Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War

226 Pages·1992·0.96 MB·English

by  Svetlana Alexievich

Zinky Boys :
Soviet Voices from
the Afghanistan War
Svetlana Alexievich
Introduction by Larry Heinemann
Praise for the British edition of Zinky “This book, a brilliant series of
interviews with teenage conscripts, gives a wonderful, understanding account of
the mixture of idealism, heroism, and horror that made up this most disastrous of
all Russian wars.” — The Guardian “The question of how to honour the dead
and respect the memories of boy veterans plunged into an unjust war has seldom
been more honestly and objectively recorded?’
—Daily Mail
“Zinky Boys does raise, in stark fashion, the problem which has plagued
Americans for twenty years: how to honour the dead and respect the rights of the
veterans of a war which has become widely accepted as a national historical
disgrace?’
—Literary Review
“Through these brief statements there emerges a stunningly powerful picture of
despair, revulsion and brutalisation____The very starkness and simplicity of her
approach—no commentary beyond a stern brief introduction—is what makes the
book so effective. As a portrait of horror, it is extraordinarily vivid?’
—New Statesman
‘After reading this book of interviews with the soldiers who fought there, I defy
anyone to say that Afghanistan was not the Soviet Union’s Vietnam?’ —
Independent (Sunday)
Zinky Boys
Zinky Boys
Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH
Translated by Julia and Robin Whitby With Introduction by Larry
Heinemann
Copyright © 1990 by Svetlana Alexievich Translation copyright © 1992 by Julia
and Robin Whitby Introduction copyright © by Larry Heinemann First
American Edition 1992
Zinky Boys was first published in the Soviet Union in 1990.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH
2015 Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
Contents
Introduction
Translators’ Preface
Short Glossary
Notes from my Diary
The First Day
The Second Day
The Third Day
Postscript: Notes from my Diary
Introduction
by Larry Heinemann
The stories of soldiers in war are painfully difficult to read, intriguing and
bothersome. Oral testimony, simply expressed, is always the first wave of ‘story’
that emerges from any war. Until recently, the publication of a book of stories
about the Soviet war in Afghanistan would have been virtually impossible. I
have no doubt that novels, poetry, theatre, and films will follow in the years to
come when the soldiers find the language and the ‘way’ to tell the story. But for
now we have the testimony of ordinary soldiers and platoon officers, women
volunteers and gulled civilians who spent time in Afghanistan. And if you don’t
mind my saying so, these stories in Svetlana Alexievich’s Zinky Boys read
remarkably like the stories that first emerged from American troops retu^ting
from Vietnam - this is what I saw, this is what I did, this is what I became.
If the war in Vietnam was a benchmark of American history, then the war in
Afghanistan can rightly be called an equally dramatic watershed for the Russian
empire. (I think we can call it that with a straight face, don’t you?) The contrasts
and comparisons between the two wrenching political and historical events will
have lasting reverberations for both countries. Though, I suppose we could say
that the results of the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan were more dramatic, to
put it mildly.
In late 1989, while the fighting continued, I was fortunate enough to travel to the
old USSR with a group of Vietnam veterans and psychologists expert in post-
war trauma. We were going to meet and talk with young veterans of the Soviet
war in Afghanistan -Afgantsi, they call themselves.
We flew into Moscow airport through 10,000 feet of solid overcast. Now, I don’t
know about anybody else on the plane, but I felt mighty strange. Flying into
Moscow I was literally coming down from a lifetime’s propaganda about the
USSR as a place and the Soviets as a people; stories of a bloody, hateful
revolution; cycles of crushing famines and virtually endless economic
depressions; Communist suppression at least as viciously brutal as life under the
tsars; stories of sour-faced and lazy, fat, and selfish commissars ready to grab
any good thing out of the hands of ordinary working stiffs, and if they dare
criticize anything or speak their minds, throw them into the grinder of the labor
camp gulags and work them to death or condemn them to an insane asylum to
keep them docile and stupid with plenty of State-approved psychotropic drugs.
This was the Soviet Union of my childhood; the paranoid and hideous Stalin
purges; the doomed Hungarian revolution of 1956, when the people of Budapest
attacked Soviet tanks with their bare hands, Molotov cocktails and small arms
captured from the despised secret police; the everpresent threat of tens of
thousands of mad-dog troops atop tens of thousands of invincible tanks waiting
on the other side of the Iron Curtain just itching to sweep across Europe to
enslave a continent, leaving in its wake a devastation of rape, pillage, and
murder. Tens of thousands of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons atop launch-
ready ICBMs; supersonic bombers poised at the end of runways, their sweptback
wings drooping to the tarmac with ‘payload’, ready to leap into the air at a
moment’s notice with enough megatons to render the planet dead at the start of a
long nuclear winter.
I was on the trip because I’d been a soldier once, in Vietnam. I had written about
that war, and have since become intimate with the personal reverberations of
what being a soldier means. And, too, I’d heard that the Afgantsi had to endure
the same military grind as American soldiers in Vietnam, and would no doubt
have to endure the same personal reverberations when they got home. I wanted
to see for myself what effect the war had on them, and perhaps save them some
of the grief I have had to endure.
They met us at the airport with astonishing warmth and hospitality, and told us
more than once that finally, finally, they had someone to talk to who would
understand. I couldn’t help but wonder, hadn’t they been talking to their fathers?
But then I remembered the struggling conversations with my own father when I
came home from overseas - trying to make sense to him about what had just
happened to me. I was surprised and gratified to hear the Afgantsi say, after
we’d hung out together for the better part of two weeks, that the only difference
between Afghanistan and Vietnam was that Afghanistan was brown and
Vietnam was green. We shared the large similarities and the peculiar differences.
For instance, the Soviet army did not issue dog tags, so many of the Afgantsi
tattooed their blood type on their wrists or shoulders, or carried an empty AK-
471 cartridge on a string around their necks with a piece of paper inside with the
name, address, and phone number of their next of kin. Such homemade solutions
were commonplace.
We met and talked many times in those weeks, the conversations lasting weU
into the night, lubricated by liter bottles of vodka (so ice-cold it poured like
liqueur). More than a few talked as radically as any angry, bitter, pissed-
offVietnarn GI from the late I 960s and early i 970s. They took us to a ‘private’
museum, where among the military artefacts were booby-trapped rag dolls with
plastic hands and faces. Who would pick them up? Children, of course. Who
would make such a thing? KGB or CIA? Who, indeed?
What amazed me and touched me most deeply about the visit, the meetings, and
the private talks was that I was talking to men who were young enough to be my
own sons.
What came through most forcefully was that no matter the nationality -
Americans fighting in Vietnam, Soviets in Afghanistan, South African
conscripts in Angola, British troops in Northern Ireland, Israelis and Palestinians
in the Middle East - the reality of being a soldier is dismally and remarkably the
same; gruelling and brutal and ugly. Regardless of the military or political
reason (always decisions made by politicians and ‘statesmen’ far removed from
the realities of the field), for ordinary everyday grunts the results are always the
same; it is soul-deadening and heart-killing work.
The eighth-century Chinese poet Li Po probably said it the best of all:
. . . sorrow, sorrow like rain.
Sorrow to go, and sorrow, sorrow returning.
The similarities of the United States’ war in Vietnam and the Soviet war in
Afghanistan are striking and ironic, and prove to me that we as people have a lot
more in common than we might think.
Both wars were fought without the full support or involvement of their country’s
citizens. Indeed, before 1985 the Soviets were told their troops were in
Afghanistan fulfilling their ‘international duty’ building hospitals and schools,