╥You remember that mother who lost her son. She kept repeating, ╘He fulfilled his duty to the end. He fulfilled his duty to the end.╒ That╒s the most tragic thing. What duty? I suppose that╒s what saves her, her notion of duty. She hasn╒t yet realised that it was all a ridiculous mistake. I╒m putting it mildly. If she realised, if she opened her eyes to our whole Afghan thing, she╒d probably find it hard to hold out.╙
Igor has been back from the war for more than three years now. He lives in the industrial town of Lyubertsi, on the outer edge of Moscow, a shapeless collection of high-rise blocks of flats and building sites, distinguised by nothing but the reflected glory of an authentic hero, the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, who once studied at the local technical institute. A small monument stands by the door.
Igor and his friends want to build their own monument in Lyubertsi. They formed a club last May which now has about 25 members, plus another 40 who sympathise. One aim is to persuade the local authorities to put up something in the town╒s park which will commemorate the boys who served and died in Afghanistan. Another is to put on pressure for better veterans╒ benefits, proper psychiatric help and artifical limbs for those who were wounded for life.
I first met Igor, who is training to be a journalist, at a weird encounter between his group and a party of American Vietnam veterans which was hosted by an archbishop of the Russian Orthodox church. The Americans had come to Moscow with offers of help in supplying prostheses. The Vietnam vets were 15 years older. Not many on either side spoke each other╒s language. Yet they all said they felt an immediate wordless rapport. The sense of having fought a remote, pointless war, which those who were not there could never understand, brought them together.
That was last September. Since then I have seen the Afghan vets twice more. One evening they came round and watched a video of Peter Kuzminski╒s documentary on Afghan vets for Yorkshire television, which was shown in Britain last year. It was by far the best thing they have seen on the war, they said, fuller, more human, less sensational than an Italian one which someone showed them and the few things that have appeared on Soviet TV.
They all feel the war was a mistake, if not a disaster. Yet as the last Soviet troops pull out of Afghanistan to the relief and delight of everyone you meet here, the view that the war was pointless is not as widely shared as you might believe. ╥Thank God, our boys are safe,╙ is as far as many Soviet citizens want to think. Not everyone wants to reflect on why they were there.
Leonid is a professional army officer. He stayed in the service in spite of his views on the war in Afghanistan. ╥While you╒re there, you think you╒re fulling your duty. Your motherland sent you. Many people stay like that. Actually, you still feel that, but over and above it you wonder what the point was.'
Some of the Afghantsy, as the veterans are called, say their first glimmerings came when they realised how little contact they had with real Afghans, the people they were supposed to be helping. Yuri explains: ╥Mainly our contact was with kids in the villages we went through. They were always running some kind of little business. Swapping stuff, selling stuff. Sometimes drugs. It was very cheap. You felt the aim was to get us hooked. There was not much contact with Afghan adults, except with the sarandoy, the police.╙
They admit they were very green when they arrived in Afghanistan. ╥The first thing which surprised me was the countryside, the Asian moon, the stars. I felt like a tourist with wide-open eyes. We don╒t have the same chance to travel like you. It was exciting,╙ says Igor.
The simplest things were not explained. ╥The army is huge. Labour is cheap. They do what they like,╙ Igor goes on. ╥Many 18-year-olds lost their fingers. They were not told properly about grenades. They never trained us properly. They just said the Afghans were different people and had a different climate. They gave us a small bit of paper, telling us what not to do, and a little dictionary. That was it. ╘Don╒t fraternise. Don╒t look at women. Don╒t go into mosques.╒
They may not have known much, but many had an inkling that it was not going to be fun. ╥I remember one paradoxical thing,╙ Leonid recalls. ╥Everyone knew I was in Afghanistan except my mother. My father, my brother, cousins, everyone. I wrote to a friend who passed my news on to them. I wrote a separate letter to my mother, telling her I was in Mongolia. Mongolians are very nice people, I told her. The countryside is lovely. Everything is fine.╙
The Afghantsy say they knew less about the war in the beginning than the Vietnam vets. It was local, and the rest of the country had no idea what was going on. ╥I suppose the Vietnam vets felt the same. But they had publicity about it from the first day, unlike us.╙ Soldiers who died could not have Afghanistan mentioned on their tombstones at the beginning. The special decree which Brezhnev╒s successor, Yuri Andropov, brought in, in 1983, to give veterans benefits and special housing rights was not published, which is why the local authorities often ignore it. Glasnost on the war came very slowly.
Igor and his friends are suspicious of the official Soviet death toll of close to 15,000 dead. Lyubertsi, with a population of 180,000, lost 23 boys. As a proportion of the total Soviet population, that should produce a total of 27,000 dead. But they do not consider the Afghan war to have been a defeat. ╥You see the proportion of casualties,╙ Yuri said. ╥Fifteen thousand of ours dead, or 27,000, and one million Afghans. It╒s hard to understand. If we had sent more men in, it would have been outright occupation or genocide. We thought it was better to leave.╙
