Robert Fisk - The Great War for Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East

The Russian officer beckoned me to leave the bus. I noticed a badge of Lenin on his lapel. Lenin appeared to be glowering, eyes fixed on some distant Bolshevik dream that I would be forbidden to enter. ‘Passport,’ the soldier said indifferently. It was like the ghastly telegram Sue Hickey had sent me, further proof of my dastardly role in Afghanistan. In the 1980s, the covers of British passports were black, and the gold coat of arms of the United Kingdom positively gleamed back at the Russian. He studied it closely. I half expected him to ask me for the meaning of ‘Dieu et mon droit’ or, worse still, ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ . He flicked it open, looked at the face of the bespectacled, tousled-haired Englishman on the third page and then at the word ‘occupation’. The word ‘journalist’ does not obtain many visas in the Middle East, and so the British Passport Office had been obliging enough to write ‘representative’ in the space provided. The Russian, who could read about as much Latin script as I could Cyrillic, tapped his finger on the word and asked in painfully good English: ‘What do you “represent”?’ A newspaper, I owned up. ‘Ah, correspondent.’ And he gave me a big knowing smile. I was led to a small communications hut in the snow from which emerged a half-naked paratroop captain wearing shades. Captain Viktor from Tashkent showed no animosity when he was told I was a journalist, and his men gathered round me, anxious to talk in faltering but by no means poor English. There was a grunting from the engine of my bus and I saw it leaving the checkpoint for the tunnel without me, my betrayer staring at me hatefully from a rear window.

Private Tebin from the Estonian city of Tallinn – if he survived Afghanistan, I assume he is now a proud citizen of the European Union, happily flourishing his new passport at British immigration desks – repeatedly described how dangerous the mountains had become now that rebels were shooting daily at Soviet troops. Captain Viktor wanted to know why I had chosen to be a journalist. But what emerged most strongly was that all these soldiers were fascinated by pop music. Lieutenant Nikolai from Tashkent interrupted at one point to ask: ‘Is it true that Paul McCartney has been arrested in Tokyo?’ And he put his extended hands together as if he had been handcuffed. Why had McCartney been arrested? he wanted to know. I asked him where he had heard the Beatles’ music and two other men chorused at once: ‘On the “Voice of America” radio.’

I was smiling now. Not because the Russians were friendly – each had studied my passport and all were now calling me ‘Robert’ as if I was a comrade-in-arms rather than the citizen of an enemy power – but because these Soviet soldiers with their overt interest in Western music did not represent the iron warriors of Stalingrad. They seemed like any Western soldiers: naive, cheerful in front of strangers, trusting me because I was – and here in the Afghan snows, of course, the fact was accentuated – a fellow European. They seemed genuinely apologetic that they could not allow me to continue my journey but they stopped a bus travelling in the opposite direction. ‘To Kabul!’ Captain Viktor announced. I refused. The people on that bus had seen me talking to the Russians. They would assume I was a Russian. No amount of assurances that I was British would satisfy them. I doubted if I would ever reach Kabul, at least not alive.

So Lieutenant Nikolai flagged down a passing Russian military truck at the back of a convoy and put me aboard. He held out his hand. ‘Dos vidanya,’ he said. ‘Goodbye – and give my love to Linda McCartney.’ And so I found myself travelling down the Hindu Kush on Soviet army convoy number 58 from Tashkent to Kabul. This was incredible. No Western journalist had been able to talk to the Soviet troops invading Afghanistan, let alone ride on their convoys, and here I was, sitting next to an armed Russian soldier as he drove his truckload of food and ammunition to Kabul, allowed to watch this vast military deployment from a Soviet army vehicle. This was better than Mazar.

As we began our descent of the gorge, the Russian driver beside me pulled his kitbag from behind his seat, opened the straps and offered me an orange. ‘Please, you look up,’ he said. ‘Look at the top of the hills.’ With near disbelief, I realised what was happening. While he was wrestling the wheel of his lorry on the ice, I was being asked to watch the mountain tops for gunmen. The orange was my pay for helping him out. Slowly, we began to fall behind the convoy. The soldier now hauled his rifle from the back of the cab and laid it between us on the seat. ‘Now you watch right of road,’ he said. ‘Tell if you see people.’ I did as I was told, as much for my safety as his. Our truck had a blue-painted interior with the word Kama engraved over the dashboard. It was one of the lorries built with American assistance at the Kama River factory in the Soviet Union, and I wondered what President Carter would have thought if he knew the uses to which his country’s technology was now being put. The driver had plastered his cab with Christmas cards.

At the bottom of the pass we found his convoy, and an officer – tall, with intelligent, unnaturally pale green eyes, khaki trousers tucked into heavy army boots – came to the door on my side of the truck. ‘You are English,’ he said with a smile. ‘I am Major Yuri. Come to the front with me.’ And so we trekked through the deep slush to the front of the column where a Soviet tank was trying to manoeuvre up the pass in the opposite direction. ‘It’s a T-62,’ he said, pointing to the sleeve halfway down the tank’s gun barrel. I thought it prudent not to tell him that I had already recognised the classification.

And I had to admit that Major Yuri seemed a professional soldier, clearly admired by his men – they were all told to shake my hand – and, in the crisis in which we would shortly find ourselves, behaved calmly and efficiently. With fractious Afghan soldiers, whom he seemed privately to distrust, he was unfailingly courteous. When five Afghan soldiers turned up beside the convoy to complain that Russian troops had been waving rifles in their direction, Major Yuri spoke to them as an equal, taking off his gloves and shaking each by the hand until they beamed with pleasure. But he was also a party man.

What, he asked, did I think of Mrs Thatcher? I explained that people in Britain held different views about our prime minister – I wisely forbore to give my own – but that they were permitted to hold these views freely. I said that President Carter was not the bad man he was depicted as in the Moscow press. Major Yuri listened in silence. So what did he think about President Brezhnev? I was grinning now. I knew what he had to say. So did he. He shook his head with a smile. ‘I believe,’ he said slowly, ‘that Comrade Brezhnev is a very good man.’ Major Yuri was well-read. He knew his Tolstoy and admired the music of Shostakovich, especially his Leningrad symphony. But when I asked if he had read Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, he shook his head and tapped his revolver holster. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is for Solzhenitsyn.’

I squeezed into Major Yuri’s truck, his driver and I on the outside seats, Yuri in the middle; and so we set off for Kabul. ‘England a good country?’ he asked. ‘Better than Afghanistan?’ No, Major Yuri did not want to be in Afghanistan, he admitted. He wanted to be at home in Kazakhstan with his wife and nine-year-old daughter and planned to take a return convoy back to them in three days’ time. He had spent thirteen of his thirty years in the army, had not enough money to buy a car and could never travel abroad because he was an officer. It was his way of telling me that life in the Soviet Union was hard, that his life was not easy, that perhaps Comrade Brezhnev was not that good a man. Had not Brezhnev sent him here in the first place? When I asked questions he could not answer, he smiled in silent acknowledgement that he would have liked to be able to do so.