Now I had no one to protect me.

Sasha used to tease me: ‘Why don’t you get married, Mum?’ he’d ask.

‘Because you’d be jealous!’ I told him. He’d laugh and say no more about it. We thought we’d be living together for a long, long time.

He wrote a few more letters and then there was such a long gap that I wrote to his commanding officer. Soon afterwards I got a letter from Sasha! ‘Mum, don’t write to the CO any more, your last letter got me into trouble. The reason I didn’t write is, I was stung on the hand by a wasp. I didn’t ask anyone else to write a letter for me because a stranger’s handwriting on the envelope would have given you a shock.’ He was sorry for me and made up stories — as if I didn’t watch TV every day and couldn’t guess he’d been wounded. After that, if I didn’t get a letter every day I could hardly get up in the morning. He tried to explain. ‘How can you expect them to send off our letters every day when we only get fresh drinking-water delivered every ten days?’

One letter was happy: ‘Hurrah! Hurrah! We escorted a convoy to the Soviet border, and even though we weren’t allowed to cross, we saw the Motherland in the distance. It’s the best country in the world!’

In his last letter he wrote: ‘If I can get through the summer I’ll be home.’ On the 29th of August I decided summer was over and went to buy him a suit and some shoes. They’re still in the cupboard …

On the 30th I took off my ear-rings and ring before I went to work. For some reason I just couldn’t bear to wear them.

That was the day he was killed.

I only went on living after his death thanks to my brother. For a whole week he slept by my bed like a dog, watching over me, because all I wanted to do was run to the balcony and throw myself out of our seventh-floor window. When the coffin was brought into the sitting-room I lay on it, measuring it with my arms over and over again. Three foot, six foot, six and a half, because that’s how tall he was. Was it long enough for him? I talked to the coffin like a madwoman: ‘Who’s there? Is it you, my love? Who’s there? Is it you, my love? Who’s there? Is it you, my love?’ The coffin was already sealed when they brought it so I couldn’t kiss him goodbye, or stroke him one last time. I don’t even know what he’s wearing.

I told them I’d choose a place for him in the cemetery myself. They gave me a couple of injections and I went with my brother. There were already some ‘Afghan’ graves in the central alley.

‘That’s where I want my son to be — he’ll be happier with his friends.’

The man who was with us, some boss or other, shook his head. ‘It’s forbidden for them to be buried together. They have to be spread about the rest of the cemetery.’

That was when I exploded! ‘Don’t get so angry, Sonya, don’t get so angry,’ my brother tried to calm me down. But how can I not be angry?

When I saw their Kabul on TV I wanted to get a machine-gun and shoot the lot of them. I’d sit there ‘shooting’ until, one day, it showed one of their old women, an Afghan mother, I suppose. ‘She’s probably lost a son, too,’ I thought. After that I stopped ‘shooting’.

I’m thinking of adopting a boy from the children’s home, a little blond chap like Sasha. No, I’d be frightened for a boy, he’d only get killed, a girl would be better. The two of us’ll wait for Sasha together … I’m not mad, but I am waiting for him. I’ve heard of cases where they’ve sent the mother the coffin and she’s buried it, and a year later he’s home, alive, wounded but alive. The mother had a heart attack. I’m still waiting. I never saw him dead so I’m still waiting … ’

Major, Propaganda Section of an Artillery Regiment

I won’t begin at the beginning. I’ll begin from when everything started to collapse.

We were on the road to Jalalabad. A little girl, about seven, was standing by the side of the road. She had a broken arm hanging down, like the arm of an old rag doll dangling by a bit of thread. Her olive eyes stared and stared at me. I jumped out of the car to pick her up and take her to our hospital but she was in a state of sheer terror, like a little wild animal. She leapt away from me screaming, with her little arm still dangling, looking as though it would drop off at any moment. I ran after her, I was shouting too. I caught up with her and clutched her to me, stroked her. She started biting and scratching, then shaking, as though some other wild animal had caught her. I suddenly realised she thought I was going to kill her.

A stretcher went past with an old Afghan woman lying on it, smiling.

‘Where’s she been wounded?’ someone asked.

‘In the heart,’ the nurse answered.

I went to Afghanistan full of enthusiasm. I thought I could do something useful out there. I expected to be needed by the people. Now all I remember is how the little girl ran away from me, trembling, how frightened she was of me. It’s something I’ll never forget.

I never dreamt about the war while I was there. Now I’m scared to go to sleep at night. I keep chasing that little girl with her olive eyes and her dangling arm …

‘Do you think I ought to see the shrink?’ I asked some of the lads.

‘What for?’

‘About being afraid to go to sleep.’

‘We’re all afraid to go to sleep.’

I don’t want you to think we were supermen, with cigarettes clenched between our teeth, opening cans of bully beef over the bodies of the enemy and carelessly eating water-melons after battle. That image is utter rubbish. We were ordinary boys and any other boys could have taken our place. When I hear people accusing us of ‘killing people over there’ I could smash their faces in. If you weren’t there and didn’t live through it you can’t know what it was like and you have no right to judge us. The only exception was Sakharov. I would have listened to him.

No one can understand that war. We were left to sort the whole thing out on our own. Now we’re expected to feel guilty and justify ourselves. To whom? may I ask. We were sent by our leaders and we trusted in them. Don’t confuse those who sent us with those who were sent. A friend of mine, Major Sasha Krivets, was killed. Go and tell his mother, or his wife, or his children, that he’s guilty. ‘You’re in good condition,’ the doctor told me. How can we be in good condition after what we’ve been through?

The idea of the Motherland seemed completely different over there. We didn’t even use the term, we called it the ‘Union’ instead. ‘Say hello to the Union,’ we’d tell the boys going home.

We assumed there was something big and strong behind us which would always be there to defend us. Once, I remember, we’d returned to barracks after a battle, with many dead and wounded, and in the evening we switched on TV, just to relax and find out what was going on back home. A huge new factory was being built in Siberia; the Queen of Britain had given a luncheon for some VIP; a gang of teenagers had raped two schoolgirls in Voronezh, out of boredom. Some prince had been killed in Africa … We realised we weren’t important and that life at home was going on as usual. Suddenly Sasha Kuchinski exploded. ‘Turn it off!’ he shouted. ‘Or I’ll blow the thing to bits!’

After battle you make a report by walkie-talkie: ‘6 three zero zeroes and and 4 zero twenty-ones,’ or whatever. ‘Three zero zero’ is the code for ‘wounded’; ‘zero twenty-one’ means ‘fatality’. You look at a dead soldier and think of his mother. I know her son’s dead, you think, and she doesn’t — yet. Could she sense it? It was even worse if someone fell into the river or a ravine and the body wasn’t found. The mother would be told he was ‘missing’.

This was the mothers’ war, they were the ones who did the fighting. The Soviet people in general didn’t suffer much. They were told we were fighting ‘bandits’. But why couldn’t a regular army, 100,000 strong, with all the latest equipment, defeat a few disorganised bandits after nine long years? You can’t imagine the power and accuracy of our ‘Grad’ and ‘Hurricane’ jet-propelled rocket-launchers: they make telegraph poles fly about like matchsticks and all you want to do is crawl into the ground like a worm. All the so-called bandits had were those Maxim machine-guns, the sort you see only in old films. Later, I admit, they got Stinger missiles and Jap non-recoil automatics, but still …

We’d bring in POWs, skinny exhausted men with big peasant hands. They weren’t bandits, just ordinary people.

It didn’t take us long to understand they didn’t want us there, so what was the point of our being there? You’d go past abandoned villages with smoke still curling over the log-fires, you could smell food cooking … Once I saw a camel dragging its insides after it, as though its humps were uncoiling. I should have finished it off, I know, but I couldn’t, I have a natural dislike of violence. Someone else might well have shot a perfectly healthy camel, just for the hell of it. In the Soviet Union that kind of behaviour means gaol, but over there you’d be a hero for ‘punishing bandits’. Why is it that seventeenand eighteen-year-olds find it easier to kill than thirty-year-olds, for example? Because they have no pity, that’s why. When the war was over I noticed how violent fairytales were. People are always killing each other, Baba Yaga even roasts them in her oven, but the children are never frightened. They hardly ever even cry!

We wanted to stay normal. I remember a singer who came to entertain us troops. She was a beautiful woman and her songs were very moving. We missed women so much — I was as excited to see her as if she were a member of my family. Eventually she came on stage. ‘When I was on my way here,’ she announced, ‘i was allowed to use a machine-gun. I can’t tell you how I enjoyed firing that thing.’ She started singing, and when it came to the refrain she urged us to clap in time: ‘Come on boys, let’s hear you now!’ No one clapped. No one made a sound. She walked off stage and the show was abandoned. She thought she was some kind of supergirl come to visit superboys. But the fact was that there were ten or fifteen empty bunks in those boys’ barracks every month, with the occupants lying in the morgue. The other lads arranged letters from their mothers or girlfriends diagonally across the sheet — it was a kind of tradition.

The most important thing in that war was to survive — to avoid getting blown up by a mine, roasted in a tank or shot by a sniper. For some, the next most important thing was to take something back home, a TV or a sheepskin coat, for example. There was a joke that people back home got to know about the war through the commission shops, where things like that fetched a good price. In winter you see all the girls in their Afghan sheepskins — they’re very trendy just now.

All us soldiers had amulets round our necks, charms our mothers had given us. When I got home my mother confessed, ‘I didn’t tell you, Kolya, but I had a spell cast over you, that’s why you’ve come home safe and sound.’ She’d actually taken a lump of earth from our garden to the local witch!

When we went on a raid we’d pin a note to the upper part of our body and another to the lower part, so that if we were blown up by a mine one or the other would be found. Or else we wore bracelets with our name, number and blood group engraved on them. We never said Tm going … ’ always ‘I’ve been sent … ’ And we never said the word ‘last’:

‘Let’s go and have a last drink.’

‘Are you crazy? There’s no such word! Final, ultimate, fourth, fifth, anything, but not that word!’

Superstition was rife. For example, if you shaved, or had your photo taken before going on an operation, you wouldn’t come back alive. War has a strange logic of its own. The blue-eyed boys, determined to be heroes, were always the first to die. ‘I’m going to be a hero!’ you’d hear someone say, and he’d be killed next time out. In action we relieved ourselves where we lay. There’s a soldier’s saying that goes, ‘It’s better to roll in your own shit than to be blown into shit by a mine.’ (Excuse my language.) Most fatalities occurred during the first or last month of a tour of duty. The early ones were due to curiosity, the late ones to a kind of blunting of the self-preservation instinct.

Joke: An officer in Afghanistan goes back home on army business. He goes to the hairdresser.

‘How are things in Afghanistan?’ she asks him.

‘Getting better,’ he replies.

A few minutes later she asks him again: ‘How are things in Afghanistan?’

‘Getting better.’

A little while later: ‘How are things in Afghanistan?’

‘Getting better.’

Eventually he pays and goes. ‘Why did you keep asking him the same question?’ her colleagues ask her.

‘Whenever I mentioned Afghanistan his hair stood on end and it was easier to cut.’

I’ve been home three years and I still yearn to go back. Not to the war, or the place, but to the men I lived and worked with. When you’re there you can’t wait to get home, but when the day comes you’re sorry and go around collecting your friends’ addresses.

Valeri Shirokov, for example. He was a slim, delicate chap, but with a soul of iron. He never said an unnecessary word. At one time we had a real miser with us, who did nothing but hoard, buy, sell, and barter. One day Valeri went up to him, took 200 foreign currency vouchers out of his wallet, tore them up into little pieces before his very eyes, and then left the room without saying a word.

Or Sasha Rudik. I saw the New Year in with him on a raid. We made a Christmas tree out of guns stacked in a pyramid and hung grenades on them instead of presents. We wrote ‘Happy New Year!!!’ in toothpaste on the rocket-launcher, with three exclamation marks for some reason. He was a good painter. I’ve still got a landscape of his, with a dog, a girl and maple trees, painted on a sheet. He never did mountains — they soon lost their charm for us. If you asked men there what they missed most they’d answer: ‘I’d like to walk in the woods, swim in the river, drink a whole jug of milk.’

Or Sashik Lashuk. He was a decent lad who wrote home often. ‘My parents are old,’ he’d say. ‘They don’t know I’m here. I’ve told them I was posted to Mongolia.’ He arrived with his guitar and left with it, too.

No two of us were alike, so don’t think we were all the same over there. To begin with the media kept quiet about us, then we were all heroes for a time, and now we’re being knocked off our pedestals again so we can be forgotten about. One chap might throw himself on a mine to save the lives of men he didn’t even know, while another would come to you and say: ‘Look, I’ll do your laundry for you if you want, but don’t send me into action.’

Our KamaZ trucks would drive around with the names of cities written on them — ‘Odessa’, ‘Smolensk’, ‘Leningrad’. Others might say ‘I want to go home to Alma-Ata’, etc. When an Odessan or Leningrader met someone from his home town they’d hug each other like brothers. And here, back home, we’re like brothers too. After all, if you see a young man hopping down the road on crutches, wearing a nice shiny medal, he’s obviously one of us. We might sit down on a bench and have a smoke, and chat all evening. We’re all suffering from a wasting disease, you know. Over there it showed itself as a mismatch between our weight and our height, but here, back home, it’s a mismatch between our feelings and our ability to express them in what we say and do.

When we landed back in the Soviet Union we were taken by bus from the airport to a hotel. We were all silent, overwhelmed by the first few hours in our own country. All of a sudden, though, our collective nerve broke. ‘Drive in the ruts!’ we shouted at the driver. ‘Keep to the ruts!’ Then we burst into hysterical laughter — we were home and didn’t need to worry about mines. We could drive on the side of the road, in the ruts or out of them, wherever we wanted — we were drunk with happiness.

A few days later we noticed we were all walking about round-shouldered. We’d lost the habit of walking upright. I used to tie myself to the bed at night to train myself to straighten up.

I gave a talk at the officers’ club. ‘Tell us about the romantic side of service life in Afghanistan,’ I was asked. ‘Did you personally kill anyone?’ Young girls were especially keen on bloodthirsty questions. Ordinary life is a bit dull, I grant you, but can you imagine anyone asking about the romantic side of World War II? Three generations fought side by side against the Germans — grandfathers, fathers and sons. This war was fought by naïve boys looking for adventure. I saw how keen they were to try everything. They wanted to know what it felt like to kill, to be scared, to take hashish. Some got high on it, others got into the state we called shubnyak, where a bush turned into a tree, or a rock became a hill, so that when they marched they had to lift their feet twice as high as the rest of us. That made the world even more frightening for them.

Another question I got asked was this: ‘Could you have refused to go to Afghanistan?’ Me personally? Only one of our group of professional army officers, Major Bondarenko, a battery commander, refused. The first thing that happened was, he had to face a ‘court of honour’, which convicted him of cowardice. Can you imagine what that does to a man’s self-esteem? Suicide might be the easiest way out. Then he was demoted to captain and posted to a building battalion as punishment. Then he was expelled from the party and eventually discharged with dishonour. How many men could go through all that? And he was a military man to the bone — he’d spent thirty years in the army.

When I went through customs they wiped my Rosenbaum [a mildly ‘dissident’ singer] tape. ‘Hey, lads, what are you doing?’ I asked.

‘We’ve got this list of what’s allowed and what isn’t.’

When I got home to Smolensk I heard Rosenbaum blaring out of all the student hostel windows!

Nowadays, if the police need to frighten the local mafia they come to us Afgantsi. ‘Come on boys!’ they say, ‘give us a hand!’ Or if they want to harass or break up some unofficial political group, ‘Call the Afgantsi in!’ they say. An Afganets, in other words, is a killing-machine, with big fists, a weak head and no conscience. No wonder we’re feared and disliked by everyone.

But if you’ve got a bad arm you don’t amputate it, do you? You nurse it until it’s better.

Shall I tell you why we go on meeting, we veterans? To save ourselves by staying together. All the same, once you’re home you’re on your own.

1st Lieutenant i/c Mortar Platoon

I have the same dream every night. It’s like watching a film over and over again. Everyone’s running and firing, including me. I fall down and wake up and I’m on a hospital bed. I start to get up to go and have a smoke in the corridor. Then I realise my legs have gone and I’m back in the real world …

I don’t want to hear any talk about a ‘political mistake’, OK? Give me my legs back if it was really a mistake.

Have you taken unfinished letters from soldiers’ pockets … ‘Dear Mama … ’, ‘My Darling … ’? Have you seen soldiers shot to pieces by old blunderbusses and modem Chinese machine guns at the same time?

We were sent to Afghanistan to obey orders. In the army you obey orders first and then, if you like, discuss their merits — when it’s all over. ‘Go!’ means exacdy that. If you refuse you get thrown out of the party. You took the military oath, didn’t you? And back home, when you ask the local party committee for something you need, they tell you, ‘It wasn’t us that sent you!’ Well, who did send us?

I had a friend out there. When I went into action he always said goodbye to me and hugged me when I came back alive. I’ll never find a friend like that here at home.

I hardly ever go out now. I’m ashamed …

Have you ever tried our Soviet-manufactured prostheses? I’ve heard that abroad people with artificial limbs go skiing, play tennis and dance. Why don’t the authorities use foreign currency to buy decent arms and legs instead of wasting it on French cosmetics, subsidised Cuban sugar or Moroccan oranges?

I’m twenty-two, with my whole life in front of me. I need to find a wife. I had a girlfriend. ‘I hate you,’ I told her, to make her leave me. She pitied me, when what I wanted was her love.

‘I dreamt of home, of nights

I lay Listening to the rowans sigh.

“Cuckoo, cuckoo, tell me pray

How many years before I die … ?” ’

That was my favourite song. I used to go into the forest, and ask the cuckoo, and count his calls, but now — sometimes I don’t want to go on living one day longer.

I still long to see that landscape again, that biblical desert. We all have that yearning, it’s like standing at the edge of a precipice, or high over water, and looking down until your head spins.

Now the war’s over they’re trying to forget all about us, or else hide us out of sight. They treated the veterans of the war with Finland the same way*. Thousands of books have been published about World War II but not one about the Finnish war. Our people are too easy on their rulers — and I’ll have accepted it myself in ten years or so.

Did I kill anybody in Afghanistan? Yes. You didn’t send us over there to be angels — so how can you expect us to come back as angels?

It took me six days by train to get to Moscow from Khabarovsk. We crossed the whole of Russia via the Siberian rivers and Lake Baikal. The railway attendant in charge of the tea-urn ran out of tea on the very first day; the water-boiler broke down the day after that. My family met me in Moscow, there were tears all round, but duty came first.

I got off the plane and saw the kind of blue sky that in our country you find only over rivers. There was a lot of noise and shouting — but all of it from our own people. There were new recruits being met, old friends seen off, and packages from home picked up. Everyone looked tanned and cheerful. Hard to believe that somewhere out there it was 30° Celsius below freezing and armour-plating was cracking from cold. I saw my first Afghan through the barbed wire of the clearing-compound. I remember having no particular feelings (apart from a mild curiosity) towards this ‘foreigner’.

I was posted to Bagram to take command of the road-engineers’ platoon in a sapper battalion.

We lived a regular routine of getting up early and reporting for work. We had a mine-sweeper tank, a sniper unit, a mine-detecting dog, and two APCs to provide protection. We covered the first few miles in the armoured vehicles, just as long as the tracks of previous vehicles were clearly visible on the road. Dust covered everything like a fine powdery snow. If a bird landed on it you could see the traces. If a tank had passed that way the day before, though, special care was needed, because the caterpillar tracks could be concealing a mine. After planting the device the mujahedin would recreate the tracks with their fingers and clear their own footprints using a bag or an unrolled turban.

The road wound past two abandoned villages of smouldering mud huts — perfect cover for enemy snipers, so we needed to be extra-vigilant. Once we were past the villages we’d get out of the vehicles. This was the procedure: the dog ran zigzagging in front of us, followed by the sappers with their probing rods poking the soil as they went. All you had going for you was God, your sixth sense, experience and flair. You might notice a broken branch, or a bit of rusty iron, or a rock, which hadn’t been there the day before. The muj would leave little markers like that to avoid getting blown up themselves.

That bit of iron, now, was it there by chance or was there a battery under the sand, connected to a bomb or a crate of TNT? A man’s weight won’t trigger an anti-tank mine — it needs a 250–300 kilo load to set it off.

After my first explosion I was the only man left sitting on our tank. All the others got blown off. My place was by the barrel so I was protected from the full force of the blast by the gun turret. I quickly checked my arms, legs and head were all where they should be. We picked ourselves up and carried on.

We set off another blast a little further on. The lightly armed trailer-tractor was blown up and split in two by a powerful fougasse, or land mine, which left a crater three metres long and as deep as a tall man. The tractor was transporting mines, about 200 mortars — they were thrown into the branches and on to the side of the road like a giant fan. We lost all five soldiers and the lieutenant on the tractor. I’d spent the past few evenings with them, talking and smoking and now they were literally blown to pieces. We went and collected them up, including a dust-covered head, so completely squashed it looked as though there wasn’t any bone.

We filled five crates and divided them so that there would be something of each man to be sent home.

The dogs were a tremendous asset. They’re just like people, some gifted with intuition, others not. A sentry might doze, but a dog — never. I was very fond of one called Toby. He’d snuggle up to us but bark at our Afghan National Army allies! Admittedly, their khaki was a bit greener, and ours rather yellowish, but still, how could he tell the difference? He could sense a mine at several paces. He’d stop dead with his tail sticking up straight, as if to say: KEEP OFF!

No two mine-traps are the same, but the worst are the homemade devices which never repeat themselves exactly. They might be hidden in a rusty tea-kettle, or a tape-recorder, watch, or can. Units who went out without sappers were known as ‘suicide squads’. Mines were everywhere, on mountain paths, on the roads and in houses. It was always the sappers who went in first.

We were checking out a trench one day. There’d already been one explosion and we’d spent two days raking it through. I jumped down into it and — BANG!

I didn’t pass out — I looked up at the sky, which seemed to be on fire. A sapper’s first reaction after a blast is to look upwards to check that his eyes are intact. I kept a tourniquet on my gunbutt which they used to bandage me above the knees. But I knew that limbs are always amputated three to five centimetres above the wound.

‘Where are you tying it?’ I shouted at the medic.

‘You’ve lost them both up to the knee, sir.’

The field hospital was fifteen kilometres away and it took them 1½ hours to get me there. There my wounds were sterilised and I was given novocaine to kill the pain. My legs were amputated the same day; I lost consciousness only when I heard the saw, it sounded like a circular saw. The following day they operated on my eyes. The flame from the blast had seared my face — the surgeons practically darned my eyes and gave me twenty-two stitches. Only two or three a day could be removed — otherwise the eyeball would have fallen to bits. They’d shine a torch into my eyes, left and right, to find out whether I reacted to light and whether the retina was intact.

I’ll never forget the red beam of that torch.

I’d like to write a book about the way an officer can be reduced to a housebound wreck, earning his bread assembling lamp-sockets and wall-plugs, about a hundred a day, or putting the metal bits on the ends of shoelaces. What colour shoelaces? Red, black, or white, he never knows, because he can’t see; he’s been officially declared totally blind. He ties string-bags, and glues little boxes — the sort of work he used to think only lunatics did. Thirty bags a day and I’ve reached my daily target, my ‘norm’.

Sappers were the least likely of all to come back intact, or even alive, particularly the specialised mine-clearing units. They were all either dead or wounded. Out of habit, we never shook hands before going into action. The day of that last explosion our new CO shook my hand, out of sheer friendliness — no one had warned him. And I got blown up … Was it just superstition? Who knows? There was another belief: if you’d volunteered for Afghanistan you’d end up dead, but if you were just posted there you might get home alive.

That was five years ago. I still have this dream. I’m in a long mine-field. I’ve drawn up a plan, based on the number of mines and the number of rows, and markers to find them by. But I’ve lost the plan. (In fact we often did lose them, or else the marker was a tree which had been destroyed, or a pile of stones which had been blown up. Nobody wanted to go and check, and risk getting blown up by our own mines.) In my dream I see children running near the mine-field, they don’t know there are mines there. I want to shout: ‘Stop! Mines!’ I want to warn the children. I want to warn the children … I’m running … I have both my legs back, and I can see, my eyes can see again … But that’s only at night, only in my dream. Then I wake up.

Doctor, Bacteriologist

Perhaps it sounds ridiculous, especially in the context of this particular war, but I’m a romantic. I hate the pettiness and materialism of everyday life. The very day I arrived the medical director called me in. ‘What makes a woman like you come here?’ he asked me, and I was obliged to tell the story of my life to a complete stranger, a military man at that, someone I might just have met in the street. For me, that was the most unpleasant and humiliating aspect of life in Afghanistan: the complete absence of privacy and intimacy. Everything took place on a public stage. Do you know a film called Off Limits, about convict life in the camps? We lived life by exactly the same rules, right down to the little barbed-wire compounds we were restricted to.

The girls I lived with were young waitresses and cooks, whose sole subject of conversation seemed to be roubles, foreign currency vouchers, and how to steal meat, smoked sausage or Bulgarian biscuits from the hospital kitchens. Before I arrived I imagined an elevating and inspiring atmosphere of self-sacrifice, with the womenfolk fulfilling their role of protecting and caring for our boys. If men were spilling their blood for the cause I would give my blood too! I realised just how wrong I was even before I left the clearing-centre in Tashkent. I sat in the plane and burst into tears. Life here was exactly the same as everything I was running away from at home. Vodka flowed like water at the centre. You know that song:

‘We dream of the grass at the cosmodrome

The green green grass that means we’re home!’

Well, I felt as though I were flying into outer space. Back home everyone at least has their own home they can make into their little fortress, but we slept four to a room. The girl who worked as a hospital cook used to bring meat she’d stolen from the canteen and hide it under the bed.

‘Wash the floor!’ she orders me.

‘I washed it yesterday, it’s your turn today.’

‘I’ll give you a hundred roubles to wash that floor.’ I say nothing.

‘I’ll give you some meat.’

I say nothing. Then she takes a bucket of water and empties it over my bed. They all burst into laughter.

Another girl was a waitress. Her speech consisted entirely of foul language but she loved the poet Marina Tsvetayeva [1892–1941, one of the three or four greatest Russian poets of the century]. When she came back from her shift she’d sit down and play patience: ‘Will I, won’t I, will I, won’t I?’

‘Will I won’t I what?’

‘Fall in love, of course.’

There were real weddings out there, and love too, though not much of it. Love usually stopped at Tashkent — after that it was ‘him to the left, her to the right’.

Tanya the Tank, as we called her on account of her build, liked to sit and talk into the early hours. She drank only pure alcohol.

‘How can you take it?’ I asked her.

‘Vodka’s just too weak, love! It doesn’t do a thing for me.’ When she went home she took five or six hundred postcards of movie stars she’d bought in the bazaars, where they were expensive. ‘Money spent on art is never wasted,’ she told us proudly.

I remember another girl, Verochka Kharkov, sitting in front of the mirror with her tongue stuck out. She was worried about typhoid and somebody had told her that one of the symptoms was toothmarks on the tongue!

They hardly even acknowledged my existence. For them I was some idiot who carried test-tubes full of germs about. I was the chief bacteriologist at the infectious diseases hospital, and all I ever talked about was typhoid, paratyphoid, hepatitis and the like. Casualties didn’t arrive at hospital straightaway — they might have been lying for up to ten hours, or even a day or two, in the mountain sand before they were located, with the result that open wounds became breeding-grounds for every kind of infection. I’d examine a patient in reanimation, for example, and find he had typhoid on top of everything else.

They died quietly. Only once did I see an officer crying. He was a Moldavian and the surgeon, who was also Moldavian, talked to him in their own language.

‘What’s the problem, my friend? Where’s the pain?’

That was when he began to weep. ‘Save me!’ he begged. ‘I must live. I have a sweet wife and lovely daughter. I must get back to them … ’ He would have died quietly too, if he hadn’t heard his mother tongue.

I hated going to the morgue, where human flesh still mixed with earth was regularly brought in. I’d think of that meat hidden under the girls’ beds … They’d put the frying-pan on the table shouting ‘Ruba, Ruba!’ which means ‘Let’s go!’ in Afghan. It was so hot their sweat dripped into the pan.

I was seeing wounded soldiers and their microbes all day long — and you can’t sell microbes, can you? At the army store you could buy toffees, which I adored, for foreign currency vouchers. Once, I remember, someone gave me two raw eggs from the hospital kitchen, because we doctors went around half-starved (we survived on reconstituted potato and frozen meat which was tough, tasteless and colourless). I grabbed the eggs and wrapped them in a handkerchief to take them back to my room to make an onion omelette. I looked forward to that omelette all day. Then I saw a young lad on a stretcher in a corridor, waiting to be evacuated to Tashkent. I couldn’t see what there was under the blanket, only his handsome face on the pillow. He looked up at me. ‘I’m starving,’ he said. It was just before lunch and I realised he’d be taken away before they brought the big tubs of food up from the kitchens. ‘OK,’ I said, and gave him the two eggs. I turned and left, not thinking to find out if he still had his arms and legs. I’d put the eggs on his pillow without breaking them or feeding him. What if he had no arms?

Once I was in a van for two hours with four corpses beside me, lying there in track-suits …

When I got back home to the USSR I couldn’t bear to listen to music or chat with people in the street and the bus queue. I’d have liked to shut myself into my room with just the TV for company. The day before I left, the medical director of our hospital, Yuri Yefimovich Zhibkov, shot himself. In Afghanistan some officer showed me this passage from the French writer, Fourrier, and I copied it down: ‘The foreigner who happens to find himself in Afghanistan may consider himself blessed by God if he leaves that country healthy, unharmed and with his head still on his shoulders … ’

I keep away from other Afgantsi — I’m always nervous they’ll put me down. I have a very gentle character but I sometimes think that even I have turned into a cruel and aggressive person. We had to prepare young soldiers for their discharge back into the army. They’d hide in the hospital attics and cellars and we’d have to catch them and drag them out.

At the clearing centre the girls told me to whom you had to give a bottle of vodka in order to get a comfortable job. Those seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds taught me all sorts of things like that — and I’m forty-five.

At the customs I was made to strip stark naked. ‘What’s your job?’

‘I’m a doctor — a bacteriologist.’

‘Your papers!’ Then: Open your cases. Let’s have a poke around … ’ All I was taking home with me was the same old overcoat, blanket, bed-cover, a few hair-pins and forks I’d come out with. They piled it all up on the table, looked at it and sneered, ‘She must be mad — or a poet of some kind.’

I can’t stand it back home either. It’s worse than over there. There, when anyone got or brought something from home we’d all sit round the table and share it. The third toast was always drunk in silence, to ‘absent friends’. We’d sit there with the mice playing round our feet and in our shoes. At four in the morning we’d hear a howling noise. The first time I heard it I jumped up and shouted, ‘Wolves! Wolves!’

‘It’s only the mullahs saying their prayers,’ the girls laughed, but for ages after that I always woke up at four in the morning.

So I want to move on again. I’ve applied to go to Nicaragua. Someplace where there’s a war going on. I can’t settle down to this life any more. War’s better than this. It gives you a justification — or an excuse — for anything you do, good or bad. It’s incredible, I know, but that’s the way I catch myself feeling sometimes.

A Widow

The moment I saw him I knew he was the one for me. He was a tall, good-looking boy. ‘He’s mine, girls!’ I asked him to dance the ladies’ waltz, the one when the girls invite the gentlemen, and my fate was sealed.

I very much wanted a son. We agreed that if it was a girl I’d choose the name — I liked Olechka — and if it was a boy he’d choose between Artem and Denis. So Olechka it was.

‘Will we have a boy?’

Of course, just let Olechka grow up a bit.’ I wish I’d given him a son too.

‘Lyudochka!’ he told me, ‘don’t get upset now, or your milk will dry up (I was breast-feeding) but I’m being posted to Afghanistan.’

‘Why you? You’ve got a baby daughter.’

‘If I don’t go, someone else will have to take my place. “The party’s wish is the Komsomol’s command,” as they say.’

He was a perfect army type. ‘You don’t discuss orders!’ he used to say. His mother is a very dominant character and he got used to being obedient and submissive when he was young. Army life was easy for him.

We threw a goodbye party. The men smoked, his mother sat silent and I cried. The baby slept in her cot.

I met a madwoman in the street, a kind of witch, really — she was always wandering round the compound or the market. People said she’d been raped as a young girl, gone crazy and couldn’t even recognise her own mother afterwards. She stopped by me.

‘They’ll send you your husband back in a zinky,’ she said. Then she laughed and ran away.

After that, I knew something would happen. I didn’t know what.

I waited for him like the girl in that poem of Simonov’s:

‘If you await me, I’ll return … ’

Sometimes I wrote and posted him three or four letters a day. I felt that I was protecting him by thinking about him and longing for him. He wrote back that army life in Afghanistan was the same as everywhere else. Trust in fate, he told me, don’t worry and keep waiting.

When I went to visit his parents Afghanistan was never mentioned. Not a word about it from either his mother or his father. It was an unwritten rule. We were all too scared to say the word.

Then, one day, I was getting Olechka ready for nursery school. I’d just given her a kiss when I opened the door to two soldiers, one of them carrying my husband’s small brown suitcase — I’d packed it myself. I had an urgent feeling that if I let them in they would bring something terrible into our home, but if I could keep them out everything would be as it had been before. They were pulling the door open and I was pushing it shut.

‘Is he wounded?’ It was just a faint hope.

The military commissar came in: ‘Ludmilla Iosifovna, with the deepest sorrow we must inform you that your husband … ’

I didn’t cry – I screamed. I caught sight of my husband’s friend, Tolya, and threw myself at him. ‘Tolik, if you tell me it’s true I’ll believe it.’

He brought over the young cadet who was accompanying the coffin. ‘Tell her … ’ But the boy was shaking so much he couldn’t open his mouth.

Women came to kiss me. ‘Try to be calm. Give us your family’s phone numbers.’ I sat down and babbled out all the addresses and phone numbers, lots of them, all I could remember. Later, when they came across my address book, they found I’d got them all right.

We have a small, one-room flat, so the coffin was placed in the clubhouse. I threw myself over it. ‘Why? Why? What harm did you ever do anyone?’ I cried and passed out. When I came to again I looked at that box and remembered the crazy woman’s words: ‘They’ll send him back in a zinky … ’ I started shouting again. ‘I don’t believe this is my husband. Prove it’s him. There isn’t even a little window for me to see him through. Who have you brought me? What have you brought me?’

His friend was fetched again. ‘Tolik,’ I said, ‘swear that this is my husband.’

‘I swear on my daughter’s life that this is your husband. He died immediately and without suffering. That’s all I can say.’

I remembered something my husband had said: ‘If I have to die I hope I don’t suffer.’ It’s us who are left who will suffer.

There’s a big photograph of him hanging on the wall. ‘Take Daddy down for me,’ my little girl asks, ‘I want to play with Daddy.’ She puts her toys round his picture and talks to him. When I put her to bed at night she asks, ‘Who shot Daddy? Why did they just choose Daddy?’ I take her to nursery school and when it’s time to take her home she’s in tears, ‘I’m not leaving school until Daddy comes to fetch me. Where’s my Daddy?’

What can I tell her? How can I explain? I’m only twenty-one myself. This summer I took her to my mother in the country, hoping she’d forget him.

I’m not strong enough to go on crying day after day … I watch a man with his wife and child, three of them going somewhere together and my soul begins to scream … ‘If only you could get up for one single minute to see what a lovely daughter you’ve got. This incomprehensible war is over for you, but not for me, and for our daughter it will never be over for she’ll go on living after us. Our children are the unhappiest generation of all — they’ll have to take responsibility for everything … Can you hear me?’

Who am I crying to … ?

A Mother

I always wanted a son. That way, I thought, I’ll have a man of my own to love and be loved by. My husband and I got divorced — he left me for a young girl. I probably only fell in love with him in the first place because there was no one else.

My son grew up with my mother and me — we were two women and a little boy. I was always checking up to see who he was playing with. ‘I’m grown up now, Mum,’ he’d complain when he came home, ‘and you’re still treating me like a baby.’

He was as small as a girl, though, and skinny with it. He was a month premature and I couldn’t breast-feed him. How could our generation be expected to produce healthy children? We grew up with air-raids, bombardments and starvation … He liked playing with girls — they accepted him the way he was and he didn’t tease them. He liked cats, too, and used to tie ribbons to them.

‘Can I have a hamster, Mum? I love the feel of their soft damp fur,’ he said one day.

I bought him a hamster, and an aquarium with lots of little fish. When we went to the market he started again, ‘Can we buy a day-old chick, Mum?’

I remember all that and wonder: did he really shoot people out there, that little boy we loved and pampered?

I went to visit him at training-camp in Ashkhabad. ‘Andryusha,’ I told him, ‘I’m going to have a word with the Commandant. You’re my only child and … ’

‘Don’t you dare, Mum! They’ll all laugh at me and say I’m a mummy’s boy.’

‘How do you like it here?’

‘The lieutenant’s great, he’s just one of the lads, but the captain’s quite likely to give us a punch in the face if he feels like it.’

‘What? Grandma and I never once even gave you a smack on your behind!’

‘It’s a man’s life here, Mum. Things go on here that you and grandma … Well, it’s best you don’t know about them.’

He was only truly mine when he was tiny. He’d jump in and out of puddles like a little devil, and I’d scrub him clean, wrap him up in a towel and cuddle him. I thought nothing could ever take him away from me and I wouldn’t let anyone else look after him. But they got him in the end …

When he was about fourteen I persuaded him to go to technical college, to learn the building trade. I thought he’d have an easier time of it when he was called up — he might even avoid conscription and go on to higher education. His ambition was to be a forester. He was always happy in the forest, he could recognise birds from their song and knew just where to find which wild flowers. In that way he was just like his father, who’s from Siberia. He was so fond of nature he even stopped them cutting the grass in the yard in front of the flats. ‘Everything’s got a right to grow!’ Andryusha fancied the forester’s uniform and cap: ‘It’s like an army uniform, Mum,’ he’d say.

Did he really shoot human beings out there?

He often wrote to us from Ashkhabad. I’ve read one of his letters a thousand times. I know it off by heart:

‘Dearest Mum and Grandma. I’ve been in the army over three months now and I’m doing fine. I can cope with all the things we have to do here and haven’t had any complaints from above. Recently our company went to a field-training camp in the mountains 80 kilometres from Ashkhabad. They spent two weeks on a special course preparing for mountain warfare, including tactics and firearms practice. Three other lads and I didn’t go with them. We stayed at the base because we’ve been working in a furniture factory nearby, building a new extension. In return our company is getting new tables from the factory. We’ve been doing bricklaying and plastering, both of which I’m good at.

‘You asked whether I got your letter. Yes, I did, and the parcel and the ten roubles inside! We spent the money on quite a few meals in the canteen and bought sweets as well … ’

I tried to cheer myself up with the hope that he might go on being used for building work. I didn’t mind if they made him put up their own private dachas and garages†, just so long as he wasn’t sent away.

This was in 1981. There were all sorts of rumours of wholesale slaughter going on in Afghanistan, but how could we believe that kind of thing? We knew very few people; on television we saw pictures of Soviet and Afghan troops fraternising, tanks strewn with flowers, peasants kissing the ground they’d been allotted by the Socialist government …

The next time I went to visit him at Ashkhabad the hotel was full. ‘Fine, I’ll sleep on the floor!’ I said. ‘I’ve come a long way to visit my son and I’m not budging from here!’

‘OK, you can share a four-bed room. There’s another mother in there who’s come to see her son.’

This woman told me (and this was the first I’d heard of it) that they were selecting a new group of conscripts to go to Afghanistan. She told me she’d come with a large amount of money, ready to pay off someone who’d make sure her son wasn’t among them. She went home a happy woman, and her last words to me were: ‘Don’t be a naive idiot!’

My mother burst into tears when I told her the story. ‘You should have gone on your knees and begged them! You could have offered them your earrings.’ Those earrings, worth a few kopecks, were the most expensive things in our lives. To my mother, who’d lived more than modestly all her life, they were riches. My God, what have we been reduced to? If he hadn’t gone some other boy would have had to take his place, some other boy with a mother …

Andryusha himself never understood how he came to be chosen for the paratroop battalion and Afghanistan. He was terribly chuffed about it, though, and didn’t try to hide his feelings.

I know nothing about military matters, so perhaps there’s something I don’t understand here. But I wish someone would explain to me why my son was kept busy bricklaying and plastering when he should have been training for war. The authorities knew what they were sending those boys into. Even the papers published photographs of the mujahedin, strong men thirty or forty years old, on their own land and with their wives and children beside them … How did he come to join the paratroop battalion one week before flying off to Afghanistan? Even I know that they choose the toughest boys for the paras, and then put them through specially gruelling training. Afterwards the Commandant of the training-camp wrote to me. ‘Your son was outstanding in both his military and political training,’ he said. When did he become outstanding? And where? At his furniture factory? I gave my son to them and they didn’t even bother to make a soldier of him.

We had only a single letter from Afghanistan. ‘Don’t worry, everything’s lovely and peaceful here,’ it said. ‘It’s beautiful and there’s no fighting.’ He was just reassuring us so that we wouldn’t start writing letters to have him transferred. They were just raw boys, almost children, who were thrown into the fire and accepted it as a matter of honour. Well, that’s the way we brought them up.

He was killed within a month of arriving in Afghanistan. My boy, my skinny little thing. How did he die? I’ll never know.

They brought him back to me ten days after his death. Although I hadn’t been informed, of course, my dreams during those ten days were full of my losing and not being able to find things. There were so many signs … The kettle whistled strangely on the stove. And I love house-plants, I always had lots on the window-sill, the cupboards and the bookshelves, but every morning, during those ten days, I dropped the pots when I watered them. They just seemed to jump out of my hands and break, so there was a perpetual smell of damp earth in the flat …

I saw the cars stopping outside our block — two jeeps and an ambulance. I knew straightaway they were coming to us. I opened the door: ‘Don’t speak! Don’t say a word! I hate you! Just give me my son’s body. I’ll bury him my own way, alone. We don’t need your military honours.’

1st Lieutenant, Battery Commander

Only a madman will tell you the whole truth about what went on there, that’s for sure. There’s a lot you’ll never know. When the truth is too terrible it doesn’t get told. Nobody wants to be the first to come out with it — it’s just too risky.

Did you know that drugs and fur coats were smuggled in in coffins? Yes, right in there with the bodies! Have you ever seen necklaces of dried ears? Yes, trophies of war, rolled up into little leaves and kept in matchboxes! Impossible? You can’t believe such things of our glorious Soviet boys? Well, they could and did happen, and you won’t be able to cover them up with a coat of that cheap silver paint they use to paint the railings round our graves and war memorials …

I didn’t go over there with a desire to kill people. I’m a normal man. We were told over and over again that we were there to fight bandits, that we’d be heroes and that everyone would be grateful to us. I remember the posters: ‘Soldiers, Let Us Strengthen Our Southern Borders!’ ‘Uphold The Honour Of Your Unit!’ ‘Flourish, Lenin’s Motherland!’ ‘Glory To The Communist Party!’ When I got home I caught sight of myself in a big mirror — over there I’d only had a small one — and didn’t recognise the person staring back at me, with his different eyes in a different face. I can’t define how I’d changed, but I had, outside and inside.

I was serving in Czechoslovakia when I heard about my transfer to Afghanistan.

‘Why me?’ I asked.

‘Because you’re not married.’

I made my preparations as if I were going away on ordinary army business. What should I pack? No one knew, because we didn’t have any Afgantsi with us. Someone recommended rubber boots, which I didn’t use once in my two years there and left in Kabul. We flew from Tashkent sitting on crates of ammunition and landed in Shindanta. The first thing I saw was the Tsarandoi, or Afghan police, armed with Soviet tommy-guns of World War II vintage. Soviet and Afghan soldiers were equally dirty and shabby and looked as though they’d just crawled out of the trenches — a sharp contrast to what I’d been used to in Czechoslovakia. Casualties were being loaded on to the plane. One, I remember, had shrapnel wounds in the stomach: ‘This one won’t survive, he’ll die on the way,’ I heard one of the helicopter crew, ferrying the wounded from the front line, comment casually. I was shocked how calmly they talked of death.

I think that was the most incomprehensible thing of all over there — the attitude to death. As I said before, the whole truth you’d never … What’s unthinkable here was everyday reality over there. It’s frightening and unpleasant to have to kill, you think, but you soon realise that what you really find objectionable is shooting someone point-blank. Killing en masse, in a group, is exciting, even — and I’ve seen this myself — fun. In peacetime our guns are stacked in a pyramid, with each pyramid under separate lock and key and protected by alarms. Over there you had your gun with you all the time — it was a part of you. In the evening you’d shoot out the light bulb with your pistol if you were feeling lazy — it was easier than getting up and switching it off. Or, half crazy with the heat, you’d empty your submachine-gun into the air — or worse … Once we surrounded a caravan, which resisted and tried to fight us off with machine-guns, so we were ordered to destroy it, which we did. Wounded camels were lying on the ground, howling … Is this what we were awarded medals from ‘the grateful Afghan people’ for?

War is war and that means killing. We weren’t given real guns to play cops and robbers with. We weren’t sent to mend tractors and build houses. We killed the enemy wherever and whenever we could, and vice versa. But this wasn’t the kind of war we knew about from books and films, with a front line, a no man’s land, a vanguard and rear echelons, etc. You know the word kiriz? It’s the word the Afghans use for the culverts, originally built for irrigation purposes. This was a ‘kiriz war’. People would come up out of them like ghosts, day and night, with a Chinese submachine-gun in their hands, or the knife they’d just slaughtered a sheep with, or just a big stone. Quite possibly you’d been haggling with that same ‘ghost’ in the market a few hours before. Suddenly, he wasn’t a human being for you, because he’d killed your best friend, who was now just a lump of dead flesh lying on the ground. My friend’s last words to me were: ‘Don’t write to my mother, I beg you, I don’t want her to know anything about this … ’ And to them you’re just a Russky, not a human being. Our artillery wipes his village off the face of the earth so thoroughly that when he goes back he literally can’t find a trace of his mother, wife or children. Modern weaponry makes our crime even greater. I can kill one man with a knife, two with a mine … dozens with a missile. But I’m a soldier and killing’s my profession. I’m like the slave of Aladdin’s magic lamp, or rather the slave of the Defence Ministry. I’ll shoot wherever I’m told to. When I hear the order ‘Fire!’ I don’t think, I fire, that’s my job.

Still, I didn’t go there to kill people. Why couldn’t the Afghan people see us as we saw ourselves? I remember their kids standing in the snow and ice, barefoot except for their little rubber slipovers, and us giving them our rations. Once I saw a little boy run up to our truck, not to beg, as they usually did, but just to look at us. I had twenty Afganis in my pocket, which I gave him. He just knelt there in the sand, and didn’t move until we’d got back in the APC and driven away.

On the other hand, there were instances of our soldiers stealing a few miserable kopecks from the kids who brought us water and so on … No, I wouldn’t go there again, not for anything. I repeat: the truth is too terrible to be told. You lot, who stayed at home, don’t need to know it, and neither do we, who were over there. There were more of you, but you kept quiet. Our behaviour there was a product of our upbringing. Our children will grow up and deny their fathers ever fought in Afghanistan.

I’ve come across fake veterans. Oh, yes, I was there … ’ they’ll say.

‘Where was your unit?’

‘Er … in Kabul.’

‘What unit was that?’

‘Well … er … Spetsnaz’ [Special Forces, somewhat equivalent to the SAS in the public mind].

Lunatics in asylums used to shout, ‘I’m Stalin!’; now, normal guys stand up and claim: ‘I fought in Afghanistan.’ I’d put the lot of them in the madhouse.

I prefer to be on my own when I think about those days. I have a drink, sit down and listen to the songs we used to sing. Those times are pages from my life, and, although they’re soiled I can’t throw them away.

The young vets get together and get very angry that nobody wants to know. They find it hard to settle down and find some kind of moral values for themselves. ‘I could kill someone — if I knew I’d get away with it,’ one admitted to me. ‘I’d do it just like that, for no particular reason. I wouldn’t care.’ They had Afghanistan, now it’s gone and they miss it.

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. ‘You bastards! You killed and robbed and now you expect special privileges?’ We’re expected to take all the blame, and to accept that everything we went through was for nothing.

Why did it all happen? Why? Why? Why?

Recendy in Moscow I went to the toilet at one of the railway stations. I saw a sign saying ‘Cooperative toilet’ [i.e. private enterprise]. A young lad sat there, taking money. Another sign behind him read: ‘Children up to 7 years, invalids, veterans of World War II and wars of liberation — free.’

I was amazed: ‘Did you think that up yourself? ’ I asked him.

‘Yes!’ he said proudly. ‘Just show your ID and in you go.’ ‘So my father went through the whole war, and I spent two years with my mouth full of Afghan sand, just so we could piss for nothing in your toilet?’ I said. I hated that boy more than I hated anyone all the time I was in Afghan. He had decided to pay me.

Civilian Employee

I flew home to Russia on leave. When I went to the baths [the Russian equivalent of a sauna or Turkish bath] I heard people groaning with pleasure, but their groans reminded me of the agonised moaning of wounded soldiers.

At home I missed my friends in Afghanistan, but after a few days back in Kabul I was homesick. I come from Simferopol in the Crimea and have a diploma in music. People who are contented with their lives don’t come over here. All us women are lonely and frustrated in some way. Try and live on 120 roubles a month, as I do, especially if you want to dress decently and have an interesting holiday once a year. ‘They only go over there to find themselves a husband,’ people often say. Well, what’s wrong with that? Why deny it? I’m thirty-two years old and I’m alone.

The worst kind of mine was the one we called the ‘Italianka\ You have to collect a person’s remains in a bucket after an Italianka. I learnt about it when one of the boys came up to me and just talked and talked about seeing his friend being turned into mincemeat. I thought he’d never stop. When he noticed me getting frightened he said, ‘I’m sorry, I wanted … ’ A boy I’d never met, but he’d found a woman and needed to talk. I thought he’d never stop.

We have two women’s hostels here: one’s called the ‘Cathouse’, that’s for women who’ve been in Afghanistan for two or three years; the other’s known as ‘Daisy’, the idea being that it’s full of innocent girls plucking petals and sighing ‘he loves me, he loves me not’! Soldiers go to the baths on Saturdays; Sunday is for the women, but they’re not allowed in the officers’ bath-house. This is because women are ‘dirty’, yet those same officers want us for sex. They show us photos of their wives and children stuck up on the walls above their beds …

When a bombardment starts and those RS rockets whistle over your head you just shake with fear. Two young soldiers went on patrol with a dog, but the dog came back without them …

Everyone’s at war here. Some are sick, in mind or body, others are wounded, but everyone’s damaged in some way, no one escapes intact. When the bombardment starts we run to the shelters while the Afghan kids dance on the roofs for joy. As I say, everyone’s damaged. Those kids even dance and sing when they see our casualties being carried out. We take presents to their villages, flour, or mattresses, or cuddly toys — sweet little rabbits and mice — but none of that makes any difference. Everyone’s corrupted by war.

The first two questions I get asked back home are, ‘Did you get married out there?’ and ‘Do you get any concessions?’ The only concession for us civilian employees is that our families get 1000 roubles if we’re killed. When you go to the army store out there the men always push in first. ‘Who the hell are you? We’ve got to get presents for our wives,’ they say. And at night they expect us to go to bed with them …

You ‘fulfil your international duty’ and make money on the side. Everyone does it. You buy sweets, biscuits or canned food at the army store and sell it to the local shops. There’s a tariff: a tin of dried milk goes for 50 afoshki, a service cap 400; a carmirror fetches 1000, a wheel from a KamaZ truck 20,000. You can get up to 18,000–20,000 for a Makarov pistol; 100,000 for a Kalashnikov; and the going rate for a truck-load of rubbish from the garrison is 70,000–200,000 (depending on the number of cans). The women who do best here are those who sleep with the quartermasters, who live it up while the boys up at the front go down with scurvy and have to eat rotten cabbage.

In the amputee wards the men’ll talk about anything except the future, according to some girls I know. In fact no one likes to think of the future here. Perhaps it’s more frightening to die if you’re happy, but it’s my mother I’d be sorry for.

I’ve seen cats creeping between bodies, looking for something to eat, but still wary, as though the boys were lying there alive.

Stop me. I could go on talking for ever. But I’ve never killed anyone …

Private, Gunlayer

Sometimes I wonder how things would have turned out if I hadn’t gone to the war. I’d be happy, I think, and wouldn’t have found out things about myself which I’d rather not have known. Thus spake Zarathustra: Not only have I looked into the abyss but the abyss has looked into my soul …

I was in my second year at the radio-technical institute here in Minsk, but my main interest was in music and art. I was vacillating between those two worlds when I got my call-up papers. I have no will-power — by which I mean I’m not the sort of person who tries to meddle with his fate. If you do try to influence it you lose anyhow. My way, whatever happens you’re not responsible — or guilty. I didn’t want to go into the army, of course. The first thing I learnt about army life was that you’re a slave. I felt the army took my personality away from me.

They didn’t say it straight out but it was obvious we were going to Afghanistan. I didn’t try to influence my fate. We were lined up on the parade-ground and they read out this order that we were ‘fighters in the international struggle’. We listened very quietly — well, we couldn’t very well shout out, ‘I’m frightened! I don’t want to go!’ We were off to fulfil our international duty — it was all cut and dried.

It really started at the Gardez clearing-centre, when the dembels took everything of any value off us, including our boots, paratroop vests and berets. And we had to pay: an old beret cost us 10 foreign currency vouchers, a set of badges 25. A para’s meant to have a set of five — one to show you’re a member of a guards’ regiment, the others are the insignia for the airborne forces and your para battalion, your class-number and your army-sportsman badge. They also stole our parade shirts, which they traded with Afghans for drugs. A gang of dembels came up to me. ‘Where’s your kit-bag?’ They poked around in it, took what they wanted and there was nothing I could do about it. All of us in our company had our uniforms taken and had to buy old ones in return. The Quartermaster’s department said simply, ‘You won’t be needing your new togs — they will, they’re going home.’ I wrote a letter home describing the beautiful Mongolian sky, the good food and the sunshine. But my war had already started.

The first time we drove out to a village the battalion commander taught us how to behave towards the local populace: ‘You call all Afghans, regardless of age, “batcha”, which means “boy’, roughly. Got that? I’ll show you the rest later.’ On the way we came across an old man. ‘Halt! Watch this!’ The commander jumped down from the vehicle, went up to the old man, pushed his turban off his head, poked his fingers in his beard. ‘Right, on your way, batcha!’ Not quite what we’d been expecting. In the village we threw briquettes of pearl barley to the kids, but they ran away thinking they were grenades.

My first taste of action was escorting a convoy. This is exciting and interesting — this is war! I thought, I’m holding a gun and carrying grenades, just like in the posters! As we approach the socalled ‘green’ zone (scrub and bush) I, as gun layer, look carefully through the gunsight. I see some kind of turban.

‘Seryozha!’ I shout to the chap sitting by the barrel. ‘I can see a turban! What do I do?’

‘Fire!’

‘What d’you mean — fire?’

‘What d’you think I mean?’ He shoots.

‘The turban’s still there. It’s white. What do I do?’

‘Fire!!!’

We use up half the carrier’s ammunition supply firing the 30mm gun and the machine-gun.

‘Where’s this white turban? It’s a mound of snow.’ Then: ‘Seryozha! Your mound of snow’s moving! Your little snowman’s got a gun!’

We jump down and let him have it with our automatics.

It wasn’t a question of, ‘do I kill him or don’t I?’ Never. All you wanted was to eat and sleep and get it all over and done with, so you could stop shooting and go home. We’d be driving over that burning sand, breathing it in, bullets whistling round our heads — and we’d sleep through the lot. To kill or not kill? That’s a post-war question. The psychology of war itself is a lot more urgent. The Afghans weren’t people to us, and vice versa. We couldn’t afford to see each other as human beings. You blockade a village, wait 24 hours, then another 24, with the heat and tiredness driving you crazy. You end up even more brutal than the ‘greens’, as we called our allies, the Afghan National Army. At least these were their people, they were born in these villages, whereas we did what we did without thinking, to people quite unlike us, people we didn’t understand. It was easier for us to fire our guns and throw our grenades.

Once we were going back to barracks with seven of our boys dead and two more shell-shocked. The villages along the way were silent, the inhabitants had either fled into the mountains or gone to ground. Suddenly an old woman hobbled up to us, crying, screaming, beating her fists on the APC. We’d killed her son and she was cursing us — but our only reaction was, what’s she crying and threatening us for? We ought to shoot her, too. We didn’t, but the point is, we could have done. We pushed her off the road and drove on. We were carrying seven dead — what was she crying for? What did she expect?

We didn’t want to know anything about anything. We were soldiers in a war. We were completely cut off from Afghan life — the locals weren’t allowed to set foot in our army compound. All we knew about them was that they wanted to kill or injure us, and we were keen to stay alive. Actually I wanted to be lightly wounded, just to have a rest or at least a good night’s sleep, but I didn’t want to die.

One day two of our lads went to a shop, shot the shopkeeper and his family and stole everything they could lay their hands on. There was an enquiry and of course everyone denied having anything to do with it. They examined the bullets in the bodies and eventually charged three men: an officer, an NCO and a private. But when our barracks were being searched for the stolen money, etc, I remember how humiliated and insulted we felt — why all this fuss about a few dead Afghans? There was a court martial and the NCO and the private were sentenced to the firing squad. We were all on their side — the general opinion was that they were being executed for their stupidity rather than for what they’d done. The shopkeeper’s dead family didn’t exist for us. We were only doing our international duty. It was all quite cut and dried. It’s only now, as the stereotypes begin to collapse, that I see things differently. And to think, I used not to be able to read ‘Mumu’ [a sentimental story by Turgenev about the relationship between a dumb peasant and his dog] without crying my eyes out!

War affects a person in a strange way: it takes some of his — or her — humanity away. When we were growing up we were never taught ‘Thou shalt not kill’. On the contrary — all these war veterans, with rows of medals pinned to their splendid uniforms, came to our schools and colleges to describe their exploits in detail. I never once heard it said that it was wrong to kill in war. I was brought up to believe that only those who killed in peacetime were condemned as murderers. In war such actions were known as ‘filial duty to the Motherland’, ‘a man’s sacred work’ and ‘defence of the Fatherland’. We were told that we were reliving the achievements of the heroes of the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis, and who was I to doubt it? It was continually hammered into us that we were the best of the best, so why should I question whether what we were doing was right? Later, when I began to see things differently, my army mates said, ‘Either you’ve gone mad or you want to go mad.’ And yet, as I said, I was too fatalistic to try to change anything. (I was brought up by my mother, who was a powerful and dominant woman.)

At training-camp veterans from the Special Forces described to us how they’d stormed villages and slaughtered all the inhabitants. It seemed romantic. We wanted to be as strong and fearless as they were. I love music and books but I also wanted to storm villages, cut throats and boast about it afterwards. I’ve probably got an inferiority complex.

My actual memories, though, are very different … My first attack of sheer panic, for example. We were driving in the APC when the shelling started. The APCs came to a halt. ‘Take defensive positions!’ someone shouted. We started jumping off. I stood up, ready to jump, but another lad took my place and was killed by a direct hit from a grenade. I felt I was falling, slowly, horizontally, like in a cartoon … with bits of someone else’s body raining down on me. It’s fixed in my memory for ever, that’s what’s so terrible. I guess that’s how you experience your own death, from a distance. Strange. I managed to crawl into an irrigation-ditch, stretched out and lifted my wounded arm. After a bit I realised I wasn’t seriously injured, but I cradled my arm and didn’t move.

No, I didn’t turn into one of those supermen who storm villages and cut throats. Within the year I was in hospital, suffering from dystrophy. I was the only ‘new boy’ in our unit, the other ten, nearing the end of their tour of duty, were known as ‘grandads’. I was forced to do all their washing, chop all the wood, and clean the whole camp — I never got more than three hours’ sleep a night. One of the things I had to do was fetch water from the stream. One morning I had a strong instinct not to go — I had a strong feeling the mujahedin had been about that night, planting mines, but I was so scared I’d be beaten again, and there was no water for washing. So off I went, and duly stepped on a mine. It was only a signal mine, thank God, so a rocket went up and illuminated the whole area. I fell, crawled on … ‘must get at least a bucket of water, for them to clean their teeth with. They won’t care what’s happened, they’ll just beat me up again … ’

That was typical of camp life. It took just one year to turn me from a normal, healthy lad into a dystrophic who couldn’t walk through the ward without the help of a nurse. I eventually went back to my unit and got beaten up again, until one day my leg was broken and I had to have an operation. The battalion commander came to see me in hospital.

‘Who did this?’ he asked.

It had happened at night but I knew perfectly well who’d done it. But I wasn’t going to grass. You just didn’t grass — that was the iron law of camp life.

‘Why keep quiet? Give me his name and I’ll have the bastard court-martialled.’

I kept quiet. The authorities were powerless against the unwritten rules of army life, which were literally life and death to us. If you tried to fight against them you always lost in the end. Near the end of my two years I even tried to beat up someone myself. I didn’t manage it, though. The ‘rule of the grandads’ doesn’t depend on individuals — it’s a product of the herd instinct. First you get beaten up, then you beat up others. I had to hide the fact that I couldn’t do it from my fellow dembels. I would have been despised by them as well as by the victims.

When you get home for demob you have to report to the local recruiting office. A coffin was brought in while I was there — our 1st lieutenant, by sheer chance. ‘He died in the execution of his international duty,’ I read on the little brass plate, and remembered how he used to stumble along the corridor, blind drunk, and smash the sentry’s jaw in. It happened regularly once a week. If you didn’t keep out of the way you’d end up spitting your teeth out. There’s not much humanity in a human being — that’s what war taught me. If a man’s hungry, or ill, he’ll be cruel — and that’s just about all humanity amounts to.

I only went to the cemetery once. ‘He died a hero.’ ‘He displayed courage and valour.’ ‘He fulfilled his military duty.’ That’s what the gravestones said. There were heroes, of course there were, in the particular sense in which the word is used in war; like when a man throws himself over his friend to protect him, or carries his wounded commander to safety. But I know that one of those heroes in that cemetery deliberately overdosed, and another was shot dead by a sentry who caught him breaking into the food store (we’d all climbed in there at some time or other … I longed for biscuits and condensed milk). Forget what I said about the cemetery, please, tear it up. No one can say what’s true about them and what isn’t, now. Let the living have their medals and the dead their legends — keep everyone happy!

The war and life back home have one thing in common: neither are anything like the way they’re described in books! I’ve created a world of my own for myself, thank God, a world of books and music which has cut me off from all that and been my salvation. It was only here at home that I began to sort out who I really was and what had happened to me. I prefer to sort it out alone. I don’t like going to the Afgantsi clubs, and I can’t see myself going to schools to give speeches about war, and telling the kids how I was turned from an immature boy into a killer, no, not even a killer, into a machine that just needed food and sleep and nothing else. I hate those Afgantsi. Their clubs are just like the army itself, and they have the same army mentality. ‘We don’t like the heavy metal fans, do we, lads? OK, let’s go and smash their teeth in!’ That’s a part of my life I want to leave behind for ever. Our society is a very cruel one, which is a fact I never noticed before.

When I was in hospital over there we stole some Phenazipam — it’s used to treat mental breakdown and the dose is one or two tablets per day. One night a couple of the boys took 30 between them, and at three in the morning went to the kitchen to wash the dishes (which were all clean). A few others and I sat there grimly, playing cards. Someone else pissed on his pillow. A totally absurd scene, until a nurse rushed out in horror and called the guards.

That’s how I mainly remember the war — as totally absurd.

A Mother

I had twins, two boys, but only Kolya survived. He was on the ‘Special Care’ register of the Maternity Institute until he was eighteen, when his call-up papers arrived. Was it necessary to send boys like him to Afghanistan? My neighbour kept getting at me — and perhaps she was right. ‘Couldn’t you scrape a couple of thousand roubles together and bribe someone?’ We knew a woman who did exactly that, and kept her son out. And my son had to go instead. I didn’t realise that I could save my son with money. I’d thought the best gift I could give him was a decent upbringing.

I went to visit him for the oath-taking ceremony. I could see he wasn’t ready for war. He was quite lost. I’d always been honest with him.

‘You’re not ready, Kolya. I’m going to appeal … ’

‘Don’t appeal, Mum, and don’t let them humiliate you. Do you really think it bothers them if I’m “not ready”. They don’t give a damn!’

All the same I made an appointment with the battalion commander.

‘He’s my only son. If something happened to him I couldn’t go on living. And he’s not ready, I can see he’s not ready.’

He was sympathetic. ‘Go back to your local recruiting office. If you can get them to send me an official request I’ll have him transferred back home.’

I took a night flight home and got to the enlistment office at nine o’clock. Our Military Commissar is Comrade Goryachev. He was sitting there talking to someone on the phone.

‘What d’you want?’

I told him. The phone rang and he picked up the receiver, looked at me and said, ‘I won’t do it.’

I begged him. I went on my knees. I was prepared to kiss his hand. ‘He’s my only child.’ He didn’t even get up from his desk. ‘Please, at least write his name down!’ I begged as I left. I still hoped he might reconsider, if he didn’t have a heart of stone.

Four months went by. They were put through an accelerated intensive three-month training course and suddenly I got a letter from my son in Afghanistan. Just four months … A single summer.

One morning I left the flat to go to work. They met me as I was going down the stairs. Three soldiers and a woman. The men were in front, carrying their caps in their left hands. Somehow I knew that this was a sign of mourning. I turned round and ran upstairs. They realised I must be the mother so they followed me upstairs. I went down in the lift — I wanted to rush into the street and run away, escape, put my hands over my ears and block everything out. By the time I reached the ground floor — the lift had stopped to let people get in — they were standing there waiting for me. I pressed the button and went up again … I got to my floor and ran to the flat, but in my shock forgot to slam the door shut. I heard them coming in. I hid in the bedroom, they came after me, with their caps in their left hands.

One of them was Goryachev, the Military Commissar. With what little strength I had left I threw myself at him like a cat.

‘You are dripping with my son’s blood!’ I screamed. ‘You are dripping with my son’s blood!’

He said nothing. I tried to hit him. I can’t remember what happened after that.

It was over a year before I felt I could face people again. Before that I was totally alone. I blamed everyone for my son’s death — my friend who worked in the bakery, a taxi-driver I’d never seen before in my life, Commissar Goryachev. I realise that was wrong. Then I wanted to be with the only people who could know what I was going through.

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 gravestone, crying; a third painting the railing round her son’s grave. We talk about only one thing — our children, as if they were still alive. I know some of their stories off by heart.

‘I went out on to the balcony, looked down and saw two officers and a doctor. Back in the flat I looked through the peep-hole to see where they were going. They stopped in our hallway and turned right. Was it to the neighbours? They had a son in the army, too. The bell … I open the door:

‘“Has my son been killed?”

‘“Be brave, Mother … ” “Mother”, they called me.’

‘It wasn’t like that for me. They just said: “The coffin’s outside, Mother. 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 … ’

‘And ours. We even had little white worms dropping on to the floor … ’

‘Mine smelt only of fresh timber.’

‘If the helicopter is blown up they collect the pieces. They find an arm, or a leg, and identify them by the watch, or the socks … ’ ‘Our coffin had to wait outside for an hour. Our son was six foot six tall, he was a para. It was like a sarcophagus, a wooden coffin inside a zinc one. It took six men to get it up the stairs … ’ ‘It took them eighteen days to bring mine home. They wait until the plane is full, the black tulip … They flew to the Urals first, then to Leningrad, and only then to Minsk … ’

‘They didn’t send back a single one of his belongings … If only we had something to remember him by … He smoked — if only we had his lighter … ’

‘I’m glad they don’t open the coffins, so that we don’t see what has happened to our sons. I’ll always remember him alive and in one piece … ’

How can we survive? We won’t live long with this pain and these wounds in our hearts.

‘We’re going to give you a new flat,’ I was promised by the local authority. ‘You can choose any empty flat in the area.’

I found one in the city centre, built of proper brick, not prefab concrete, with a nice modern layout. I went back to the town hall with the address.

‘Are you out of your mind? That block’s strictly for Central Committee members.’

‘Is my son’s blood that much cheaper than theirs?’

The local Party secretary at the institute where I work is a good man, and honest. I don’t know how he managed to get access to the Central Committee on my behalf. All he said to me was this: ‘You should have heard how they spoke to me. “All right, she’s grief-stricken — but what’s wrong with you?” That’s what they asked me. I was almost thrown out of the Party.’

Perhaps I should have gone myself to get an answer from them?

‘I’m going to the grave today. My son is there, with his friends, and mine.’

Private, Tank-Crew

There’s something wrong with my memory and I may have to drop out of my second year at college. Words and faces, even my own feelings, seem to escape me. All that’s left are fragments, bits and pieces, as if there’s something missing inside …

I remember these words from the military oath:

‘I stand ready to defend my Motherland, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, when ordered to do so by the Soviet Government, and, as a soldier of the armed forces of the USSR, I swear to defend it with courage, skill, dignity and honour, not sparing my blood and even my life for the achievement of total victory over our foes … ’

From my first days in Afghan …

I thought I was in paradise. For the first time I saw oranges growing on trees. I hadn’t yet seen mines hanging like oranges from those same trees (the tank-aerial touches the trip-wire and triggers the bomb). When the ‘Afghan wind’ blows, your porridge is full of sand, the sun is blotted out and it gets so dark you can’t see your hand in front of your face. A few hours later the sun comes out and you see the mountains again. Not a sign of war. Then — a burst of machine-gun fire, a mortar attack, the crack of a sniper’s bullet, and two of your mates are dead. Sun, mountains, and the gleam of a snake in the sand.

You can’t imagine what death is like even with the bullets whistling overhead. A body lies in the dust and you call out to it, because you can’t take in what’s happened, although a voice inside you says, ‘That’s what death is.’ I was wounded in the leg, but not as badly as I thought. ‘I seem to be injured,’ I thought. I felt surprised but calm. My leg was hurting, but I couldn’t quite believe that this had happened to me personally. I was still a new boy — I wanted a chance to fight and go home a hero.

Someone cut away the top of my boot and applied a tourniquet to my vein, which was severed. I was in pain but it would have been cowardly to show it so I kept quiet. Running from tank to tank means crossing an open space up to a hundred metres wide. There were shells flying about and rocks flying in all directions but I wasn’t about to admit I couldn’t run and crawl with the rest of them … I’d’ve looked like a coward. I crossed myself and ran, covered with blood. The battle lasted for another hour or more. We’d started out at 4 a.m., fighting didn’t stop until 4 p.m., when we had something to eat. I remember my bloody hands tearing at the white bread. Later I found out that my friend had died in hospital from a bullet in the head. I kept waiting for his name to be mentioned at evening roll-call: ‘Igor Dashko was killed while fulfilling his international duty.’ He was a quiet boy and no ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’, but all the same, he shouldn’t have been forgotten so immediately and completely, and just wiped off the lists …

Who was I talking about? Oh yes, Igor Dashko … I saw him laid out in his coffin. I wasn’t even sad any more, but I looked at him for a long while so I wouldn’t forget …

From my time back home:

We flew to Tashkent and went to the station, but couldn’t buy tickets. That evening four of us slipped 50 roubles each to two conductors, who — lo and behold — found us seats in their train. They got 100 roubles each, nice work if you can get it, but we didn’t care. We were laughing like madmen and thinking, ‘We’re alive, we’re alive!!’

When I got home I opened the door, picked up a bucket and crossed the yard to fetch some water. Ecstasy!

I was presented with a medal at my college. Next day there was an article in the paper, with the headline: ‘A Medal Finds Its Hero’. I laughed, they made it sound as though the Frontier Scouts had been searching for me for forty years. And I certainly never said that we ‘went to Afghanistan dedicated to the dawn of the April revolution on Afghan soil’. But that’s what they wrote.

I loved hunting before I went into the army. I planned to go to Siberia after I was discharged and become a professional hunter. Well, one day I went hunting with a friend of mine. He shot one goose, then we saw another, injured. He was trying to shoot it and I was racing after it, trying to save it. I was sick of killing and I still am.

There’s something wrong with my memory. Just fragments, bits and pieces, as if there’s something missing inside …

A Soldier

What was happening to my body didn’t show on the outside, and my parents refused to let me be obsessed with something I couldn’t do a thing about.

I went to Afghanistan with my dog Chara. If you shout, ‘Die!’, she falls to the ground. ‘Shut your eyes!’ she covers her face with her paws. If I was upset she’d sit herself next to me and cry.

I was bursting with pride my first few days over there. I’ve been seriously ill since I was a child and the army had turned me down. ‘Why isn’t this lad in the army?’ people asked. I was ashamed, and hated the idea of people laughing at me. The army is the school of life and makes a man of you. Well, I got into the army and started applying to be sent to Afghanistan.

‘You’ll kick the bucket before the week’s out,’ they warned me.

‘I still want to go.’ I needed to prove I was the same as everyone else.

I didn’t tell my parents where I was stationed. I’ve had cancer of the lymph glands since I was aged twelve and they’ve devoted their lives to me. I told them only the Forces Post Box Number, and that I was ‘attached to a secret unit in a location that cannot be disclosed’.

I took my dog and guitar with me.

‘How did you manage to end up here?’ I was asked by the army security department.

‘Well … ,’ and I told them about all my applications.

‘You actually volunteered? You must be mad!’

I’ve never smoked but I nearly took it up over there.

I fainted the first time I saw casualties, some of them with their legs tom off at the groin or with huge holes in their heads. Everything inside me was shouting, ‘I want to be alive!’

One night someone stole a dead soldier’s submachine-gun. The thief was one of our soldiers too. He sold it for 80,000 afoshki, and showed off what he’d bought with the money: two cassette-recorders and some denims. If he hadn’t been arrested we’d have torn him to pieces ourselves. In court he sat quietly, crying.

When we read articles in the Soviet press about our ‘achievements’ we laughed, got angry and used them as toilet paper, but the strange thing is this: now I’m home, after my two years out there, I search through the papers to find articles about ‘achievements’ and actually believe them.

I thought I’d be happy when I got home, and planned big changes in my life. A lot of soldiers go home, get divorced, remarry and go off somewhere new. Some take off to Siberia to work on the oil pipe-line; others go to Chernobyl, or join the fire brigade. Somewhere where there’s risk and danger. They have a craving for real life instead of mere existence. Some of our boys had terrible bums. First they go all yellow, then they shed their skin and turn pink.

Mountain operations? Well, you carry your gun, obviously, and a double issue of ammo, about 10 kilos of it, plus a mine, that’s another 10 kilos, plus grenades, flak-jacket, dry rations. It comes to at least 40 kilos. I’ve seen men so wet with sweat they look as though they’ve been standing in torrential rain. I’ve seen the orange crust on the frozen faces of dead men. Yes, orange, for some reason, I’ve seen friendship and cowardice … What we did had to be done. No, don’t start on that subject, please! There are a lot of clever dicks around now, but why didn’t they tear up their Party cards, or shoot themselves in protest, while we were over there?

When I got home my mother undressed me and patted me all over. ‘All in one piece, you’re fine!’ she kept saying. Yes, I was fine on the surface, but inside I was on fire. Everything irritates me now — even sunshine, or cheerful songs, or someone laughing. My old books, my tape-recorder, photos and guitar are all in my bedroom as before — but I’ve changed. I can’t walk through the park without looking behind me. If a waiter in a café stands behind me to take my order I want to jump up and rush out — I can’t stand anyone standing at my back. If someone provokes me my immediate reaction is, ‘Shoot the little shit!’ In war we had to do the exact opposite of what we’d been taught in normal life, and now we’re meant to unlearn all the skills we learnt in war. I’m an excellent shot and my grenades always hit their target. Who needs all that now?

We believed we were there to defend something, namely the Motherland and our way of life. Yet back home, what do I find? My friend can’t lend me a fiver because his wife wouldn’t like it. What kind of a friend is that? I soon realised we were surplus to requirements. We might just as well not have made it — we’re unwanted, an embarrassment. After Afghanistan I got a job as a car mechanic. Then I worked for the Komsomol at regional level in the ideology department, but I left there too, even though it was a cushy job. Life here is one big swamp where all people care about is their wages, dachas, cars and how to find a bit of smoked sausage. No one gives a damn about us. If we didn’t stand up for our rights ourselves nobody would know a thing about this war. If there weren’t so many of us, 100,000 in fact, they’d have shut us up, like they did after Vietnam and Egypt … Out there we all hated the enemy together. But I need someone to hate now, so that I can find some friends again. But who?

I went to the recruiting office and applied to go back to Afghanistan but I was refused. The war would soon be over, they said. A lot more like me will be home soon. Yes, there’ll be a lot more of us one day.

You wake up in the morning and you’re glad you can’t remember your dreams. I never tell my dreams to anyone. There is something that really happened that I can’t talk about either …

I dream I’m asleep and see a great sea of people, near where I live. I look round and feel very cramped, but for some reason I can’t stand up. Then I realise I’m lying in a coffin, a wooden coffin. I see that so clearly, but I’m alive, and I know I’m alive, even though I’m in a coffin. A gate opens and all the people pass through the gate on to the road, carrying me along with them. The faces of the crowd are full of grief but also a kind of mysterious ecstasy I can’t understand. What’s happened? Why am I in this coffin? Suddenly the procession comes to a halt. ‘Give me a hammer!’ I hear someone say. I suddenly realise I’m dreaming. ‘Give me a hammer!’ I hear again. The lid is hammered down, then I hear hammer-blows and one nail goes through my finger. I beat my head and legs against the lid. Bang — the lid flies off. The people watch as I sit up straight. ‘I’m in pain!’ I want to shout. ‘Why are you nailing me down? I can’t breathe in here.’ They’re crying but they can’t, or won’t, speak to me. And I don’t know how to get them to hear me. I think I’m shouting, but my lips are glued together and I can’t open them. So I lie back in the coffin. ‘If they want me to be dead perhaps I am dead and must keep quiet.’ Again someone says, ‘Give me a hammer!’

* The ‘Winter War’ of 1939–40, about which the Soviet public was, until very recently, permitted to know almost nothing.

† An allusion to the widespread practice of officers using their men for private gain. His work at the furniture factory may well have been on the same basis, despite the reference to ‘our company getting new tables’.