Captain Vashchenko left the gates of the embassy, jogging in the direction of the city centre. Normally, running in Russia, for the first kilometre his muscles would be heavy with sleep, a sensation he’d shake off as he eased into the rhythm of the run and the caffeine took hold. But in Kabul he was alert from the first step, his heart beating fast not because of the exertion or the speed, but because there was a chance someone might try to kill him.
Within a couple of hundred metres gunfire sounded. He suppressed his instinct to stop and duck since the noise had come from far away, a distant neighbourhood. Sporadic bursts of machine-gun fire were a regular feature of city life, along with the pungent smells – cooked food and raw sewage only metres apart. Even as his hand flinched towards his gun, he didn’t long to be somewhere else. The captain flourished in extreme conditions. Life in Russia with his wife and children was of little interest to him. After only days at home he became irritable. He was not a good father and he accepted that – it was a skill he would never master. He needed to be tested every day: that was the only way he felt alive. There was no military duty open to a Soviet soldier more dangerous than Afghanistan and for that reason alone there was nowhere else the captain would rather be.
A member of the elite Spetsnaz troops, he’d arrived three months ago, the vanguard of an invasion force sent to save the year-old Communist Revolution from falling apart under ineffectual rule. There were Soviet advisers already based in the city, but they were no more than diplomatic guests of an independent Afghan state. The captain was part of the Soviet Union’s first foreign invasion in two decades, a complex logistical operation across a vast terrain. Quick success had rested on the gambit that the Afghan Communist regime would not recognize that they were being invaded by their allies, a bold military premise and one that the captain embraced. On Christmas Eve 1979 he’d flown into Kabul airport at the same time as other Spetsnaz troops were flown into Bagram airbase in the north, pretending to be an extension of the substantial military aid already provided to the regime. The first test occurred at Kabul airport when the captain and his men disembarked from the planes that landed without permission in violation of international law, approaching the Afghan government troops stationed there, troops with no warning of their arrival. Several Afghans had raised their weapons, cocking their Soviet machine guns at their Soviet allies. In this moment the invasion had rested on a knife-edge and the captain had been the first to react, dropping his gun, running forward, arms high in the air as if greeting a much-loved comrade. He’d expected a chest full of bullets. No shots were fired and the invasion continued er the guise of a military aid programme. New ammunition was promised for the Afghan 7th and 8th Divisions, neutering their guns as shells were neatly lined up in the sand waiting for replacements that would never arrive. Afghan tank units were told they’d be receiving new tanks and ordered to drain their fuel to power them. With the fuel in cans, taken away, the heavy armour sat useless as Soviet tanks crossed the border.
The captain had watched the deception play out with mixed feelings. There was only one interpretation of the events – the Afghan soldiers were inexperienced, the disciplines of a modern army were not natural to them. They were gullible because they’d been organized according to Western military concepts, indoctrinated to being told how to behave. They did not recognize when an order seemed out of place. These were the soldiers he and his comrades would be relying upon to defeat the uprisings, inheriting men who had rolled over in muddled disarray as motorized rifle divisions entered Afghanistan from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, soldiers who hadn’t fired a shot as fifty thousand foreign troops took control of their country. He was not troubled by the Afghan troops’ strength, he was troubled by their weakness. The invasion had been intended to capture the Afghan military machine, funded and built up over the years by lavish subsidies. The purpose of the Soviet soldiers arriving in Afghanistan was not to fight the war but to direct it using the Afghan military. But even before the desert dust kicked up by the invasion had settled it was apparent that there was no war machine to capture. As a ring of Soviet troops spread around the country taking the major cities, Herat, Farah, Kandahar and Jalalabad – a near-perfect loop of successful tank and troop manoeuvres – the Afghan forces melted away. On New Year’s Day, the Afghan 15th Division revolted in Kandahar. When the Soviet 201st Division entered Jalalabad the 11th Division of the Afghan army simply deserted, a whole division lost in less than a few hours. It was clear to the captain that the real war was only just beginning.
He had never been one of the more bullish officers who considered the resistance to a Communist state primitive, fragmented and disorganized – a tribal opposition equipped with mismatched rifles, some dating back fifty years, and led by squabbling factions. Such an assessment, though accurate in its material analysis, overlooked one key advantage the enemy possessed. This was their home. Superior weapons did not guarantee victory in this mysterious landscape. Smitten with the mystique of this country, the captain had spent many hours reading about the history of resistance in Afghanistan, the defeat of the British and their pitiful retreat from Kabul. One fact above all else had struck him, that since expelling the British:
The Afghans have never lost a war.
What better opponents to carve a brilliant career from? He entered this war from a position of supreme respect for his adversaries but also supreme confidence that he would become the first soldier that these mighty warriors would be defeated by, or, if they preferred, they could die fighting.
Coming to the end of his run, there were the first cracks of sunrise in the sky. Some of the shops were open: new fires in back rooms were burning tinders and twigs. The captain stopped dead in his tracks, drawing his gun and spinning around. The barrel of his gun came level with the forehead of a child directly behind him, a boy running in imitation to impress his all audience of friends. Seeing the gun they stopped laughing. The boy’s mouth hung open, terrified. The captain leaned down and gently tapped the barrel of his gun against the boy’s front teeth as though knocking on a door.
A scrawny wild dog scampered into the middle of the street, eyes glowing in the last moments of darkness, before running away. Captain Vashchenko’s day had begun.
Greater Province of Kabul
City of Kabul
Karta-i-Seh District
Darulaman Boulevard
Next Day
Leo woke, peeling his face from the pillow. He shakily got to his feet, looking down at his outline imprinted in the mattress. His muscles ached. The lining of his stomach was tight and dry like old leather. A hacking cough seemed to take over his entire body. His clothes were the ones he’d been wearing yesterday when he’d walked into the lake. They’d dried stiff. He broke up the folds in his shirt, hobbling to the front door and slipping on a pair of dark green flip-flops. He descended the stairs, plastic soles slapping each step. Throwing open the front door, he revealed the street – from the darkness of his apartment to bright sunshine and city commotion, crossing from one world to another. A kharkar, a waste collector, rattled past, whipping a pitiful-looking mule dragging a wagon, wheels squeaking, overloaded with various kinds of city filth. Once the kharkar was out the way, Leo breathed deeply, smelling diesel fumes and spice. He wondered how many hours there were before it was night again. The sun broke through the smog, and squinting at the sky he guessed it was the afternoon. As a rule he didn’t smoke until it was dark.
Without getting changed, washing, or taking anything to eat, he stepped out, closed the door, leaving it unlocked since there was nothing worth stealing in the apartment. He shuffled down the alley to where his rusty bicycle stood waiting like a devoted mongrel. The bicycle was also unlocked, protected by its worthlessness. He threw a leg over the seat, balancing precariously, and pushed himself off from the wall, wobbling down the alley to the main street, mixing into the traffic of bicycles and mule-drawn wagons. Battered cars honked their horns, exhaust pipes spluttered in reply. And Leo
tried not to fall off, rocking from side to side until he managed to find a fragile sense of balance among the chaos.
It was his seventh year as a Soviet adviser providing counsel to the Afghan Communist regime. His area of expertise was the workings of a secret police force, forced into a job no KGB officer wanted. The dangers were numerous. Several advisers had been savagely murdered, regional offices overrun; there had been public decapitations. He was performing the most hated job in a society where he was hated not only as an agent but also as an occupier. His task both now and before the Soviet military occupation was to create an Afghan political police force capable of protecting the fledgling Communist Party. Communism couldn’t be exported to Afghanistan without also exporting a political police force: the two went hand in hand, the party and the police, the ideology and the arrests. Having abandoned the profession in his homeland, he’d been forced to return to the job that Raisa had so despised. If he left his post, or failed in his duties, if he tried to run, he would be executed. Military discipline applied. Correctly suspecting the threat to his life might not scare him, it had been made clear that the repercussions to his daughters would be serious, their reputations would be tarnished and their prospects damaged, which tethered him to thejob. Locked in servitude to the State, his only choice was to carry out his responsibilities as they’d been outlined – well aware that his superiors did not expect him to survive. Yet he’d clung on, a ragged existence, and he was now the longest-serving Soviet adviser based in Afghanistan.
The Afghan Communist Party was a young creation, formed only a few years before he touched down in a rickety propeller aeroplane at Kabul airport in 1973. Grandly named the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, it was led by a man called Nur Mohammad Taraki: an agent of the Soviet Union and codenamed NUR. Since the party wasn’t in power there was no way for Leo to establish anything as sophisticated as an official police force and initially his job was merely to keep the party from being destroyed by its enemies both foreign and domestic. It was as if he’d been sent back in time to Lenin’s early years: Communism existing as a minority party under mortal threat from all sides. It had been a wretched struggle to deflect numerous CIA plots and resolve internal rivalries. Few were more surprised than Leo when, in the April coup of 1978, the Communist Party seized power. Agent NUR became President of Afghanistan and Chairman of the Revolutionary Council. At that point Leo’s duties transformed. He could now advise on how to set up a secret-police force with uniforms and prisons, a force with one purpose – to maintain and preserve the Communists’ grip on power.
Trying to eschew the savagery and brutality that had characterized his early years as a secret-police officer, Leo proposed a force that was moderate and restrained. His proposals were dismissed as naive. The police force created by the new Communist regime followed a Stalinist model. It pursued vendettas and arrested indiscriminately. After years of caution and striving to achieve power the President became quickly drunk on terror. Decisions on whether citizens should live or die were presented to him daily, lists of names for him to tick or cross. Ironically, Leo was marginalized by the Party’s success. He was no longer needed. He wrote reports to the Kremlin updating them on the nature of the monster that he had helped create.
Unchecked by laws, the President desecrated mosques and arrested religious leaders. The anti-religious campaign was so misguided yet pursued so rigorously, Leo speculated that the concept of God must be irritating to any newly formed dictator, one fashioned with god-like powers. The President’s attempts to sculpt Afghanistan into a Communist model overnight were equally misjudged. With Decree Number 8, the President limited the amount of land held to six hectares. The rest was confiscated by the State. The response was uproar among the population. There was a deep cultural attachment between the population and its land. Families lived where they were born: their identity and location were tightly bound together. These sentiments far outweighed any grievances felt by the landless labourers working as tenant farmers. An insurgency took shape while the President tinkered with the things he could control, not his people’s thoughts or beliefs, but their flag, redesigned, removing the minbar, the pulpit in a mosque, as the emblem and replacing it with a five-point star. On the day the new flag was hoisted, the President ordered the colour red to be celebrated. Pigeons were smeared with red ink, residents of Kabul were ordered to apply red paint to the exterior of their apartments, students painted their chairs and desks red. Leo was sent a note asking him if he’d consider painting his bicycle red. He saved the letter, marking it as evidence and including it with the report he wrote that night to the Kremlin describing the catastrophic failure of their satellite regime and predicting the imminent collapse of the governmnt.
The only choice had been for the Soviet Union to involve itself directly. They invaded at Christmas, 1979, three months ago. With the new influx of soldiers Leo was no longer a solitary Soviet in the city. Russian tanks controlled the streets of Kabul. The former president was assassinated and a new president, Babrak Kamal, was installed, suppliant to Soviet commands. A radio broadcast denounced the excesses of the previous leader and promised to uphold fairness and the rule of law. The new regime was presented as just rather than thuggish, wide-reaching rather than savage and punitive. Yet any goodwill created by the removal of a despised leader was offset by the hatred inspired by the presence of foreign troops, troops the President legitimized by requesting their assistance, as if they had yet to arrive, using the Treaty of Friendship and Good Neighbourliness as the legal framework. It was a political charade, transparently cynical to even the casual observer. In February anti-Soviet demonstrations in Kabul turned into a riot. Three hundred people were killed. Even these deaths were not enough to quell the violence: Kabul’s shops were closed for a week. A fly-over of jets and helicopters was ordered, a show of force, an implicit threat that troublesome districts would be destroyed, levelled to the ground if they did not submit.
The need for a powerful and effective secret police force grew more pressing. The force was renamed, now known as KhAD, the State Information Agency – the Afghan equivalent of the KGB. False promises were made. The era of senseless savagery was at an end. No more rivers of blood. No more red pigeons. President Kamal designated 13 January 1980 as a day of national mourning for all those killed by the previous president, and the very next day Leo began his classes, engaged as a teacher for the newly recruited Afghan agents.
With his coarse grey beard and skin aged and cracked by the hot Afghan summers, his Soviet colleagues joked that Special Adviser Leo Demidov had gone native. They’d concede that he didn’t wear a shalwar kameez, traditional local attire, but he didn’t wear a uniform either – he was not one of them. His clothes were a blend of styles, locally knitted shirts, Soviet army-issue trousers, American Ray-Ban sunglasses and plastic flip-flops mass-produced in China. He was one of the few Soviet advisers who spoke fluent Dari, a dialect of Persian, the language of the governing classes in Afghanistan less commonly spoken than Pashto. Dari was the first foreign language Leo had learned and he now spoke it more often than Russian. In his idle hours he read about the culture and history of this land and discovered that the only thing to rival the power of opium as a form of escape was academic study. Excluding Communist dogma, for thirty years Leo had hardly read a book; now he did little else.
The authorities tolerated Leo’s unorthodox behaviour and eccentricities with a leniency unheard of in the Soviet Union. Rules and regulations that applied back home were quietly ignored here. The concept of discipline was re-defined. Kabul was a frontier town, a revolution perched on a cliff face that every day was in danger of crumbling into anarchy. Many advisers begged to return home, resigning their posts, citing health problems, even cultivating dysentery. They argued that they could never be naturalized in the way that Leo had been. Yet though he was the longest serving Soviet adviser in Kabul, Leo did not consider himself any more Afghani than the day he’d arrived. The claim tha
t he’d gone native was made by scared Soviet soldiers who’d just stepped off the transport plane, many of whom had never been abroad before. None of the Afghans Leo came into contact with thought of him as one of them. He was acquainted with many: he as a friend to none. He was foreign and being foreign was not scored on a graded scale. He was recognized as different from other Soviets. Seemingly without beliefs of any kind, whether nationalistic or spiritual, he did not sing praises for his homeland. While he seemed restless and unsettled, he did not appear to miss the place where he was born. He spoke of no wife. He did not talk about his daughters, nor did he show anyone their photographs. He said nothing about himself. He was not of this land, nor did he belong to the land he’d left behind. In many ways it was easier to understand the more conventional Soviet forces, in uniforms, with ideology and purpose, objectives, strategies and timelines. They represented something, even if it was something to be despised and a force to be defeated. Leo represented nothing. Nihilism was a notion even more alien than Communism itself.
*
Leo squeezed his brakes. Up ahead a truck had caught a tyre in a pothole and spilled thousands of plastic bottles of treated drinking water. There was shouting between those involved. The traffic had backed up. Impatient drivers honked their horns. Leo glanced at the rooftops, at the casual spectators – he’d seen enough road accidents in Kabul to tell when something was staged and the set-up for an ambush. There were no Soviet vehicles in the traffic, and unable to see any reason for the obstacle than the perilous state of the roads, he weaved his way through the scattered bottles, ignored by the angry participants, before continuing past the truck. Glancing over his shoulder he saw children filling their ragged shirts with bottles before scuttling away with their loot. He’d passed through the accident as if he didn’t exist.