Soviet soldier Bakhretdin Khakimov was declared missing in action during the war in Afghanistan, which claimed the lives of 15,000 USSR soldiers and more than a million Afghans. Thirty-three years later, his family found out he was alive, living as a true Afghan among his former enemies.
Khakimov’s story is surprisingly similar to many others. During the nearly decade-long war between 1979 and 1989, several hundred Soviet soldiers went missing in the fighting between the Soviets and the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Most are presumed dead, but the Committee for International Soldiers—an organisation set up by veterans of the Afghan war—has continued to search for them anyway.
Twenty-nine former soldiers have been identified alive over the past decade, twenty-two of whom returned to Russia and seven of whom chose to stay in Afghanistan, The Guardian reported in 2013.
The survivors have stories to tell, either openly or in secret, to obscure the atrocities of a war they were thrown into against their will, and in which they still find it difficult to clarify their true status. Were they heroes, victims or occupiers? Those who returned home as heroes of a dead-end war, the relatives of those who suffered the trauma of seeing their loved ones in the army’s zinc coffins, and the soldiers who made the Afghan desert their second home, faced a painful dilemma. They had to decide whether to keep the war in a mythical framework or to accept it in all its cruelty and infamy.
A three-decade disappearance
The news that Bakhretdin Khakimov was still alive must have come as a shock to his family, who had not seen him since he was an 18-year-old freshly conscripted into the Soviet army. In fact, the good news didn’t even come while his parents were still alive. Had they lived, they would have been surprised by the changes their son had undergone: under a new name, Sheikh Abdullah, he had found his purpose in a semi-nomadic existence, converted to Islam and become so attached to the people and places that had adopted him that he considered himself one of them.
Seriously wounded in one of the battles of the 1980s, he fell into a coma and was captured by Afghan fighters who saved his life. What’s more, one of the mujahideen fighters offered him shelter, a wife and, more recently, a job at the Jihad Museum.
The former Soviet soldier discovered his own truth after surviving a war shrouded in lies. He says he found respect and love among the Afghans, and was even happier than he remembered being in Russia. There are, of course, testimonies from former prisoners who reveal an irreconcilable relationship with the Afghans, who starved them or used them as slaves in their households. Khakimov either omits details of his Afghan experience, or he experienced the generosity and friendliness of some of the locals and extrapolated it to the whole nation.
He has even forgotten his mother tongue, which he now speaks very badly. However, he has not forgotten his family and is moved to tears when he hears his brother’s statements to the press. But his blood ties cannot weaken his determination not to leave his adoptive country, even for a short time. He has a duty to do there: to atone for the wrongs and atrocities of his past, which he does not go into detail about but which have probably haunted him as they have other former combatants. Afghanistan’s political instability is not driving him to Russia either, which he sees as nothing more than a foreign country.
When home is where you’re needed
Alexei Nikolayev, a Moscow-based photographer who specialises in reporting on Russia and the former Soviet republics, went to Afghanistan in 2013 on the trail of six former Soviet soldiers to follow their integration into the country where they had been captured by the mujahideen.
Freed and later converted to Islam, they did not consider it a priority to return home, either because they had already built a new life for themselves or because their country of origin had little to offer heroes who had become unwanted. For each of them, Afghanistan is becoming less the place where the tragedy of an undeclared war was played out and more the country where they have managed to build a new life. One of the well-integrated is Sergei Kransnoperov, who has two jobs, including as an electromechanical technician at the Chaghcharan hydroelectric power station, which provides a more than decent living for his six children.
Ghennadi Tsevma, whose local name is Nekmuhammad, is one of the people living in poverty. Disabled by war, he receives no pension and has no access to proper care, so his earning potential is very limited.
The motherland doesn’t welcome them with open arms either. Some of those who went to Russia after the 1990s have had to return to Afghanistan. “Afghanistan became their home, as Russia could not give them anything,” concludes Nicolaiev.
Ahmad, who was Alexander Levenets, a Soviet soldier thirty years ago, feels the same way: “Who needs me back home?”
In fact, the USSR had answered this rhetorical question long ago, when it was preparing to invade Afghanistan. And the fact that Alexei Nikolayev had to go to Afghanistan to get information about the lives of former prisoners (or deserters), information that the returnees were unwilling to provide, shows that this war was at least as hushed up as it was talked about. For years, only propaganda had an open microphone.
A war that didn’t exist, despite more than a million deaths
Until 1979, Afghanistan was a forgotten country with little to do with the modern world, but the Soviet invasion was to thrust it into the international spotlight, according to the authors of the Encyclopaedia of the States of the World.
The invasion took place against the backdrop of the Cold War and was catalysed by dissent within the Marxist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, which culminated in the assassination of President Nur Muhammad Tarak by Hafizollah Amin. The new leadership favoured rapprochement with the US and China over the USSR—a threat Moscow could not tolerate. Eventually, the situation degenerated into a long and tortuous civil war.
The war, which lasted longer than Soviet strategists had predicted, was a factor in the break-up of the USSR.
Supported by a number of countries—including the US, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt and others—the Islamist mujahideen rebels fought both the atheist regime in Kabul and its ally, the invading Soviet army. The war, which dragged on beyond the predictions of Soviet strategists, was seen by some as a factor in the break-up of the USSR because of the financial burden it placed on the USSR, which was already in an economic crisis.
The USSR’s military intervention in an internal Afghan problem was shrouded in a smokescreen of propaganda. At the meeting of the Political Bureau on 27 December 1979, the document on the propaganda directions of the Afghan issue was approved. Thus, the Soviet Union declared that it had approved military aid at the insistence of the People’s Democratic Party, but only a limited contingent (in fact, more than a million Soviet soldiers had passed through Afghanistan, the newspaper Полит.ру wrote in November 2003) to support the Afghan army in the event of external aggression. The USSR firmly distanced itself from any involvement in the change of leadership (President Amin was assassinated along with his entire family during the invasion) and limited the duration of the Soviet contingent’s presence in Afghanistan to the period when the country was threatened by external aggression.
In the familiar tradition of Soviet propaganda, the only protagonists of the armed conflicts in Afghanistan mentioned in the Russian media were the Afghan military and counter-revolutionary forces, while the Soviet soldiers were assigned the task of international assistance—an ambiguous phrase that suggested their messianic role. The press said nothing about the Soviet soldiers brought home in zinc coffins, nor about the thousands of invalids, but it was full of references to how, despite the attacks of the imperialist mercenaries, Afghanistan was on the blooming road to revolution. Of course, the Soviet soldiers were giving them all the help they could, building schools, wells and roads when they weren’t ploughing the Afghan fields with their own hands.
In effect, the chameleonic nature of the propaganda was illustrated by its willingness to provide each target group with the right motivation—it appealed to patriotism to focus the energy of young recruits, it activated communist consciousness through discourses on American imperialism aimed at suppressing the Afghan revolution, and it argued for Soviet intervention by citing the threat to the USSR’s southern borders.
But the soldiers’ journey into an unfamiliar—and socially, culturally and economically so different—country was described in very different terms by those who returned home. And when it was officially recognised that the war was nothing but a constant waste of money and lives, President Gorbachev began to withdraw troops in an attempt to close the “bleeding wound” that Afghanistan had become.
“If our eyes had been opened earlier…!”
In her courageous book Zinky Boys, Belarusian writer Svetlana Aleksievich collects the shocking testimonies of soldiers who survived the war, and of bereaved families who found themselves with a zinc-lined coffin in place of their loved one…and a few rubles.
Beyond official speeches and heroic news reports, beyond sacrosanct concepts such as internationalist duty, Svetlana Aleksievich looks for the small stories that, she says, bring history down to the level of the individual, making it unbearable to watch.
Mothers who rush to the cemetery “as though they’re meeting someone”, parents who have sold things from their home to ensure a dignified funeral.
The parents of those who never returned have organised their lives around their absence: mothers rush to the cemetery “as though they’re meeting someone”, parents have sold things from their home to ensure a dignified funeral. A wife who goes from police station to police station in search of her husband, paying for the trips with borrowed money because her loved one’s coffin was mistakenly taken to another destination. A father postpones his suicide until he can add to the money he has collected for the wedding of a son he will never see married, the amount needed to secure a marble tombstone.
Those who return home from a war where they have learned that the boundaries of morality are very flexible and depend on the orders of their superiors, often find that they have become unfit for both worlds—the front line and home. Because for some home is more alien to them than the theatre of war, they asked to be sent to other conflict zones after returning home. For some, it was unbearable to adjust to a life in which conflict situations could no longer be resolved with a bullet. For others, the twinges of an awakened conscience were more than they could bear: “If only our eyes had been opened earlier!” lamented one major. And then there are those whose consciences were numbed indefinitely when personal interests were more important than moral values, allowing them, for example, to attack caravans and seize the goods of murdered merchants.
A military counsellor, whose memories of the war are condensed into what he calls a confession, tells of his efforts to forget everything—especially the fact that he, who was incapable of harming a fly, had killed. He tries to forget all the blame heaped on them, on those who had merely carried out orders and whom the public accuses of having blood on their hands. His anger is shared by many of the survivors—they who risked their lives and buried their best years in the hot sands of Afghanistan are the ones footing the bill for a war that the state called heroic for a decade.
“In those days no one had seen the zinc coffins. Later we found out that coffins were already arriving in the town, with the burials being carried out in secret, at night.”
Many of the returnees could have told Bakhretdin Khakimov, their comrade turned true Afghan, that he—not they—made the right choice. Because the country has lied to them more times than they feel they can forgive. Some were lied to when they enlisted, when they weren’t told what they were being trained for, and some weren’t even told they were going to Afghanistan until they were on the plane. Soldiers and civilians were then lied to about the real situation in the conflict zone: “It was war and yet not war, and, in any case, something remote, without bodies or prisoners. In those days no one had seen the zinc coffins. Later we found out that coffins were already arriving in the town, with the burials being carried out in secret, at night.”
And when they return home, even they are forced to present a fictitious version of their experience to those close to them: “We were not allowed to talk about the fallen… We did not shoot, we did not bomb, we did not poison, we did not burn. We are a big, strong army, the best in the world.” (The Bessarabians interviewed by Ion Xenophontov in his extremely well-documented volume The War in Afghanistan [1979-1978] were forced to write to their families, following the instructions for writing and fabricating reality to the extent that they pretended to be on missions in Mongolia or elsewhere in the world).
“I soon realised we were surplus to requirements. We might just as well not have made it—we’re unwanted, an embarrassment”.
The Pravda reports never mentioned the unfulfilled promises of the state to provide housing for repatriated soldiers. Or about the rudimentary prostheses and meagre pensions for the invalids. Just as not a single line has been written about the trauma of Soviet women who volunteered to go to the Afghanistan portrayed by propaganda, only to face death, deprivation and pressure from officers who bribed or threatened to send them to the epicentre of the conflicts in order to persuade them to become their “war wives”. Sometimes even being sent to Afghanistan could be the result of a moral inflexibility that was not at all accepted by their superiors, as Olga Căpăţână, a journalist from Moldova and a former soldier in Afghanistan, recounts in a documentary.
In fact, as a former artilleryman concludes, the war was ultimately lost not in Afghanistan but in his own country when they did not get the rights they were promised and when the medals they won became symbols of shame. Or when the former soldiers, called “Afghans”, realised that home was a territory lost forever and that there was no common language except between them and their old comrades. That the society that had tacitly agreed to send them to Afghanistan was now hostile to them, seeing them as a compromised category.
Echoes of a war that ended three decades ago
The war, especially in the former Soviet space (but not only there), is talked about in triumphalist tones. The small history, with all its tragedies, is swallowed up by the big history and the meanders of militarised thinking. Indeed, in another famous book by the Nobel laureate, the characters speak of the Soviet man’s appetite for heroism (“war and prison are the two main Russian words”), instilled in him by all the instruments of propaganda.
However, the testimonies of those who experienced the frontlines describe a nightmarish experience, coupled with the uneasiness that it can only be presented to public opinion in a heroic light. Aleksievici says in an interview with The Guardian that the protagonists of The Unwomanly Face of War accepted with great difficulty to talk sincerely about their experiences as female soldiers in what the Russians called the Great Patriotic War. “They would say, ‘OK, we’ll tell you, but you have to write it differently, more heroically’.”
It was precisely this heroism that was denied to the soldiers who returned from Afghanistan that led the Sovietologist Nicolas Werth to say that they represented a discontented and marginalised category. And when the heroic aura of their mission faded, all that remained were corrosive memories (“First you shoot, then you find out what it was—a woman or a child”) and a tormented conscience.
The infallible method of burying the truth is to convince even the victims that they played a nobler role than their memories and their own consciences would have them believe.
Had the appetite for truth been as great as the appetite for heroism, things would at least have held out the prospect of healing. But even before democracy took its first steps in the former Soviet space, the old habits of gagging the victims were revived.
And the infallible method of burying the truth is to convince the victims themselves, under the incriminating spotlight of post-Soviet revelations, that they played a nobler role than their memories and their own conscience would have them believe. The play “Zinky Boys”, performed at the Belarusian theatre Yanka Kupala in 1992, was withdrawn from the repertoire after a group of mothers of internationalist soldiers complained to the Belarusian theatre. Former “Afghans” who appear in Svetlana Aleksievich’s book have taken her to court, denying their testimony or accusing the author of distorting it. Members of the Russian Writers’ Union, Belarusian writers who fought in the Second World War and former dissidents have all written to denounce the old ways of a political system that claims to be reforming itself. But it was not only the system but also the people who were contaminated by this long-standing coexistence of truth and lies.
Patriotism has been the pretext for the fight against truth, and what is at stake in this fight is in fact vulnerability to the siren song of ideology. The great tragedies of the past cannot be healed by denying testimony or by repressive legislation. Lawsuits against the writer cannot erase the suffering that shines through the collage of human voices in Zinky Boys, just as the ban in Belarus on her book about the aftermath of Chernobyl will not undo the effects of the nuclear accident. Or just as the law criminalising any criticism of the Soviet army, which put the historian Antonhy Beevor in prison, will not erase the memory of the mass rapes committed by the Red Army in Germany, the subject of his bestseller, The Fall of Berlin.
A war that ended three decades ago can teach us that propagandistic euphemisms cannot restore the life of even one soldier in love with his fiancée or Dostoyevsky.
The truth must be known, whether it is about the Russo-Afghan war, the annexation of Crimea, or the wars in Vietnam or Iraq. There is always a temptation to conceal realities that are damaging to one’s cause, but whatever the good intentions behind the lack of transparency, sooner or later these distortions of the truth have their consequences.
A war that ended three decades ago can teach us that propagandistic euphemisms cannot restore the life of even one soldier in love with his fiancée or Dostoyevsky, or the life of even one little Afghan boy roaming the Kislak in his always-too-big trousers. It can warn us that the bellicose statements of leaders can often be tempered by the truth that a single life represents the whole universe to those who gave birth to it.
Or it can remind us that a shifting line between heroes, victims and killers, whether legitimised or legislated, can plunge us into a chaotic world where irreconcilable values intermingle like colours in a cheap fabric.
Carmen Lăiu is an editor at the Signs of Times Romania and ST Network.