Soviet War Songs II: The Afghan War
War is always bloody, that will be reflected in most any song about it. However, not all wars are just. The shift from fighting to protect one’s home and family from invasion to being the one invading had a profound impact on the psyche of the soldiers, and therefore on the music they would write. Whereas songs from the Great Patriotic War (the name for the Second World War in Russian) were often characterized by grim determination, informed by a belief in what they were fighting for, those of later wars were often far more cynical and hopeless. It could also be argued that this shift also comes from the fact that many of the soldier songs of the Second World War were not written by soldiers but were rather propaganda pieces by the Soviet Union.
It is in one such war, the Soviet-Afghan war, that a song that would outlast the war it was written about, the millennium it was written in, and indeed the army it was written for, would first be sung. Not much of the Soviet-Afghan war is known in the West, with one of the most long-lasting cultural impacts from this decade-long war coming in the form of an internet hoax about the ending of a Rocky movie. With the more recent American intervention in Afghanistan, it is easy to believe that the two wars are analogous, but there are several key differences. For one, many of the Soviet troops deployed to Afghanistan were the same ethnicities as the population of Afghanistan. They often spoke Russian as a second language, speaking Uzbek, Turkmen, or Tajik as their first.
As well, Afghanistan had been friendly with the Soviet Union, but intra-party strife ultimately led to the soviets initiating a Palace coup in 1979, known as Storm-333. This context is important to understanding the difference in perspective that soviet troops held to that of American troops. To these Soviet soldiers, they had just deposed a friendly government made up of people they could identify with much more (at least in a cultural or ethnic sense) than the mostly white Russian government that they were fighting for.
Dust and suffering in the blue mountains
Many of the soldiers were also conscripts, young men that the Red Army treated as disposable (a morbid name for the soldiers sent to fight in Afghanistan was “Zinky Boys”, a reference to the zinc-plated coffins that the dead would be delivered home in). Being out of combat did not guarantee the safety of soldiers, abuse was common in the ranks, with many soldiers being killed by those they fought alongside for minor infractions.
With this in mind, the despair and hopelessness reflected in songs from that time should not be surprising. Fighting a war that many viewed as pointless, in an army that would throw your life away without a second thought, alongside men who would abuse you, there was not much to feel hopeful about.
One of the most well-known anthems of the war is “Swallowing Dust“. Authorship is often attributed to Aleksandr Doroshenko. However, I cannot find any biographical information about him, and cannot say with any confidence that he is indeed the writer of the piece.
“Swallowing dust“ is narrated by a 19-year-old soldier lying without water and with two broken legs after the helicopter he was riding in was shot down by the Mujahadeen. The soldier describes his last moments on earth, watching as a Black Tulip (the name given to the aircraft that would transport the bodies of soviet soldiers back to the Union) circles above him.
He reflects upon his life, how he has lived “a short 20 incomplete years”, he breaks down crying before saying to himself, “calm down, we are going to die with a smile!”. Ultimately, the song ends with the soldier taking his own life with a grenade after being abused by Mujahedin fighters.
The lyrics are difficult to read, as the perspective never changes from the soldier who lies dying on the mountain, with the instrumental serving often to highlight notes of panic in his voice, or the moments of determination and revenge at the end of his life. The depressing lyrics mixed with the rock/ disco style instrumental create a haunting image of the moments before death.
The abuse of the Afghan population
“Oh Afghan” is another song written from the perspective of an infantryman, detailing once again the horrible conditions, oppressive heat, poor quality of food and water, etc, and how the soldiers would deal with it, referring to a “Pakistani” that is just a name for vodka.
This song, however, also shows something that not many others do, that being the abuses that soviet soldiers would inflict on the population of Afghanistan. They sing euphemistically about having a woman for every soldier, how they have nowhere to stick their masculine urges. Although it is never explicit, they are talking about raping Afghan women, something so common as to not even really be a punishable offense during the war.
“Don’t Tell Mom I am in Afghanistan” is a song that has had many claims to authorship over the decades since it was first written. It has been iterated upon dozens of times, with each variation bringing new, or removing something. This complexity is only worsened by the fact that the song is a cultural touchstone, and it is therefore difficult to tell if any version is one that is new when it is first documented, or if it is one that had simply not been documented to that point. To shorten all of this, this song has no official version. If the analysis here does not comment on something, whatever version of the song you know likely differs from the one I do.
The song is structured as a letter to someone, usually a sister, but in some versions it is addressed to a girlfriend, reminiscing about home, and talking of the “stars” in the sky above Kandahar. These stars are, in fact, white phosphorus, ostensibly for illumination, although often used as a weapon in its own right, producing horrific burns.
This leads into the chorus, one of the few things that remains consistent through all versions “Just please don’t tell mom I am in Afghanistan”. The words are simple and impactful. Since all men in the Soviet Union were conscripted into the army, and because the government denied that what was happening in Afghanistan was even really a war, the official term for it was the “international duty”; many took comfort in the idea that their son or brother was not in Afghanistan. And tragically, some would only learn where their family member had been serving when they received their zinc-plated coffin.
Another common theme is a ‘bet’ the author makes with a friend, that the friend will survive. This ‘bet’ is, in truth, a dark joke. If the friend dies, who does he have to pay? It is just another example of how fickle life is as a soldier.
Then, the narrator asks for something very revealing, letters from home. He hasn’t received any. This was common for soldiers in Afghanistan, people back in the Soviet Union didn’t care about the war in Afghanistan. It wasn’t covered in the news. When it was, they were said to be building bridges and farms for the people of Afghanistan. No one cared about the men there. They were forgotten about. And they knew it.
Zinc coffins for nothing
One thing that you will find in any media about the Soviet-Afghan War is a sense of pointlessness. The book “Zinky Boys” by Svetlana Alexievich, which I have mentioned repeatedly throughout this piece, is a good example. The men she interviews will freely admit that they don’t really know why they were there, what good it did anyone. But those same soldiers will then talk about killing innocent women and children with no remorse. They ate rotten cabbage and buckwheat, killed innocent civilians, and died.
The songs in this piece display that truth. What do the soldiers speak of? They talk about themselves, how they are suffering, and what they want. There isn’t any of the bombast of the songs from the Great Patriotic War. In “Swallowing Dust“, the narrator is in a helicopter that gets shot down. He spends his final moments suffering and finally kills himself. The narrator of Oh Afghan complains of the water and food they receive, makes veiled illusions to the rape of Afghan women, and talks about how he still might die before he gets home. And all that the soldier in “Don’t Tell Mom I’m in Afghanistan” asks is that his sister doesn’t tell his mother where he is, and for letters from home. These men aren’t fighting for a great cause anymore. They don’t care about Afghanistan. They are there because they are told to be.
