Revolution 1989 (41 page)

THIRTY

Termez, Afghanistan, Wednesday 15 February 1989

 

LIEUTENANT-GENERAL BORIS GROMOV had been given an unenviable task. A trim, handsome and dashing forty-five-year-old, he was the commander of Soviet forces in Afghanistan. His orders were to organise the Red Army’s withdrawal after nearly ten years of futile war in the Afghan hills, but not to make it look like a defeat. Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet high command had repeatedly vowed that Soviet forces would not leave in disarray, as the Americans had done from Vietnam. They could recall the chaotic sight of American helicopters taking off from the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon and demanded that nothing of the kind should happen for the world to see in Kabul. Just a few days before the final troops withdrew, in conversation at the Kremlin with Shevardnadze, the Soviet leader had said that ‘a defeatist position is not permissible. We must not appear before the world in our underpants, or even without any.’
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A retreat is the least satisfying military manoeuvre for a general to make and often the trickiest. Gromov executed the Soviet Union’s final, painful withdrawal from Afghanistan with skill, efficiency and some panache. Under the terms of the Geneva Accords Russian tanks, artillery and soldiers had been on the move along the Salang Highway back to the USSR since the previous May. They were leaving by the same route the invasion force had come, crossing the brackish Amu Darya River over the Soviet-built wrought iron ‘Friendship Bridge’. Gromov, like the 100,000 or so troops he commanded, was glad to be going home. The son of a celebrated Red Army officer who was killed crossing the Dnieper in World War Two, he had a meteoric career. He was a company commander by the age of twenty-four, a full Colonel before he was thirty-five, and a Major-General at thirty-nine. His birthday was 7 November, the holiest day in the Soviet calendar, as it celebrated the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Like so many of the Soviet officer class, Gromov had been a deeply committed Communist. Then, gradually, doubts began to creep in, prompted principally by the Afghanistan conflict. He loathed Afghanistan, which he thought was a backward country undeserving of the benefits socialism could bring. He hated the unwinnable war his political masters had launched without thinking through the consequences. He was now on his third tour of duty there. The first had been in 1980 as a colonel, just after the invasion began. He had been commander of Soviet forces for the last two years. He had seen comrades fall and suffered personal tragedy when his beloved wife was killed in a plane crash in the Carpathian Mountains. He barely had any time to spend with his sons Maksim and Andrei, who were growing up without a parent while he was performing his duty in that pestilential place, Afghanistan.

Unheroic the task may be, but he was determined that there would be an orderly and dignified retreat. Above all he wanted to ensure as few deaths as he could of ‘my boys’. Nearly 15,000 Soviet soldiers, mostly young conscripts, died in vain in a war that he had realised for many years held little strategic value for the Soviet Union and had nothing to do with furthering the cause of communism. More than 53,000 had been wounded. Publicly Gromov bristled at any suggestion that the Soviets had failed in Afghanistan. When troops began returning home last May he declared to journalists: ‘The troop withdrawal is not a defeat. It is the completion of an internationalist mission . . . None of our units, even the smallest one, has ever retreated. That is why there is no talk of a military defeat.’
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Privately, among his aides and select comrades in arms, he acknowledged the truth. That was why he wanted to reduce the number of casualties - at least on the Soviet side. He was still fighting a war, though. He had to protect the convoys of men and matériel heading home from attack by the guerrillas. He ordered Soviet special forces to destroy scores of villages along the main route back to the Soviet Union, along the Salang Highway to Termez. Hundreds of people died in the last few weeks of a conflict that cost more than a million Afghan lives and created more than three million refugees.

Four weeks before the withdrawal deadline, with long columns of Soviet hardware and troops heading towards the Friendship Bridge, Gromov received a message from the Mujahideen leader who controlled the high ground along most of the Soviets’ line of retreat. Ahmad Shah Massoud offered a ceasefire: ‘We have put up with the war and your presence here for ten years now,’ he said. ‘God willing, we will put up with you for a few more more days. But if you begin military action against us, we will give you a worthy response.’ It had a limited effect. Fighting continued between the departing Soviets and other guerrilla groups until the bitter end. The weather took its toll. The convoys were held up by freezing conditions in the mountains. Snow blocked the highway for days at a time. An avalanche killed the last Soviet troops to die in Afghanistan.
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Gromov’s detachment of the Soviet Fortieth Army, 500 troops from the 201st Reconnaissance Division, reached the Friendship Bridge early in the morning on the deadline day agreed in the Geneva Accords. The military mounted an elaborate show to keep up appearances on their side of the border. It was made to look more like a victory parade than the return of an exhausted and defeated army. The small town of Termez was bedecked with bunting and regimental flags. A military band played marching songs. A huge red banner at the point where the troops reached Soviet soil read: ‘The Order of the Motherland has been Fulfilled’. Crowds of veterans’ families were specially flown in and garlanded the troops with flowers. However it was dressed up, though, the retreat from Kabul was a humiliation for the Soviet Union. It was a point carefully considered by East Europeans who dreamed of soon seeing the Red Army leave their own lands.

The last Russian soldier to leave Afghanistan - defying normal military protocol - was Lieutenant-General Boris Vsevolodovich Gromov. He was a flamboyant man with a flair for the dramatic and for public relations opportunities. He had told his men, and reporters, in advance that he would not leave until he knew all his troops were safely in the USSR. His gesture caused trouble with his superiors. When the Minister of Defence, Marshal Dmitri Yazov, heard of Gromov’s intentions he called the General and barked a complaint: ‘Why are you leaving last, and not first, as a commander should?’ Gromov replied: ‘This was my own decision . . . I consider that five and a half years’ service in Afghanistan gives me the right to make a small breach of army traditions.’ The Minister did not respond. At around 9 a.m. Gromov told his driver to go the last few hundred metres across the river ahead of him in another vehicle. He drove his own armoured personnel carrier to the bridge. There, he hopped out and calmly walked into Soviet territory. He turned round briefly, looking back into Afghanistan one final time before he was greeted by a Russian television crew and by his fourteen-year-old son Maksim clutching a fistful of carnations.
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It was not the end of the story of the USSR’s tragic involvement in a land that has a long tradition of defeating foreign invaders. Najibullah knew that he could not survive long in power after the Soviet withdrawal. The Mujahideen controlled four-fifths of the country and were massing for a final assault. They were about to capture the country’s second city, Jalalabad, and preparing to attack Kabul. Early in March, Najibullah bombarded Gorbachev with desperate pleas for help to buy some time. ‘He was imploring us with demands . . . to launch air strikes from Soviet territory - or else in a few days everything would collapse,’ said Chernyaev.

Shevardnadze, and Kryuchkov, who was now head of the KGB, supported the idea. It was a curious call by Shevardnadze, given his opposition to Soviet involvement in the war. But he had met Najibullah several times, including a few weeks earlier when he had assured him that the Soviets would not abandon him completely. He had already told Gorbachev in private that ‘we must recognise we are leaving the country in a lamentable state . . . its towns and villages have been destroyed; the capital is starving’. Now he pleaded with him that they must back Najib and not break their word. ‘It’s the only way,’ he said. ‘Otherwise, it’s treachery . . . We promised and if we don’t we’re deserting friends . . . what will the Third World say?’ Gorbachev put his foot down and nearly lost his temper with his Foreign Minister: ‘No. Absolutely not. I am definitely against all bombings or anything of the kind,’ he said. ‘While I am General Secretary I won’t permit anyone to break the promise we made in front of the whole world [to withdraw]. Didn’t we know what we are doing when we decided to withdraw our troops? There won’t be any other answer than a refusal to drop any bombs.’ Now the Soviets’ long agony in Afghanistan was over.
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THIRTY-ONE

The Kremlin, Friday 3 March 1989

 

THE HUNGARIAN PRIME MINISTER, Miklós Németh, was tense and worried as he entered Gorbachev’s office soon after 10 a.m. He knew the Soviet leader reasonably well from Gorbachev’s visits to Budapest. He liked and admired him enormously. Yet he was apprehensive about the reaction he would receive to the momentous news he was about to relay. The youthful-looking Németh told him that the Hungarians planned to tear down the 300 kilometres of barbed wire and electronic fences that comprised Hungary’s border with Austria. ‘It has outlived its usefulness and only serves to stop citizens of the GDR and Romania who try to escape illegally to the West,’ he said. Gorbachev was entirely unfazed. For more than forty years the Iron Curtain had been the most powerful symbol of Soviet strength and of the extent of its European empire. It was the stark physical reminder of continuing ideological battles between East and West. Now a Hungarian Prime Minister was proposing, here in the Kremlin, to tear down this barrier that had been considered so vital to Soviet interests. Not so long ago his predecessors would have treated the Magyar as a colonial upstart and had him sent to the Lubyanka or running a saltworks. Gorbachev knew how significant this moment was. But he barely reacted. Still, Németh was cautious, expecting a further response. He said ‘that of course we will have to talk to comrades’ elsewhere in the Warsaw Pact. Gorbachev, as Németh later recalled, just looked distractedly at him and said: ‘We have a strict regime on our borders, but we are also becoming more open.’
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In Hungary the Iron Curtain had been corroding for a long time and was now beginning to fall apart. In the 1950s and 1960s there had been minefields on the Eastern side. They were removed in the mid- 1960s, leaving a wire with a low-tension current that was constantly going wrong and sending regular false alarms. As Gyula Kovács, head of the border guard command, said, the fence had become an embarrassment. His men spent a lot of their time chasing animals, but they had to make checks every time an alarm sounded. ‘Usually an animal triggered it off,’ Kovács said. ‘But the soldiers in the response units would only know later and could tell only from footprints. Sometimes it was a hare, sometimes a pheasant or a deer. In one case it was a bear. We were surprised by that as [we thought] there were no bears in Hungary.’
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At the end of the previous year the Interior Minister, István Horváth, suggested to Németh that the fences be dismantled - for reasons partly symbolic, partly practical. ‘It was costing millions to maintain . . . and for what?’ he said. Hungarians had been allowed to travel freely for a number of years and by 1989 six million a year were going abroad, mainly to the West. More than twenty-five million tourists were entering Hungary. ‘Every year we had between 200 and 250 cases of foreigners trying to cross illegally, while the maximum number of Hungarians is ten a year,’ Horváth said. ‘These were drunks, children with bad school reports and husbands sneaking away from their wives. With such a huge legal traffic, what was the point of catching this handful?’
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The economist Németh, who subsequently became a banker, knew it would cost upwards of US$ 50 million to revamp the fence and make it effective. It was money Hungary did not possess. ‘I decided that we did not want to spend this money for this end,’ he said. If Gorbachev had ordered the Hungarians to rebuild the fence, Németh would reluctantly have agreed to go along with it. He was amazed by Gorbachev’s insouciance. He dropped what a year or so earlier would have been another bombshell. Németh predicted that, following the Hungarian government’s decision a few weeks earlier to legalise all political parties, there would almost certainly be free elections in Hungary quite soon. The Hungarian Communists would offer Polish-type Round Table talks with the opposition, starting in June. How would the Soviets react? ‘I don’t know when we will have these elections,’ Németh told him. ‘But as you have 80,000 troops stationed in our country, and bearing in mind the experience of 1956 . . . would you repeat what you did then?’ Gorbachev, looking intently at the Hungarian, replied in an instant: ‘I don’t agree with the multi-party system . . . or with the introduction of a multi-party system in Hungary. But that’s not my responsibility. That is up to you. But you can be certain that there would be no instruction or order from us to crush it.’

The Soviet leader had an equally remarkable interview later the same day with the Hungarian Communist Party chief, Károly Grósz, who in private asked him to remove all nuclear weapons from Hun garian soil. These were the missiles that Grósz did not even know were based in his country until after he had succeeded Kádár as General Secretary. Gorbachev agreed at once. Grósz was surprised and tried to push further. ‘To reinforce the Party’s legitimacy with the people, and to distance us from the memories of 1956, I put it to you that all Soviet troops should leave Hungary.’ Gorbachev said they would - and soon - but he wanted to try negotiating with the Americans first to obtain an agreement for troop reductions in Nato at the same time. But even if he did not get one, Soviet troops would withdraw from Hungary. ‘It is not in the West’s interest to have instability in Hungary. I am not concerned they will interfere. I will do everything that is compatible with . . . preserving stability.’ As an earnest of Soviet intent, more than 500 tanks and 5,000 troops were withdrawn from Hungary within three weeks of their meeting. Grósz said later that he was dumbfounded. ‘Every time I asked Gorbachev for something that I believed would be very . . . delicate from the standpoint of Soviet interests, he always said yes,’ said Grósz. ‘I came to the conclusion that he and Shevardnadze had in mind a plan to disengage the Soviet Union entirely from Eastern Europe.’
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