Down with Big Brother (39 page)

III

REVOLT
OF THE NATIONS

Where the Russian flag has once been hoisted, it cannot be lowered
.

Nicholas I, 1850

Comrades, we have every right to say that we have solved the nationality question in this country
.

Mikhail Gorbachev, November 1987

TERMEZ
February 15, 1989

M
IKHAIL
G
ORBACHEV REMEMBERED
the pictures of American helicopters lifting off from the rooftop of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, with marines pushing away Vietnamese citizens as they tried desperately to clamber aboard. It would be a “shame,” he told his aides, if Soviet troops were to “run away” from Afghanistan as the Americans had done in Vietnam.
¹
He wanted the Red Army’s withdrawal from Afghanistan to be orderly and dignified, in keeping with the Soviet Union’s superpower status.

In accordance with Gorbachev’s wishes, everything possible was done to create the illusion that the Red Army had “fulfilled its internationalist duty.” As column after column of tanks and armored cars swept across the “Friendship Bridge” spanning the muddy Amu Darya River—the ancient Oxus—a military band struck up a patriotic march. Regimental standards fluttered proudly in the breeze. Battle-hardened veterans, their faces bronzed in the Afghan sun, were showered with kisses and carnations by relieved relatives. Everyone seemed to be wearing a medal of some kind. “The Order of the Motherland Has Been Fulfilled,” proclaimed a red banner strung up across a makeshift parade ground.

The patriotic slogans and parade ground hurrahs could not, however, conceal the bitterness felt by many of the returning troops over a futile nine-year
war. As they crossed back into Soviet territory, commanders spoke contemptuously about the politicians who had sent them to Afghanistan and the Communist regime they had attempted to defend.

“It’s like the Middle Ages there,” said a
spetsnaz
colonel, gesturing in the direction of the country he had just left. “The Afghan people were simply not prepared for a socialist revolution.”

“It was a tragedy,” acknowledged another veteran. “We helped a government that did not have the support of the Afghan people.”
²

Although the Geneva accords provided for the complete withdrawal of Soviet troops by February 15, 1989, there had been considerable skepticism in Western capitals about whether Gorbachev would keep his promise. From the time of Peter the Great Russian history had been one of almost continuous expansion, interrupted by the occasional foreign invasion and domestic cataclysm. Over the course of several centuries Russian rulers had succeeded in establishing their dominance over much of the Eurasian landmass, an area inhabited by more than a hundred ethnic groups. To hang on to these vast territories, Russia had to convince its many enemies that retreat was out of the question. If it started abandoning colonial outposts, however obscure and however costly to defend, its credibility as a great power would be called into question.

The Russian territorial doctrine was succinctly expressed by Tsar Nicholas I in 1850, after one of his naval officers had seized some territory belonging to China along the Amur River. The officer had acted on his own initiative, without orders from St. Petersburg, and some of the tsar’s advisers were in favor of surrendering the territory, which had little strategic value. But Nicholas saw things differently. “Where the Russian flag has once been hoisted, it cannot be lowered,” he declared. The tsar’s stubbornness and inflexibility produced the desired impression on foreign rulers. “The Russian policy of aggression is slow and steady, but firm and unchangeable,” noted the emir of Afghanistan some thirty years later. “If once they make up their minds to do a thing, there is no stopping them, and no changing their policy.”
³

The Bolsheviks followed a similar territorial doctrine to the tsars, although they dressed it up in Marxist-Leninist language. Two years after the invasion, in 1982,
Pravda
described the Afghan Revolution as “irreversible because it is a people’s revolution, and because it enjoys the support and solidarity of the Soviet Union.”
⁴
Soviet leaders had an additional reason for wanting to retain what amounted to the world’s last great colonial empire. Together with victory over Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War, the
existence of a steadily expanding network of client states was the major accomplishment of the Soviet regime. Here was concrete proof that communism was on the move, ideological justification for decades of economic hardship and political repression. Soviet citizens might live in penury and squalor, but history was on their side. Sooner or later communism would triumph throughout the world.

It was this doctrine—the doctrine of the irreversibility of history—that was being undermined by the withdrawal from Afghanistan. If the forces of socialism were defeated in Afghanistan, the Kremlin would find it difficult to hold on to places like Nicaragua, Ethiopia, and Poland.

I
T TOOK
L
IEUTENANT
G
ENERAL
B
ORIS
G
ROMOV
, the last Soviet commander in Afghanistan, a week to make the three-hundred-mile drive along the mountainous Salang Highway from Kabul to Termez. This was the same route that the Soviets had used to invade the country nine years earlier. An outpost founded by Alexander the Great and sacked by Genghis Khan, Termez had been incorporated into the tsarist empire in the late nineteenth century, during the great thrust to the south. The springboard for the Russian conquest of Afghanistan had become the main reentry point for Soviet troops returning home.

The long convoys of Soviet military vehicles proceeded cautiously, knowing they could be ambushed by the guerrilla fighters who now controlled more than four-fifths of Afghanistan. To protect the highway from sudden attack, Soviet special forces had systematically destroyed hundreds of Afghan villages perched in the towering mountains on either side of the road. Everywhere they looked, the retreating troops could see the detritus of a war that had cost the lives of fifteen thousand of their own comrades and more than a million Afghans. They drove past roofless mud-brick houses, bullet-splattered walls, and fields of forlorn tree stumps that had once been luxuriant orchards. Rusting carcasses of bombed-out tanks and the twisted wreckage of army trucks littered the sides of the highway.

A month before his departure from Kabul, Gromov had received a message from the Afghan guerrilla commander who controlled the heights around the Salang Highway, Ahmad Shah Massoud. “We have put up with war and your presence in our country for nearly ten years now,” the missive read. “God willing, we will put up with you for a few more days. But if you begin military action against us, we will give you a worthy response.” Despite Massoud’s offer of a cease-fire, skirmishes had broken out between the
mujahedin and the departing Soviet troops. In retaliation, Gromov had launched Operation Typhoon. In its last military action in Afghanistan, the Red Army carried out more than a thousand helicopter attacks against suspected mujahedin positions in the Salang area and blasted their supply bases with long-range missiles.
⁵

The rest of the withdrawal proceeded smoothly enough. The weather proved more troublesome for the Soviets than the mujahedin, who refrained from harassing their enemies on their way out. Several soldiers were killed in avalanches that had blocked the eleven-thousand-foot-high Salang Pass for days at a time. The Fortieth Army reached the border without further losses.

Gromov spent his last night in Afghanistan in the town of Khairaton, on the southern side of the “Friendship Bridge.” Like his men, he was immensely relieved to be going home. He had spent nearly six years in Afghanistan, on three separate tours of duty, and had little illusion about the ability of Najibullah’s Afghan regime to survive without Soviet assistance. For nearly a decade the Afghan Communists had manipulated the Soviets into waging war on their behalf. In theory the Soviet “internationalist” fighters had been defending the “cause of socialism.” In practice, Gromov realized, they had been defending an unpopular government from its domestic opponents. They had failed to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. The leaders the Soviets had helped install and keep in power were inept, corrupt, and entirely dependent on foreign assistance.
⁶

Gromov had had a difficult time explaining to his men what they were doing in Afghanistan. The standard formula—“fulfilling their internationalist duty”—was no longer adequate. Until Gorbachev came to power, the Soviet Union had refused to acknowledge it was fighting a war in Afghanistan. Instead of being hailed as heroes on their return home Afghan war veterans were treated like pariahs. The motherland seemed ashamed of them and was reluctant to acknowledge their sacrifices. It soon became clear to Gromov that he and his men were in an unwinnable war. In this situation it was his duty to reduce Soviet combat losses to a minimum. This was the goal he had set for himself following his appointment as commander of the Soviet “limited contingent” in Afghanistan in 1987.
⁷

As he made a final tour of inspection of the Soviet military barracks at Khairaton, Gromov was sickened by the sight of warehouses overflowing with hundreds of thousands of tons of food and building materials. It was not just human lives that had been squandered in Afghanistan. The war had disrupted the Soviet economy, absorbing resources and contributing to
widespread shortages of ordinary household items. In a few hours’ time these huge stockpiles of sugar, flour, cement, and roof tile would be handed over to the Afghan army. Gromov knew from bitter experience what would happen next. A few weeks before, Afghan soldiers had ransacked the Soviet military barracks in the southern city of Jalalabad, carrying away everything from television sets and air conditioners to beds and doorframes. Many of the stolen items quickly ended up on the black market.
⁸

Gromov had promised himself that he would be the last Soviet soldier to leave Afghanistan. He told journalists he would walk alone across the “Friendship Bridge,” once he knew all his men were safely on Soviet territory. As he crossed the border, he would turn back in the direction of Afghanistan and “say what needed to be said.” When word of his intention reached Moscow, it caused some alarm at the Defense Ministry, which did not appreciate flamboyant gestures by independently minded combat generals.

“Why are you leaving last, and not first, as a commander should?” growled the defense minister, Dmitri Yazov, when he finally reached Gromov over a secure Kremlin telephone line in Khairaton.

“This was my own decision as the commander of the army,” the forty-six-year-old general replied. “I consider that five and a half years’ service in Afghanistan gives me the right to make a small breach of army tradition.”
⁹

Yazov grunted but said nothing.

F
OR
G
ROMOV, THE WAR WAS ENDING
as it began, in a shameful silence. He resented the fact that neither Gorbachev nor any other Soviet leader could be bothered to come to Termez to welcome the troops home. Even the defense minister and his deputies had chosen to avoid the ceremonies, which were being presided over by low-level officials from the republic of Uzbekistan. In effect his troops had been left to organize their own homecoming. Moscow had rejected his repeated pleas to follow tradition and award the Fortieth Army a collective medal for its service in Afghanistan. It was as if the Politburo wanted to wash its hands of the whole Afghanistan adventure, Gromov thought, and put the blame on the soldiers who had carried out the orders of their political superiors.

He lay awake most of the night, thinking about what he had seen and done since he first arrived in Afghanistan in January 1980, a month after the invasion. A sense of emptiness and betrayal overwhelmed him. Despite winning every set-piece battle they had fought with the mujahedin, his troops
had lost the war because they lacked the necessary political support from the Afghan people. In Gromov’s view, the Soviet Union had suffered a political rather than a military defeat. But it was a defeat nonetheless. The consequences of such a shattering setback were impossible to predict. The future—for both the country and the army—was clouded with uncertainty.

Gromov also thought about the price his own family had paid while he was waging war. During his second tour of duty in Afghanistan his wife had been killed in an air crash. His two sons, Maksim and Andrei, had grown up without a father or a mother. He had been away from home long enough.