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Sunday 30 December 2018

The Beginning of the Soviet Afghan War




Link https://youtu.be/72-mBdZEfjs

In late December 1979, the world held its breath as thousands of Soviet troops were sent into Afghanistan. Moscow said the troops would be there six months, to help bring peace to the country. In fact the Soviet army stayed almost ten years, and Afghanistan came to be seen as the Soviet Union's Vietnam. Louise Hidalgo has been talking to journalist Andrei Ostalski and former soldier Vyacheslav Ismailov about that time.
Transcript

Louise Hidalgo:

Hello and welcome to the Witness podcast here on the BBC World Service with me Louise Hidalgo, and today I’m taking you back to late December 1979, when the world held its breath as the Soviet Union sent its army into Afghanistan to prop up the Communist led government. Moscow said the troops would stay six months, in the end they stayed nearly ten years. And Afghanistan will become the Soviet Union’s Vietnam.

Vyacheslav Ismailov who served in Afghanistan as a soldier and journalist Andrei Ostalski have been remembering that time.

[Music, Black Tulip* performed by Rozenbaum]

lyrics:

In Afghanistan, in the Black Tulip,

With a glass of vodka, we silently fly over the land.

Across the border, the sorrowful bird carries

Our guys home, to Russian summer lightnings.

In the black tulip, the guys who were on a mission

Fly to dear motherland for rest in peace.

Being torn to shreds, they have gone forever,

They can never hug warm shoulders.

When our tulip was falling down at an angle to the oases of Jellalabad,

We all damned our job.

Again one guy died and failed his company.

In Shindad, Kandagar, and Bagram,

We will again put a heavy stone on our souls,

We will again carry the heroes to motherland

They are 20 years old heroes for which people dig graves,

They are 20 years old heroes for which people dig graves.

But we must climb and find the strength,

If we make an error, we can be shot down here,

The mountains shoot us, a "Stinger" missile takes off,

If the enemy shoots down us, the guys will die a second time.

We fly here differently than in our motherland,

Where there is no war, and everything is familiar for a long time,



Where pilots see bodies of dead soldiers only once a year,

Where nobody shoots down helicopters from the clouds,

And we fly, clenched teeth from the anger,

Wetting our lips with vodka.

Many caravans go here from Pakistan,

It means that there is a job for the tulip,

Yes, there is a job for the tulip.



In Afganistan, in the black tulip,

With a glass of vodka, we silently fly over the land.

Across the border, the sorrowful bird carries

Our brothers home, to Russian summer lightnings.



When our tulip was falling down at an angle to the oases of Jellalabad,

We all damned our job.

Again one guy died and failed his company.

In Shindad, Kandagar, and Bagram,

We will again put a heavy stone on our souls,

We will again carry the heroes to motherland

They are 20 years old heroes for which people dig graves,

They are 20 years old heroes for which people dig graves.

*Black Tulip is a nickname for the Antonov 12 cargo plane that was used heavily during the war to transport men and materials.



Andrei Ostalski:

I was taking my things to go home after my evening shift when I was summoned by the Task Director General Mr. Sergei Losev.

Louise Hidalgo:

It was late on December the 24th Andrei Ostalski was in the Moscow headquarters of TASS the official Soviet News Agency when his boss got a call from the Kremlin.

Andrei Ostalski:

And he told me in great confidence that in a few hours’ time the Soviet troops would enter Afghanistan and then big military operation in support of the Kabul government would start.

Louise Hidalgo:

And he ordered you to stay at the office that night, didn’t he? You couldn’t tell anyone, you had to collate all the reaction that was coming in from abroad. But you were really quite junior at the time weren’t you to have access to news like that?

Andrei Ostalski:

Yes, so I was astonished to learn much later from the memoirs of the Chief analyst of the KGB Foreign Intelligence Service that even he was taken totally by surprise.

Louise Hidalgo:

That night, the next day and the following day December the 26th thousands of Soviet troops entered Afghanistan.

[American archive news report from 1979]

For the past two days some 200 Soviet air transports, the large Antonov 22 and the smaller Antonov 12 literally poured into Kabul.

Louise Hidalgo:

Far away in the Soviet Republic of Dagestan a young teacher heard the short official announcement. His name was Vyacheslav Ismailov.

Vyacheslav Ismailov:

The Soviet Army always seemed to be fighting somewhere and there was so little information. I just remember we were told we were helping these people, the Afghans, and our soldiers would be defending them against bandits – that’s what we called them. And they were going to rebuild schools and hospitals, and roads. There was no mention of military operations.

Louise Hidalgo:

Back in Moscow meanwhile at TASS Andrei Ostalski had been temporarily put in charge of the Afghan news desk as the agency scrambled to find experts who spoke the Afghan languages Dari and Pashto.

And you had this hierarchy of information didn’t you at TASS? There was the uncensored news that wasn’t for public consumption of course but you’d send it to the Politburo and other senior officials. And one day they asked you to go and brief these local party officials, didn’t they?

Andrei Ostalski:

Yes, yes I was telling them that Hafizullah Amin the Afghanistan’s President who was murdered by the Soviet commanders, and then the Soviet Union started supporting the minority faction inside this minority. Led by an alcoholic KGB agent called Babrak Karmal, so the USSR was relying on this minority in one of the most troublesome countries in the world.

Louise Hidalgo:

So, you told the party officials this, and their reaction wasn’t quite what you expected was it?


The audience was totally shocked. Because it contradicted everything they were reading in the Soviet newspapers. So, they started jeering and heckling and I had to cut my talk short, and I was scared. I ran, I physically ran back to TASS to ask to see my bosses and said I am afraid they will denounce me and you will sack me or maybe I will be arrested, well I was totally panicking. But they said ok we’ll try to do what we can and they did.

But they didn’t want to know the truth, the Soviet leader also didn’t want to know it. That was a learning curve I must say.

Louise Hidalgo:

The war ground on. Six months turned into a year, then two, then four. Afghanistan had become a Cold War battleground with Moscow and America fighting through their proxies, flooding the country with weaponry. By 1985 the Soviet Union had a new leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who was beginning to realise it was a lost cause. And it was getting harder to hide the body bags bringing home dead Soviet soldiers.

That year Vyacheslav Ismailov who joined the army a few years earlier was sent to Afghanistan.

Vyacheslav Ismailov:

We flew to Kabul which I remember being very dirty and then to Shindad Air base in the west where we were based. When we arrived we were given a lecture by one of the senior officers and afterwards when we were having a smoke he said `You know, the way we’re fighting, this war is going to be going on when our children, our grandchildren are old enough to fight.`

That was when I began to understand it was going badly and it was so different from everything we’ve been told.

Louise Hidalgo:

The next day Vyacheslav was travelling in a military convoy when they passed an Afghan driving a truck loaded with watermelons.

Vyacheslav Ismailov:

One of our officers stopped the man and commandeered the van and started throwing all the watermelons out to our soldiers, ten, twenty, thirty. And the Afghan was sitting there shaking saying `Please, please, this is my livelihood, that’s enough`.

And I remember thinking we’re not bringing peace to this place we’re occupiers, this is how occupiers behave.

Louise Hidalgo:

Your Battalion wasn’t in a combat role, it’s job was to take supplies from the airbase at Shindad down through the mountains and the desert 400 Kilometres to Afghanistan’s second city Kandahar. Tell me about that Journey.

Vyacheslav Ismailov:

We’d set off at first light, we weren’t allowed to travel by night although sometimes we had too. The hardest was the third day going into Kandahar, that was the most treacherous part, they were waiting for us. There was a grain store and once you got past that the gunfire started, it was like a firing zone.

Our forces in Kandahar tried to cover us but sometimes we got hit, then we’d have a day’s rest and we’d set off again.

Louise Hidlago:

What was the most difficult thing?

Vyacheslav Ismailov:

Oh, it’s hard to say, it was on top of you all the time, I was in charge of four hundred men; young 18, 19-year olds you have to feed them, you have to look after them when they’re wounded, make sure their weapons are working properly. You’re just thinking about them all the time.

Louise Hidalgo:

But you knew what was going on didn’t you? Villages were being bombed, civilians killed, you know fields and valleys were being mined.

Vyacheslav Ismailov:

Of course, I knew. I knew when our forces hit a column of Afghans, it was like when the Americans hit the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia. You know, we did the same, our planes dropped bombs on hospitals, on villages it was collateral damage. Some days they wouldn’t let us out of Kandahar for two or three days and all the roads were closed because the planes were bombing. But what can you do? It’s a war, we started it we had to see it through.

Louise Hidalgo:

The hardest thing he had to bear was the fact that one in four of the Soviet soldiers killed in Afghanistan weren’t killed by enemy fire, the were killed by their own side. Or they took their own life.

Vyacheslav Ismailov:

Or it was fights that ended badly, or it was pilots going out drunk and crashing their planes or colliding with another plane. Our leaders were always talking about our achievements and our heroism but really, we were our own worst enemy.

Louise Hidalgo:

And suicide, you mention the high rate of suicides. Did any of your men take their own life?

Vyacheslav Ismailov:

There was one instance of suicide under my watch. We were on our way to Kandahar and a young lad was with us and he went AWOL. We found his weapon, he’d left it behind but he’d taken a few grenades, and the following morning we found his body, ripped apart. And a note, I still remember every word, and it’s more than 30 years ago.

“I’m a coward, people like me don’t deserve to live. Please tell my mother that I died a hero.”
He was 18.

Louise Hidalgo:

The last Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan in February 1989. 15,000 Soviet soldiers and 1 Million Afghans had died. Two years later the Soviet Union dissolved. Vyacheslav Ismailov is today a military analyst for the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta. Andrei Ostalski went on to work for the newspaper Izvestia and then the BBC, to day he lives in the south of England.

Both were talking to me Louise Hidalgo for Witness.


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