Soviet women recall horrors of Afghan war
MOSCOW — Sitting in her living room, 65-year-old Tatyana Rybalchenko goes through a stack of black-andwhite photos from more than 30 years ago. In one of them, she is dressed in a nurse’s coat and smiles sheepishly; in another, she shares a laugh with soldiers on a road with a mountain ridge behind them.
The pictures don’t show the hardships that Rybalchenko and 20,000 Soviet women like her went through as civilian support staff members during the Soviet Union’s 1979-89 invasion of Afghanistan. Although they did not serve in combat roles, they still experienced the horrors of war.
As Russia on Friday marked the 30th anniversary of the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, the memories are still fresh for the nurses, clerks and shopkeepers, predominantly young, single women who were thrust into the bloody conflict.
Rybalchenko enlisted on a whim. In 1986, she was 33, working in a dead-end nursing job in Kiev, the capital of Soviet Ukraine, and was going through a breakup. One day, she joined a colleague who went to a military recruitment office. The recruiter turned to Rybalchenko and asked if she would like to work abroad — in Afghanistan.
She recalls that she was fed up with her life, “so I told him: ‘I’d go anywhere, even to hell!’ And this is where he sent me.”
Family and friends tried to talk her out of it, telling her that Afghanistan is where “the bodies are coming from.” But it was too late: She had signed the contract.
At least 15,000 Soviet troops were killed in the fighting that began as an effort to prop up a communist ally and soon became a grinding campaign against a U.S.-backed insurgency. Moscow sent more than 600,000 people to a war that traumatized many young men and women, and fed a popular discontent that became one factor leading to the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union.
Rybalchenko, who worked as a nurse at a military hospital in Gardez, was stunned by the many casualties. But there was so much work that she found herself shutting off her emotions.
“At the end, I did not feel anything anymore. I was like a stone,” Rybalchenko said, shedding her normally perky persona.
Friendships helped, and she befriended a young reconnaissance officer, Vladimir Vshivtsev.
He once confided to her that he was not afraid of losing a limb, but he would not be able to live with an injury to his eyes. She recalled him saying “if I lose eyesight, I’ll do everything to put an end to it.”
In November 1987, the hospital was inundated with casualties from a Soviet offensive to open the road between Gardez and the stronghold of Khost.
One of the wounded was Vshivtsev, and Rybalchenko saw him being wheeled in with bandages wrapped around his head. She unwrapped the dressing and gasped: “The eyes were not there.”
She persuaded her superior to let her accompany him to a bigger hospital in Kabul as part of a suicide watch. She stayed friends with Vshivtsev, and he later became a leading activist in the Russian Society for the Blind.
Alla Smolina was 30 when she joined the Soviet military prosecutor’s office in Jalalabad in 1985. It wasn’t until 20 years later that she started having nightmares about the war.
“The shelling, running away from bullets and mines whizzing above me — I was literally scared of my own pillow,” she said.
She put her memories on paper and contacted other women who were there, telling the stories of those who endured the hardships of war but who are largely absent from the male-dominated narratives.
She is trying to raise awareness of the role the Soviet women played, believing they have been unfairly portrayed or not even mentioned in fiction and nonfiction written mostly by men.
The deaths of Soviet women who held civilian jobs in Afghanistan are not part of the official toll, and Smolina has written about 56 women who lost their lives. Some died when a plane was shot down by the Afghan mujahedeen, one was killed when a drunken soldier threw a grenade into her room, and one woman was slain after being raped by a soldier.
In an era when the concept of sexual harassment was largely unfamiliar in the Soviet Union, the women in the war in Afghanistan often started a relationship to avoid unwanted attention from other soldiers.
“Because if a woman has someone, the whole brigade won’t harass you like a pack of wolves,” Rybalchenko said. “Sometimes it was reciprocal, sometimes there was no choice.”
After Rybalchenko went home, she could hardly get out of bed for the first three months. When she asked officials about benefits for veterans and other personnel in Afghanistan, she faced hostility and insults.
In 2006, Russian lawmakers decided that civilians who worked in Afghanistan were not entitled to war benefits. Women have campaigned unsuccessfully to reinstate them.
Rybalchenko eventually got an apartment from the government, worked in physiotherapy and now lives in retirement in Moscow.
Smolina, who lives in Sweden, is wary of disclosing all the details about her own Afghan experiences after facing a backlash from other veterans about her publications.
“Our society is not ready yet to hear the truth. There is still a lingering effect from the harsh Soviet past,” she said. “In Soviet society, you were not supposed to speak out.”