20 years ago, the international mission of Soviet troops in Afghanistan began \\ Afghanistan Library

This year is a special year for Afghan veterans. In February, we celebrated the 10th anniversary of the withdrawal of a limited contingent of our troops from Afghanistan. December is a different date. As you may remember, it was just beginning in 1979. It turns out that 20 years have passed since the beginning of that undeclared war.

Nowadays, the fighting, no, the war, is flaring up and going out, and then flaring up again in Russia. It's hot, very hot in the Caucasus. And we're thinking about Afghanistan. It's not just about finding historical, military, political, and other parallels. Although that's also necessary. We're giving the floor to the "Afghans" and talking about those events, so that people know and remember the "heroes of other times" and give them the recognition they deserve. Then the faith will be strengthened that the current defenders of the Fatherland will not be left without attention and the promised care. Those who today face danger, defending the interests of the country and the state in southern Russia and other hot spots. The army should not have unlit stars.

A selection of materials dedicated to those events is opened by the memoirs of Valery Kurilov, a fighter of the Zenit special forces officer unit.

...Winter days are short. When I left the barracks, it was already dark. The sky was covered with dark clouds, and there were no stars to be seen - it gets dark early here at this time of year. The palace stood tall on its hill, illuminated by spotlights.

Everything seemed to be going as usual. However, each of us understood that something extraordinary was about to happen. On this day, December 27, 1979, a small group of Russian soldiers was tasked with capturing the capital of a friendly foreign country without any cover or adequate fire support. Their mission was not only to seize important government facilities but also to hold them until the arrival of the main forces.

Of all the objects to be captured, the Palace in front of us was probably the most important. It was here, on the second floor, where the windows were lit, that the cunning, treacherous, and power-hungry leader of the current Afghan government, Hafizullah Amin, was currently residing.

How many of us were going to storm the Palace? There are only twenty-five people from our Zenit squad... And the same number of fighters from Group A, which was referred to as Group Grom during this operation. Besides, about twenty-five soldiers and officers of the "Muslim battalion" - mostly mechanics-drivers of armored vehicles, shooters-operators. And armored vehicles: four well-worn APCs and four infantry fighting vehicles. There were also snipers and grenade launchers on the hills, who were supposed to cover us with fire...

We must take over the Palace. Amin must be eliminated. That's an order. And no matter what any of us may think, the order must be carried out.

If only we could have a glimpse into the future! To see what awaits us tomorrow morning...

It would be nice if in the morning, proud victors, we would remember the events of this night, sipping vodka brought from the embassy, preparing to leave for home. And our commanders would congratulate us. And the operation we carried out would go down in the history of the world's intelligence agencies, and young students at the university would study our actions in their textbooks...

Or maybe it won't be like that! After all, there aren't many of us... Maybe tomorrow morning, our disfigured, stiffened corpses will be piled up or laid out in a row. Examining and searching our bodies won't yield any information; we don't have any identification documents, notebooks, or any other papers. All we have are our clothes and weapons...

Eh, to know... Although, what will it give, this knowledge? Yes nothing! There is an order, and it must be carried out. Everything will depend on the speed, the onslaught... We have nothing to lose! We are better prepared in the combat plan! We must win!

The armored personnel carriers of the "Muslim Battalion" are already in a column. The headlights are off, and the engines are running. Near the storage facilities, there is a row of trucks with machine guns and automatic grenade launchers mounted on their bodies. Communications officers are running around the yard, pulling wires.

Everyone was in a hurry. Volodya Bykovsky ran up to us and told us that Titich was urgently calling everyone together. We rushed into the room.

"That's it, guys!" Tytich said firmly. "Get back to your posts. Be careful, take care of yourselves!"

We pushed our way through the corridor and ran out into the yard to our APC, number 112.

I glanced at the Palace, which shone festively in the night under the floodlights. The flag of the main entrance is raised. So, "himself" is in place. I saw the little figures at the foot of it suddenly scurrying, scurrying, and then... gone! I wondered if the information had been leaked and they were preparing to defend themselves. No, I can't believe it's going to be all right without blood... It doesn't happen that way!

... From somewhere in the city, we heard the muffled sound of a powerful explosion. Signal rockets soared into the sky.

Everything! It's time!

We quickly took our seats in the armored personnel carrier.

A command came over the radio:

"Forward!" The driver stepped on the gas, and the APC swayed, roared, and rolled into the valley separating us from the Palace.

Immediately, the air was rent by the roar of the Shilok machine guns, which were firing over our heads. We could clearly hear the explosions. The Palace was being shelled. Our grenade throwers, machine gunners, and snipers, who were positioned on the nearby hills, were firing back.

* * *

Here we go!

My heart skipped a beat, stopped for a second, and then, like an engine that has been shifted into a higher gear, it began to beat faster. Suddenly, I felt warm, even hot, and my body began to tremble slightly. I felt a surge of energy and a sense of freedom.

"Vovka, open the hatch!" I shouted excitedly.

Volodya threw back the hatch cover.

"Just don't push! "What is it?" he asked worriedly.

I climbed into the hatch and... got stuck! I saw that he had caught his machine gun belt on a ledge. I quickly freed the belt and gave Volodya a hard shove in the butt. He flew out like a cork from a champagne bottle. I don't remember how I got out of the hatch, but I must have done it very quickly. I was lucky, and so was Volodya, when we jumped out of the car.

...At the same time, a wiry and agile Borka Suvorov was climbing out of the next armored personnel carrier through the top hatch, under a hail of machine-gun fire. He was unlucky: a 7.62 mm machine-gun bullet hit him in the groin, just below the bottom edge of his bulletproof vest. Indeed, his chainmail was too short... He fell under the armored personnel carrier's wheels, crawled a few meters, pulled out a personal first aid kit, and even attempted to bandage himself. But the bullet had severed his veins, and Borka had almost no chance of survival. He lost consciousness almost immediately, and thick, hot blood soaked his uniform and spilled onto the concrete roadway...

... I came to my senses only when I reached a narrow stone parapet, no more than half a meter wide.

I looked around. Our troops were lying along the parapet. I had run ten or fifteen meters away from my armored personnel carrier. Our entire column was in disarray. An armored personnel carrier was smoking in front of us, blocking the road. The Palace was brightly illuminated by searchlights just beyond the parapet.

"What fools! They didn't even turn off the lights!" I thought about the guards. Volodka Bykovsky was standing next to me. There was so much gunfire that it was hard to tell who was shooting at whom. Every now and then, there would be a loud bang or explosion. My ears were ringing. The black sky was filled with tracer bullets. The tracer bullets were flying in wide arcs, and it was impossible to tell where they were coming from or where they were going.

Bright red flashes flicker in the huge, dimly lit windows of the Palace. I realized that the machine guns were firing. They must have placed the bipods of the "hand guns" on the windowsills and were firing!

"Where is this entrance, anyway?" Volodka shouted in my ear.

- And figs knows!

I raised myself a little above the parapet. There it was, the entrance to the Palace! It was about fifteen meters away from us, maybe a little more... We just didn't make it!

"They're crawling!" I shouted to Volodya and, trying not to lean out from behind the parapet, crawled forward. I waddled over prone bodies (dead, or what?), and every now and then I came across some rounded stones under my hands. He picked up one of them and held it up to his eyes. Christmas trees, but these are grenades! Exactly, rounded RG-42 of our production! And with a detonator capsule and ... without checks!

I realized that the guards were throwing grenades at us from the windows. For some reason, some of the grenades didn't explode. Maybe it was because they were old. Well, thank God for that! It was really unpleasant to crawl over grenades with their fuses pulled out. It was quite nerve-wracking.

I stuck my gun over the parapet and fired a long burst in the direction of the Palace without aiming. I looked out. The white stone wall of the Palace was about twenty meters in front of me. A machine gun was firing from a high window (the glass had been broken out, leaving only the frames). I could see the shaking barrel of the machine gun, with a trefoil of fire at the tip.

What a bastard! He's shooting without any delays! I struggled to align the sights and the front sight in the dim light, took aim, and began firing short bursts at the window, aiming for the wall to ricochet the bullets and hit the machine gunner. Quickly freeing myself, I now fired at random. My bursts were clearly visible: I was loading the magazines myself, and every second bullet was a tracer. I could see the stream of fire, and I was directing it where I needed it to go.

Someone flashed in the next window, and I immediately fired a burst. No one else appeared. I started firing at the machine gun again.

... We still hadn't reached the entrance to the Palace, and we were stuck. But it wasn't too far away now. I looked out and saw that the striped guardhouse was on fire, and the bright "Volga" was full of holes... "It's a pity, it was a nice car..." I thought.

To my right, Volodya Bykovsky was shooting at the windows. To my left, an automatic rifle was firing continuously. I looked around and saw a soldier from Group A standing on one knee in the open, in full view of everyone, firing short bursts at the windows of the Palace. He was wearing a large, round, opaque helmet with a visor and a strange-shaped bulletproof vest with a high collar, like a sweater. The visor's triplex reflected the glare of the fire.

As it turned out later, already in the hospital, it was Oleg Balashov, the commander of the Alfovtsev squad.

Oh, damn, I thought, that's a great helmet! I wish I had one like that! I was wearing a regular tin soldier's helmet that a bullet could penetrate through...

On all fours, I made my way along the parapet and came across Sasha Zvezdankov. He was sitting against the stone wall, his long legs stretched out. His face was covered in blood.

"Hey, Muscovite, are you alive?"

- A... Eagle! It hit me... - Sasha's voice was so resigned that it made me feel uneasy.

- Where? In the head? Hard?

- I don't know... Both in the face and in the arm... Bandage it... I feel sick...

His sleeve was black with blood. The nausea was from the blood loss, from the shock of pain... He pulled a personal packet out of the top pocket of his jacket, tore open the wrapper. He bandaged it.

- Lie here, don't get up. I have to go.

"Come on."

I loosened the belt on my machine gun, threw it around my neck, and took off running. I was almost on all fours, crouching and dodging, just like they taught us at the training camp, and I was firing my machine gun in a fan pattern.

Suddenly, I felt a giant, hot needle pierce my left hand, my unlucky hand!

I don't remember how I ended up under the arches of the Palace entrance. I leaned against the wall. My arm was almost completely numb, I just couldn't feel it! The sleeve was swollen with blood. Damn, a second wound, and all in the same arm! I tried to move my fingers. They seemed to be moving slightly!

Leaning against the wall, he stood up. Our men were running past in the half-darkness.

- Misha! Yasha! - they shouted from all sides.

To avoid hitting my own people! I realized, and I shouted too: - Misha! Yasha!

I ran a few more steps down the corridor, which seemed endlessly long, and pulled open a door. The room was dimly lit, but I could see that there were tables and a sofa. I pulled a grenade out of my pocket, pulled the pin with my teeth, and rolled it into the room. The grenade bounced on the floor, and I slammed the door shut and jumped back against the frame. The door creaked open, releasing a cloud of smoke and dust from the office.

Here I am...

* * *

...That's when the automatic fire caught up with me.

The gunfire came from somewhere to the left, probably from a half-open door. The machine-gun bullet pierced my morally and physically outdated bulletproof vest and, after tearing through its metal plates and spinning like a rose, entered my left side, just below the lower rib. The impact was like being hit with a crowbar. I was knocked off my feet and fell to the floor on my right side. My head spun for a moment, but I didn't lose consciousness. Instinctively pointing my gun in the direction of the supposed enemy, I fired a long burst of bullets into the semi-darkness and heard a wild scream. It was like stepping on a cat...

I was nauseous. It was as if someone was poking a red-hot poker into my wounded side, so painful was it. I tried to sit up. I succeeded.

One of our guys came across me:

- Are you hurt? Can you walk?

I nodded.

- Get over to the exit... It looks like our guys are being bandaged. Be careful, don't get killed by your own people! Don't leave the building, they've ordered to kill anyone who leaves the Palace!

Damn it! How insulting. A little more - and victory. And I leave the game? And victory? Around the shooting, a grenade exploded, plaster from the ceiling fell on the helmet.

Barely aware of what I was doing, I ventured into a dark alley.

At that moment, a fireball exploded just five steps to my right. It was probably an RG-42 grenade that had been thrown down a flight of stairs. I vividly remember that a hundredth or thousandth of a second before the grenade fragments and granite chips reached me, I tightly closed my eyes and squeezed my eyelids shut. The fragments struck my face, my arms, and my entire body. The blast knocked me to the ground...

* * *

...On December 27, my wife Tanya felt bad all day: she had a headache and was oppressed by an incomprehensible feeling of anxiety... In the evening, she went to the kindergarten to pick up her children straight from work. She cooked dinner. The kids ate. She didn't eat.

"Kolya!" she called to her eldest son, who was six years old at the time. "I'm going to lie down and rest for a while. Take care of Andryusha... Play with him..."

"Okay, Mom.

Tanya had already dozed off, but suddenly she was jolted awake.

She jumped up from the couch and ran to the window. It was snowing. It was quiet and dark.

Two-year-old Andryushka came up behind him and leaned against his leg.

"It's night, it's dark," Tanya said sadly. "Where is our father, Andryusha? What is he doing right now?"

Andryusha looked out the window at the December snowfall and said quite seriously:

"Probably killed...

* * *

... Then I remember sitting somewhere, my back against the wall, my right hand on the floor... There was a carpet on the floor, a thick, shaggy carpet, a real oriental carpet... I had an idiotic thought: I wish I had a carpet like that at home. No, I probably never will have a carpet like that... Well, fuck it. Then I realized that I couldn't hear anything with my right ear. I touched it with my fingers, and it was hot and sticky. I was bleeding from my ear. There was a continuous ringing in his left ear...

Someone was tugging at my sleeve.

- Who is this? An Afghan? Hey, who are you?

- Are you blind? You can see the boots! One of our men... It's hard to tell, his face is covered in blood...

- Is he dead? He's not moving.

I didn't have the strength to respond or react, but I moved my body to show that I was still alive.

- Hey, medics! Guys! Who's there? Here's another one. Oh, you can't get hold of him! Come on, grab him, let's go!

They took me by the arms and lifted me up. I started moving my legs...

In the fresh air...

* * *

...I came to my senses a little in the fresh air.

- Wow! Is he alive?

Volodya Poddubny was standing in front of me.

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