When Ivan Comes Marching Home

...members...

...A considerable amount of information about the domestic side of the war has seeped out, revealing the existence of dissatisfaction and division...

...they do not want your armed forces to be in their country...

...Nevertheless, he ended up admitting that the Afghan resistance is indeed more substantial than the Soviet media have suggested and that there are "some 2,500,000 Afghan refugees in Iran and Pakistan...

...Some do not understand us at all, others call us fanatics, still others understand us but cannot support us because they do not feel up to it...

...Evidence soon appeared in the Soviet underground press (samizdat) of growing revulsion against the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan, particularly in the Baltic republics and Ukraine...

...For example, on February 28, Moskovskaya Pravda carried an interview with 22-year-old Gennady Yevsenin, a decorated Afghanistan veteran who has had problems switching back to civilian life, and who is angry at the uniform way that the press portrays the Soviet servicemen...

...16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1987 Moreover, she also charged that a disproportionate burden of the fighting has been placed on offspring of the workers...

...One thing seems certain...

...At the beginning of the year a powerful new documentary film, Is It Easy To Be Young...

...One Afghanets named Foteev said openly that back home it is "considerably more difficult" than it was in Afghanistan...

...Let's look at the origins of the war...

...the musicians had retorted...

...While not mentioning those who were sickened by what they saw in Afghanistan, the press tended to focus on Afghantsi who believed their battle experience had made them morally superior to the people around them...

...Russkikh complained that there were young people going around saying that "our boys are dying for nothing...

...At the end of 1986, Sobesednik, the weekly supplement to the Communist Youth League daily Komsomolskaya Pravda, tested the waters by revealing that not all young people subscribe to the official view of the war...

...If and when it is finally closed, a scar will remain...

...Foteev claimed that the distrust and resentment of the activist type of Afghanets goes beyond people not believing their accounts of the war: at work, he was constantly being watched and checked "from above...

...I'd like more information...

...It took the form of a letter from S. Berezovs'ka, a Ukrainian mother of two draftees, to the Ukrainian Komsomol daily Molod' Ukrainy, published on January 15...

...The first issue of Sobesednik for 1987 shed more light on what Soviet youth think of the war...

...After years of pretending that the Soviet "intervention" in Afghanistan had, the full understanding and wholehearted support of the Soviet population, the Soviet media have begun acknowledging that the war has not been all that popular at home and that not everyone has accepted the official line...

...On January 8, 1986, Komsomolskaya Pravda published an account of one such group of Afghantsi—as the Afghan veterans had by now become popularly known—in Togliatti...

...The Soviet media have begun acknowledging that the war has not been all that popular at home and that not everyone has accepted the official line...

...As everyone knows, the dushman resistance forces began receiving aid from the West in the form of weapons and military hardware only after the Soviet Union moved its troops into Afghanistan...

...We are approaching that dangerous condition when, having returned to our society, this generation which was under fire will disseminate the terrible experiences they acquired among their contemporaries...

...A fortnight later, the February 1 issue of Moscow News, a weekly designed mainly for foreign readers, showed that even higher up there are those prepared to argue the case for a speedy political settlement of the Afghanistan problem...

...Their hearts are filled with readiness to accomplish exploits and with loyalty to the heroic traditions...

...Having failed after more than seven years to pacify the Afghans and impose a Marxist puppet regime, Moscow appears to be seeking a face-saving way to extricate itself from the Afghan imbroglio...

...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1987...

...When pressed on the subject of Afghanistan, Shultz delivered the most outspoken condemnation that has yet appeared in the Soviet media...

...What is more, foreign radio broadcasts from Iran, China, and the West have provided the Soviet Central Asians with an alternative view of the war and informed them of the international opprobrium the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan continues to generate, not least among Islamic nations...

...The Soviet population was told something of the scale of the fighting and the difficulties involved in pursuing a war against guerrillas in mountainous terrain...

...Such news can hardly have raised morale, coming as it does at a point when the Red Army has been waging war in Afghanistan for almost twice as long as the Soviet Union's struggle against Nazi Germany...

...What do they want from us...

...The Soviet commentator attempted to respond to this audacious letter with the standard responses...

...Under oppression themselves," Ausra pointed out, "Ukrainians, Estonians, Latvians, [and] Lithuanians" were being forced to "obey the brutal orders of the Russian officers, and shed both their own and Afghan blood...

...All the same, no criticism of the Soviet role in Afghanistan was tolerated...

...As if we are all proper and good...

...The wounds," as Radyans'ka Ukraina put it on March 17, "remain...

...Nonetheless,enough Soviet citizens listen to Western radio stations for word to have gotten out that the Red Army's brutal methods have been exposed abroad and condemned by a host of individuals and organizations, ranging from Soviet deserters to the U.N...

...She not only objected to the way the Soviet media deal with the war and questioned the high cost in human lives, but pointed out that this conflict cannot be compared to the defense of the homeland against the Fascist invaders...

...Soviet sensitivity on this score was shown in an odd sort of way in December when Komsomolskaya Pravda published a vitriolic attack on foreign "falsifiers" and "forgerers" who, the newspaper claimed, are fabricating stories and photographs about alleged Soviet crimes in Afghanistan...

...Gorbachev has described Afghanistan as "a bleeding wound...

...A new social activeness has emerged in place of the old apathy and depoliticization...

...V. K. was fed up with reading about how "happy" draftees were to be "entrusted to fulfill their internationalist duty" by going to fight in Afghanistan, and made it clear that he regarded such a notion as "crazy...

...As one Ukrainian regional party leader tactfully put it in March 1984, the war in Afghanistan had exposed certain "moral problems...

...10154 ^ I want to help...

...Interestingly, the publication of Berezovs'ka's protest was accompanied by a long response from one of the newspaper's correspondents, Oleksandr Klymenko, who in effect publicly apologized on behalf of his media colleagues for their glib and insensitive treatment of the Afghanistan theme...

...Questions about the number of Soviet casualties continue to get short shrift...

...Undoubtedly the Soviet press is partly to blame for the prejudices that exist against some of the Afghantsi...

...Typically, the army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda of November 25, 1984, wrote: "The sons are following in their fathers' footsteps...

...This sentiment is probably shared by a good many of the Afghans' co-religionists in Soviet Central Asia and the North Caucasus...

...The pseudonymous Sergei Kovansky, a writer living in Moscow who in 1986 was interviewed by the British journal Detente, goes as far as to suggest that these demonstrations "bear evidence to the shifts that are taking place in the mood of the masses, at least in the periphery of the country...

...What now...

...It contains moving interviews with disabled and embittered veterans, as well as the- parents of soldiers killed in Afghanistan...

...New York, N.Y...

...The military side of the war still remains off limits to critics and inquisitive journalists...

...Nevertheless, distressing news about the conflict began filtering' through from soldiers returning home, Bohdan Nahaylo writes frequently on Soviet affairs for the London Spectator...

...Nevertheless, from roughly the beginning of 1984, one distinctly sour note began to be sounded in the media's handling of the "Afghanistan" theme...

...The general message seemed to be that the Soviet forces were in for a long haul because of the unrelenting "external interference" in Afghanistan's affairs by the states that were arming and sheltering the Afghan resistance...

...For the first few years the Soviet population was told very little about the nature and scale of the war...

...More recently, in February, the Uzbek party chief, Inamzhon Usmankhodzhaev, revealed something of the scale of the problem, stating that during the last two years "hundreds" of Komsomol members in Uzbekistan, the key Central Asian republic that borders on Afghanistan, had been prosecuted for draft-dodging...

...Human Rights Commission...

...She overheard one youth in Pushkin Square say: "Would I want to fulfill my internationalist duty...

...The first sign of a more tolerant and candid approach was the official reaction to Andrei Sakharov's renewed condemnation of the occupation of Afghanistan, which the human rights activist made as soon as he was released from internal exile in Gorky...

...How many soldiers do you keep there-120,000...

...On January 31 and February 7, Soviet television showed a two-part program in- which the leading propagator of a military cult associated with Afghanistan, Aleksandr Prokhanov, interviewed several disgruntled but militant young veterans...

...One Radio Moscow commentator explained to domestic listeners on February 6 that he was unable to give the figures because "the Americans" are using Afghanistan as a military testing ground, and information of this sort would enable them to judge if their "methods" are effective, and hence endanger "the lives of our boys...

...Over the last seven years, the Soviet reign of terror has killed nearly a million civilians and driven five million out of the country...

...The theme of "internationalist duty" was still fostered, but analogies with the Second World War became more frequent, and the emphasis subtly shifted to patriotic virtues and military traditions...

...He explained that Afghanistan veterans such as he are considered "dangerous people...

...Significantly, a statement issued on January 15 by twenty members of Moscow's unofficial peace group in connection with the Kabul regime's declaration of a six-month unilateral ceasefire suggests that, if anything, the problem of the Afghantsi is still understated in the Soviet press and is becoming "more acute with every day...

...Furthermore, a commentator expressed concern that all sorts of "unpleasant" things can be heard about the Afghantsi, yet at the same time the fate of the badly wounded and disabled veterans is all too often forgotten...

...Nor is there any hint of demoralization among Soviet troops, of drug problems, and desertion to the enemy...

...One veteran was quoted as saying that "no one needs us now...

...It cited extracts from letters that had been sent to the paper by a 28-year-old Muscovite who had signed himself with the initials V. K., and a certain Vladimir Russkikh in Udmurtia...

...Such a bold look at the conflict and its consequences has proved a sensation and all showings are reported to have been sold out...

...At a news conference on December 23, Yuri Kashlev, the chief of the Soviet Foreign Ministry's Department of Humanitarian Affairs, declared that he did not see anything wrong with Sakharov's remarks...

...The next instance of outspoken criticism was a bombshell...

...There are no children of officials there," she complained...

...For instance, in Tajikistan, which borders on Afghanistan, five people were arrested in 1982 for circulating leaflets against the war...

...Which intervention came first, and which came second, is obvious...

...Of course not...

...He added that "our leadership has stated on many occasions that we are seeking a solution of the problem in Afghanistan as soon as possible...

...Why are they trying to get into our souls...

...This is not the Great Fatherland War where our people died defending their land...

...Increasingly, attempts were made to popularize the war by portraying it not so much as an intervention on behalf of a socialist ally, as an extension of the defense of the motherland...

...Later in the piece Ambartsumov also mentioned that "the introduction of a military contingent into Afghanistan" had not met "with the support of the majority of the U.N...

...Although the newspaperwarned the young zealots about the consequences of taking the law into their own hands, it nevertheless treated them sympathetically...

...Although the mujahedeen have claimed since at least 1982 to have been carrying out attacks of this nature, this was the first time Moscow admitted that the fighting has spilled over into the Soviet Union...

...If not on the body, then in the soul...

...The Chronicle's position was summarized in a letter to Soviet Defense Minister Dmitrii Ustinov from three leading Ukrainian Catholic activists, who declared: "Ukrainians do not wish to fight, nor do they want this unjust war...

...In January 1986 Krasnaya Zvezda described cases of draft dodging in Vladivostok, and in July it disclosed that senior officials in Uzbekistan were using their influence to keep their draftee sons from being sent to Afghanistan...

...Who wants to die...

...All mention of casualties was avoided, and the impression was deliberately created that the "limited contingent" of Soviet troops was providing "temporary" assistance to a neighboring "victim of unprovoked imperialist aggression...

...opened in Moscow...

...Another dismayed her by exclaiming: "You'd think those who are serving there are heroes...

...In fact, the media's constant boosting of the veterans as role models won the former soldiers no friends...

...C ince the end of last year selective 1.3 glasnost on the Afghanistan theme has been broadened to include some discussion of popular attitudes towards the war, as well as criticism of the slanted way in which it is depicted...

...Evidently, Shultz went beyond the limits of glasnost because his following two sentences in a similar vein were not translated...

...In June 1985, violent clashes are reported to have broken out in Astrakhan between Chechen draftees from the North Caucasus who refused to go to Afghanistan and the military authorities...

...A fter that leading expert on Soviet public opinion, former KGB chief THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1987 15 Yuri Andropov, took over at the end of 1982, coverage of the war did grow franker...

...Millions of Soviet viewers heard him say: As regards Afghanistan, you have come into conflict with the people of Afghanistan...

...At the Komsomol Congress in April, Gorbachev went- out of his way to praise the many thousands of young people who have fought in Afghanistan, saying that the country was proud of them...

...Those who refuse to flee need your help desperately...

...We are all different...

...This time the paper published a long letter from eighteen-year-old Laura Tsagolova from Moscow who had spent some time in Afghanistan while her parents were posted there...

...nor about the fact that tens of thousands of Afghan families have left Afghanistan and are living in Iran and Pakistan...

...Are we supposed to idolize them...

...She had been distressed to discover on returning home that people her age were more interested in having a good time than discussing "far-off' Afghanistan and "politics...

...People are being killed over there...

...Even the local Komsomol organizations have been reluctant to help set up Afghanistan veterans' clubs, and calls for the establishment of a separate veterans' organization for the Afghantsi have fallen on deaf ears...

...Our boys would stay alive, and "death notifications" would no longer bring untold grief to Soviet families...

...It is common knowledge," they continued, "what psychological and moral difficulties American veterans of the [Vietnam] war suffered...

...The veterans had become so disgusted with the "anti-social behavior" they saw around them that they formed a vigilante squad, waging their own private war against "money-grubbers" and "scroungers," whom they dubbed "contras...

...More disturbing, though, was that some had come home imbued with revolutionary zeal and full of aggressive energy...

...For us this is of interest because it radically alters the stereotype of events in Afghanistan that Soviet propaganda has presented up to now: the war in Afghanistan has been portrayed in terms of a handful of renegades and bandits waging an undeclared war against their own people, while the Soviet internationalist servicemen are "protecting"—for some reason in inverted commas—the women and children of Afghanistan from the bandits...

...As if we all know exactly what we want...

...Although the Soviet media are still adhering to the old approach of presenting only the news that the Kremlin sees fit to print, selective glasnost on Afghanistan has gone surprisingly far by Soviet standards, and seems to be acquiring its own dynamic...

...It's a bomb loaded with just enough explosive to mutilate Its young victims become crippled reminders of the high cost of resistance...

...The risks inherent in applying glasnost to the Afghanistan theme were aptly demonstrated when Secretary of State George Shultz was interviewed on Soviet television on April 16...

...These were Novikov's comments as the commentator read them: Recently, all Soviet propaganda has been saying a great deal about the national reconciliation taking place in Afghanistan...

...The Afghan people want you to leave their country...

...Since 1980 the Afghanistan Relief Committee has been sending medical aid, food and support for schools to villagers inside Afghanistan...

...and there is no mention of the fact that the so-called dushmans [bandits] are not just a handful of bandits, but vast numbers of the Afghan population...

...Although he went on to rehearse the familiar official explanations, he nevertheless reminded Berezovs'ka that "there was a period, and not such a short one at that, when the press provided almost no information about how our boys were fighting over there," and asked for her understanding...

...The largest of these took place in the Armenian capital of Yerevan in May 1985, when some 200 protestors gathered outside the city's military commissariat...

...It published a statement by Yevgeny Ambartsumov, a prominent member of one of Mr...

...The Afghantsi, it claimed, undergo a "revolutionary purification" in Afghanistan and therefore see the world through "a powerful filter" that brings out moral distinctions...

...F or some time now the Kremlin has been stressing that it wants to bring the boys home from Afghanistan...

...But we can't do it alone Please don't turn the page until you've opened your heart...

...What was even more unusual was that the paper reproduced several photographs from an Afghan refugee journal showing children that had been maimed by Soviet booby-trap toys and bombs...

...Although the absence of samizdat and precise information generally from Soviet Central Asia and the North Caucasus makes it difficult to know just how strong opposition to Moscow's involvement in Afghanistan really is in the USSR's traditionally Muslim areas, several protests have been recorded...

...Lastly, we would be able to release additional forces and means for our economy...

...T he problem of the Afghantsi has I continued to receive frank treatment...

...Over the years, a number of spontaneous demonstrations by the parents of soldiers sent to Afghanistan have also been reported...

...Matters have not been helped by the Soviet media's reference to the Afghan insurgents as Basmachi, the name givento the Muslim groups who fought against Soviet rule in Central Asia in the 1920s and thirties with the aim of establishing an independent Islamic state...

...I do not know how much international aid costs our people, but I think the price is not small...

...the relatives of boys killed or wounded in action, and foreign radio broadcasts...

...If this was something to think about, then one also wonders what the Soviet public felt on being told in April of two raids across the border into Soviet terMAT'S MAKING A LASTING IMPRESSION ON THOUSANDS OF AFGHAN CHILDREN...

...Similarly, in 1985 the samizdat publication The Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Ukraine also depicted the conflict in Afghanistan as"Russia's war" in which the USSR's non-Russians were being forced to participate...

...There is also no admission of the large-scale atrocities committed against the Afghan population...

...Afghanistan Relief Committee Room 4100, 345 Park Ave...

...The journal also quoted young Lithuanian veterans on the atrocities they had witnessed while serving in Afghanistan...

...In 1982 the Lithuanian underground journal Ausra described how the bodies of soldiers killed in Afghanistan were being brought home in sealed zinc coffins and how funerals were turning into anti-Russian demonstrations...

...There are no extreme conditions," and "relations with people are much more complicated...

...Yet two days later, on April 18, Soviet television showed another frank discussion about the Afghantsi in which the real state of affairs was shown to be not quite so rosy...

...Enclosed find my tax-deductible contribution...

...It's peaceful over here...

...There have as yet been no questions asked in the press why it has taken Soviet military might so long to subdue the Afghan "counterrevolutionaries...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1987 17 ritory by the Afghan resistance...

...It presented a grim picture of heavy casualties suffered by soldiers from Western Ukrainian districts, of bodies being brought back in sealed coffins to be buried in graves marked with stars and not crosses, and of the shabby treatment of wounded and disabled veterans...

...We are worried about the fate of the people who went through this school of blood...

...That is untrue...

...Tsagolova went on to describe what happened when an Afghanistan veteran suggested arranging a meeting between veterans and members of break dance and heavy metal rock groups...

...Shortly after the invasion there were reports that Central Asian soldiers were being withdrawn because of their unreliability...

...Gorbachev's think tanks, who gave the following reasons for pulling the troops out: Reconciliation in Afghanistan would mean the early return home of our troops .. . awaited with such impatience and such concern at home...

...It was not until the early part of 1986 and the beginnings of glasnost, however, that the Soviet press finally began to admit other difficulties with Afghanistan veterans...

...As if, if anyone was a blockhead before the army, Afghanistan well and truly set him right...

...As it was describing the bitterness and alienation of some of the Afghanistan veterans, the Soviet press also began to mention the problem of draft evasion...

...Name Address City State Zip SP7 AFGHANISTAN RELIEF COMMITTEE INC...

...This, in tandem with the Gorbachev leadership's policy of selective glasnost, or greater openness in the press, has brought to the surface issues that until recently were taboo for the Soviet media—the domestic impact of the engagement in Afghanistan, and the one-sided manner in which the war has been depicted...

...He described an argument in which he had "been pinned to the wall" with the question: "How do you explain to mothers the deaths of their sons...

...The routine depiction of all Soviet soldiers serving in Afghanistan as heroes clearly does not convince everybody and even irritates some of the Afghantsi themselves...

...During the last eighteen months Soviet newspapers have also revealed that there is widespread alienation and bitterness among the estimated close to half a million veterans, most of them young draftees, who have served in Afghanistan...

...It was admitted that some wounded or disabled veterans of the war were coming up against bureaucratic indifference of the most disgraceful sort...

...Contemptuous of the life they had returned to, they wanted to take matters into their own hands and purge society of undesirable elements, even if this meant breaking the law...

...Another revealing indication of popular attitudes, and a further example of the new difficulties the authorities face under glasnost, cropped up during a question-andanswer program broadcast by Radio Moscow's domestic service on the evening of March 27...

...One of the commentators felt compelled to respond at considerable length to a letter sent in by 20-year-old Andrei Novikov from the city of Andropov...

...As he put it: . . . actually a lot is being written about our boys, but—begging the journalists' pardon —more or less the same about everyone...

...Many of them were finding it difficult to readjust to civilian life and were disappointed by the lack of support and understanding on the part of the local authorities, and for that matter the public at large...

...For the discerning reader, it was to become increasingly evident that although the boys who had served in Afghanistan were officially hailed as heroes, back home not everyone was impressed by what they had beenthrough, including the local Komsomol and party officials...