Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89 by Rodric Braithwaite - review | Books | The Guardian

• • Saturday 26 March 2011

  • Article history

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 was roundly denounced by western governments caught completely unaware during their Christmas break. The US and UK responded first with overblown rhetoric, then by helping to fund and arm mujahideen guerrillas, unleashing forces that would lead to the 9/11 attacks on the US and a "war on terror" that, from the perspective of governments in Washington and London, is far from over.

1. Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979–89

2. by

   Rodric Braithwaite

3. 
   
4. Buy it from the Guardian bookshop

Some 20 years after that fateful invasion, Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security adviser at the time, was asked whether he regretted "having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists". He replied: "What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of central Europe and the end of the cold war?"

In his enlightening and refreshing book, largely based on Russian sources, Rodric Braithwaite, the British ambassador in Moscow at the time of the Soviet Union's collapse, recalls how, a month before Soviet troops poured into Afghanistan, a Foreign Office official wondered: "Wouldn't we be better off with a socialist regime rather than a reactionary Islamic type . . . ?"

A month after the invasion, in January 1980, the author describes how a visiting Soviet minister was given a historical account of Britain's failures in Afghanistan. "This time it will be different," the Russian replied. As people do, Braithwaite observes, "when they set out to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors".

Soviet troops went in expecting to be out in months and without having to fire many shots. Moscow had no plans for them to stay, despite claims made in the west. Within weeks of sending the troops in, the politburo was discussing how to get them out again. The parallels with later British and American missions and misperceptions are inescapable. Braithwaite notes that after the 9/11 attacks, President Putin was the first foreign leader to express his condolences to Bush and told his officials to hand over "a good deal of intelligence, including minefield maps" of Afghanistan. For years Moscow had been concerned about the drugs trade and influence of Islam – concerns that only later would capture the attention of capitals in the west.

The value of Afgantsy – the name given to Russian veterans of Afghanistan – lies in the (mainly) sympathetic personal anecdotes and the pictures the author paints of the conditions in which Soviet troops, many of them conscripts, had to survive and fight. Braithwaite describes how public opinion in the Soviet Union soon turned against the war. Ordinary people wrote letters to state and party institutions and newspapers. Most were from mothers whose sons had been killed, were serving in Afghanistan or were about to be called up.

The mothers' movement thus became one of the first effective civil rights movements in the Soviet Union, the author notes, and it gained strength under Gorbachev. A symbol during what became Russia's long goodbye to Afghanistan was the "Black Tulip", the four-engined cargo plane that brought home the dead soldiers.

He describes how sometimes it was difficult to identify the dead. A half-trained army medic tells of being taken to a regimental morgue where, "inside, two soldiers, completely drunk, were picking through a pile of body parts". On the last day of the war, 15 February 1989, the Soviet army had still not fully accounted for 333 soldiers who had gone missing in Afghanistan. Some of the soldiers who did return joined those who had come home from Eastern Europe to "poverty-stricken chaos" after the collapse of the Berlin wall. Many had nowhere to live.

This is the other side of history. Braithwaite draws comparisons with the Vietnam war. The failures were not military, but of intelligence and judgment – as they continue to be for British and American forces in Afghanistan. More than 15,000 Soviet soldiers died there, and probably more than a million Afghan civilians. Foreign troops continue to die in Afghanistan, but many more Afghans – most of them, according to the UN, at the hands of the Taliban.