Zinky Boys (29 page)

‘Now you just listen to me! I'm fed up with the whole damn thing! Why is it that whenever you write about girls who went to Afghanistan you always make us out to be prostitutes? I don't deny that some of them were, but not all. It makes me want to scream! Why should we all be tarred with the same brush? Take the trouble to look inside us and you'll find some very tormented souls.

‘For a year and a half after I got home I couldn't sleep at night; if I did doze off my dreams were full of bodies and shelling, and I woke up in a panic. I went to see a psychiatrist, not to ask for sick leave, just for some tablets or even a bit of advice. His response was, “Did you really see a lot of corpses?” God, I wanted to slap his silly young face! I haven't bothered with any more doctors.

‘This feeling that I don't want to go on living gets stronger with every passing day. I have no desire to meet anyone or see anything but because of our wretched housing shortage there's nowhere to escape to. I don't want or need anything for myself, but do try to do something for the ones asking for your help.

‘The same thing's happening to all the people I've kept in touch with from my time over there. All the same, I don't trust what you're saying. You're trying to convince us that we were cruel — but do you realise how cruel you yourself, and your society, have been?

‘I won't mention my name. Take it that I'm already dead.'

‘You want me to accept that it was a sick generation that came back from the war, but I prefer to see it as the generation whose eyes were opened. At least we found out who our real friends were. Yes, of course young boys were killed, but who knows how many of them might have died in drunken brawls and knife-fights anyway? I read somewhere (I can't remember the exact statistics) that more people die in car accidents every year in this country than were killed in ten years of war. The army hadn't had a real war to fight for a long time and this was a chance to test ourselves and our latest weapons. Those boys were heroes, every one of them, but it's because of people like you that we're now in retreat on all fronts. We've lost Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia. What's happened to our Empire? Is this what I fought all through the war for, right up to Berlin in 1945?'

‘We want justice for ourselves. Just recently I've begun to wonder how we've developed this acute sense of justice after coming back from a war where there was none. Don't mention my surname if you print this — I don't want any funny looks from the people round me.'

‘Why all this talk of mistakes? And do you really think all these exposes and revelations in the press are a help? You're depriving our youth of their heroic heritage. People are killed out there and you go on talking about mistakes. I suppose the real heroes aren't the boys being pushed around in wheelchairs by their mothers or
wearing artificial legs under their jeans, but the ones who broke their legs in motorbike crashes so as not to go into the army, or deserted to the enemy?'

‘I was on holiday by the Black Sea and saw a few young lads crawling over the sand to get to the water. I didn't go to the beach any more, I'd just have started crying. They were laughing and trying to flirt with us girls but we all ran away from them. Yes, I did, too. I want those boys to be happy, to know that we value them even the way they are. They want to live! I love them because they're alive!'

‘My only son was killed there. The only comfort I had was that I'd raised a hero, but according to you he wasn't a hero at all, but a murderer and aggressor. Then how would you describe our sons' courage? They shot themselves when they were fatally wounded rather than surrender and dishonour themselves as Soviet soldiers, and threw themselves on grenades to save their comrades' lives. Do you think that was all a gigantic lie?

‘Why? Why do you continually pick up what is black in man, rather than what is fine and noble? Remember Gorky's phrase: “Man — the very word is proud!'” (A father)

Of course there were criminals, addicts and thugs. Where aren't there? Those who fought in Afghanistan must, absolutely, must be seen as victims who need psychological rehabilitation.

‘Somewhere I read the confession of an American Vietnam veteran. He said a terrible thing. “In the eight years since the war the number of suicides — officers as well as other ranks — is about the same as the number of fatalities in the war itself.” We must urgently consider the souls of our Afgantsi.'

‘They say up to a million “enemy” lives were lost fighting for their own interests and their own freedom. However heroically the aggressors may themselves have died, that onslaught on basic human rights was no act of heroism, even though we try and dress it up as such today. The most important question is this: in whose name was all this done? There's been enough hero-worship now,
Afgantsi. We sympathise with you. That's the paradox! We know that oppressed and demoralised young men were forced to take part in the war, but the fact remains that, even while you yourselves were dying, you were bringing death and destruction to another people. That was a crime rather than heroism. Only repentance can bring relief to you who partook in a shameful episode.

‘Please publish my opinion, I'm curious to know what dirt these “heroes of our time” will throw at me.'

‘I don't know what my son did in Afghanistan. Why was he there? We began asking such questions even while the war was still on, and I almost got thrown out of the Party for it. And I would have been, but for the fact that my son was brought home in a zinc coffin. I couldn't even give him a Christian funeral.' (A father)

‘This is still a very painful memory. We were in a train, and a woman in our compartment told us she was the mother of an officer killed in Afghanistan. I understood — she was the mother, she was crying, but I told her, “Your son died in an unjust war. The mujahedin were defending their homeland.'”

‘They took young kids to fight and destroyed them … and for what? To defend the Motherland and our southern borders?

‘They rehoused me after, but I sit here alone, crying. Three years later I go to the cemetery every day, and imagine the weddings and grandchildren that will never be.

‘They phoned me from HQ. “Come, Mamasha,” — that's what they called me — “come and receive the medal on your son's behalf.” They presented me with his Red Star. “Say a few words, Mamasha,' they asked. So I did. I held up the medal. “Look!” I said. “This is my son's blood.” '

‘It won't be long before they call on us to put the country to rights and give us the weapons to do it with. I think there's going to have to be a reckoning pretty soon. Just publish their names! Don't let them hide behind pseudonyms.'

‘Some people are stupid enough to blame those eighteen-yearold boys for everything and it's your book that is responsible for that. We must distinguish the war from those who took part in it. The war was criminal and has been condemned as such, but the boys must be defended and protected.'

‘I'm a Russian literature teacher. For many years I taught my pupils some words of Karl Marx: “The death of a hero is not like that of the frog in the fable, who inflated himself until he burst. It resembles, rather, the setting of the sun.” What does your book have to teach us?'

‘They want to transform us from a lost generation into reliable defenders of the status quo (we've already proved our faith in it, after all). Nowadays they're sending us to Chernobyl, Tbilisi or Baku, wherever there's danger.'

‘I don't want to have children, I'm frightened of what they might say about me and about the war when they grow up. Because I was there. It was a filthy war and we should admit that it was so. But because we stay silent our children will have to do it for us.

‘I'm ashamed to admit this but when I got back I was sorry I didn't win a medal, not even a minor one. Now I'm glad I didn't kill anyone.'

‘We are forced to suppress so much of ourselves in this country, and we know so little about ourselves. How much do we know, for example, about the cruelty of our own teenagers? There's so little written about this question and hardly any research done. Until very recently, of course, there was no call for it — weren't our Soviet teenagers the finest in the world? Just as we had no drug addicts, rapists or robbers! Well, it turned out we have more than our fair share of all of them. Then these adolescent boys were handed out guns and had a simple message hammered into them: “All mujahedin are bandits and all bandits are mujahedin!” Now they come home and tell us all about how they lobbed grenades into villages. For them this is the norm. “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do … '”

Arthur Koestier asked this question: ‘Why, when we tell the truth, does it always sound like a lie? Why, when we proclaim the New Age, do we cover the ground with corpses? And why do we accompany our paeans to the glorious future of socialism with threats?'

In shelling those quiet little villages and bombing the ancient mountain-paths we were shelling and bombing our own ideals. This cruel truth is something we must face up to and survive. Our children are already playing games called ‘Mujahedin' and ‘Limited Contingent' [as the first Soviet forces were euphemistically described].

It will take great courage to recognise the truth about ourselves. I know — I've tried it. I still remember the way a twenty-year-old shouted, ‘I don't want to hear about any political mistakes! I just don't want to! Give me my two legs back if it was all a mistake.' And I also remember what the boy in the next bed said: ‘They put the blame on a few men who were already dead.
†
And everyone else was innocent — apart from us! Yes, we used our weapons to kill. That's what you handed them out for. Did you expect us to come home angels?'

There are only two ways forward from all this: to become aware of the truth, or to shield ourselves from it. Are we to hide ourselves away yet again?

In
The Black Obelisk
Erich Maria Remarque wrote:

‘Shortly after the truce was called a strange process began to occur, and it continues to this day. The war, which until 1918 had been hated almost without exception by the soldiers involved, was gradually transformed into the great event of their lives. They returned to an everyday existence which had seemed, as they lay in the trenches and cursed the war, a kind of paradise. Now, faced with the frustrations and problems of ordinary life, they recalled the war as a vague memory of another time and another place; and quite against their wishes and
even without their active participation, it took on a different aspect, like a retouched painting. The mass slaughter was seen as an adventure from which they had fortunately emerged unharmed. Suffering was forgotten, grief assuaged; and death, which had spared us, became what it always does become for the living, something abstract, even unreal, which takes on reality only when it strikes the man next to us or threatens us directly. In 1918 the Veterans' Society was intensely pacifist; now it has taken on a sharply nationalistic character. Memories of the war, and the sense of soldierly comradeship so strongly alive in nearly all the members, have been cunningly transformed by Volkenstein into pride in the war itself. Those who lack this nationalist fervour are held to besmirch the memory of those cruelly betrayed heroes who wanted so passionately to live.'

I must admit I'm bewildered when I see those young men putting on their Afgantsi uniforms, pinning their medals to their chests, and going off to schools to talk to the children. I can't understand how a mother can be forced to give ten or twenty speeches about her dead son, to the point where she's almost too exhausted to drag herself home.

We've worshipped many gods. Some have been consigned to the scrapheap, others to museums. Let us make Truth into a god! A god before whom each of us shall answer according to his own conscience, and not as a class, or a university year, or a collective, or a people … Let us be charitable to those who have paid a greater price for insight than we ourselves. Remember: ‘I brought my friend, and my own truth, back with me from a raid … Head, arms and legs, all severed, and his skin flayed … '

Our lives are forever tied to those red gravestones, with their inscriptions in memory, not only of the dead, but also of our naïve and trusting faith:

Tatarchenko Igor Leonidovich

(1962–1981)

In the execution of his duty and true to his military

oath. He showed courage and steadfastness and died on

active service in Afghanistan.

Dearest Igor, You left this life without having known it.

Mama, Papa

Ladutko Aleksandr Viktorovich

(1964–1984)

Died while fulfilling his international duty

You died an honourable death

You did not spare yourself

You died a hero's death on Afghan soil

That we might live in peace.

To my dear son, from Mama

Bartashevich Yuri Frantsevich

(1967–1986)

Died in the execution of his international duty

We love, remember and mourn.

His family

Bobkov Leonid Ivanovich

(1964–1984)

Died in the execution of his international duty

Sun and moon are extinguished without you, dearest son.

Mama, Papa

Zilfigarov Oleg Nikolayevich

(1964–1984)

Died true to his military oath.

You did not fulfil your dreams and ambitions

Your dear eyes were closed too soon

Dear Oleg, dearest son and brother

We cannot express the pain of your loss.

Mama, Papa, your brothers and sisters

Kozlov Andrei Ivanovich

(1961–1982)

Died in Afghanistan

My only son.

Mama

Bogush Viktor Konstantinovich

(1960–1980)

Died defending his country

The earth is a desert without you .