Zinky Boys Read Free Page B

military and civilian installations in Kabul.’
    Berdyaev again: ‘I have always been my own man, answerable to no-one.’ Something which can’t be said of us Soviet writers. In our day truth is always at the service of someone or something — either the interests of the Revolution, or the dictatorship of the proletariat, or some brutal dictator himself, or the Party, or the first or second five-year plan, or the latest Congress … Dostoevsky insisted: ‘The truth is more important than Russia’.
    â€˜Take heed that no man deceive you. For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ’ (St Matthew, 24:4,5). Russia has had to suffer so many false Messiahs — too many to mention.
    I ask myself, and others too, this single question: how has the courage in each of us been extinguished? How have ‘they’ managed to turn our ordinary boys into killers, and do whatever theywant with the rest of us? But I’m not here to judge what I’ve seen and heard. My aim is simply to reflect the world as it really is. Getting to grips with this war today means facing much wider issues, issues of the life and death of humanity. Man has finally achieved the evil ambition of being able to kill us all at a stroke.
    Nowadays it is no secret that 100,000 Soviet troops were deployed in Afghanistan every year. Over ten years, that adds up to 1,000,000. The war can be described in neat statistical terms: so many bullets and shells spent, so many armoured cars and helicopters destroyed, so many uniforms torn to shreds. How much has all this cost us?
    Fifty thousand dead and wounded. A figure you may believe or disbelieve, because we all know how well officials can count. The dead of World War II are still being counted and buried …
    Fragments of conversations:
    â€˜Even at night I’m afraid of blood, in my dreams … I can’t even bear to step on a beetle … ’
    â€˜Who can I tell all this to? Who’d want to listen? As the poet Boris Slutsky put it:
    â€˜When we returned from the war
I saw we were needed no more.’
    I have the whole Table of Elements in my body. I’m still wracked by malaria. Not long ago I had a few teeth pulled, one after the other, and in my pain and shock I began to talk. The dentist, a woman, looked at me almost in disgust: “A mouth full of blood, and he wants to talk … ” At that moment I realised I would never be able to talk honestly about anything again. Everyone thinks of us like that: mouths full of blood, and we want to talk.’
    That’s why I haven’t used people’s real names in this book. Some asked for confidentiality; and there are others whom I can’t expose to the reproach of ‘a mouth full of blood, and he wants to talk’. Are we going to react to this moral crisis as we always have done in the past, by attaching blame to a few individuals in order to exonerate the rest of us? No! We are all accessories to this crime.
    But I did record their names, if only in my diary, in case my cast of characters wish to be recognised one day:
    Sergei Amirkhanian, Captain; Vladimir Agapov, 1st Lt., gun-crew leader; Tatiana Belozerskikh, civilian employee; Victoria V. Bartashevich, mother of Private Yuri Bartashevich, killed in action; Private Dmitri Babkin, gun-layer; Maya Ye. Babuk, mother of Nurse Svetlana Babuk, killed in action; Maria T. Bobkova, mother of Private Leonid Bobkov, killed in action; Olimpiada R. Bogush, mother of Private Victor Bogush, killed in action; Victoria S. Valovich, mother of 1st Lt. Valery Valovich, killed in action; Tatiana Gaisenko, nurse; Vadim Glushkov, 1st Lt., interpreter; Captain Gennadi Gubanov, pilot; Ina S. Golovneva, mother of 1st Lt. Yuri Golovnev, killed in action; Major Anatoli Devyatyarov, political officer of an artillery regiment; Private Denis L., grenadier; Tamara Dovnar, widow of 1st Lt. Petr Dovnar; Yekaterina N.P., mother of Major Alexander P.,