Hidden in Afghanistan: Soviet Veterans of a Previous War Compare and Tremble

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I thought this was very interesting.

Hidden in Afghanistan: Soviet Veterans of a Previous War Compare and Tremble

Even after three decades, Gennady Tseuma remembers the wavering call to prayer that went up clear over the hillside village. It floated out over the fields and river and pierced the early morning hush on the Bangi Bridge. Tseuma, then a Soviet soldier assigned to a small force guarding the river crossing in northern Afghanistan’s Kunduz province, recalls a feeling of dread when he heard the sound. Like many of the conscripts serving in the Red Army in Afghanistan, Tseuma was bored and undisciplined, and after 10 months of service, curiosity finally got the best of him.

The decision to investigate the call to prayer cost him the life he had known up to that point. “Our checkpoint was close to the village. Every morning the mullah did the call to prayer. It was totally new to me. I didn’t understand what was going on. I thought maybe they were killing people or something,” Tseuma tells TIME. “So, one day, early in the morning, I got off my base to take a look. When I got close to the mosque there was an old man sitting there. Then suddenly men with guns surrounded me and captured me. After that, the mujahedin told me to convert to Islam or they would kill me. I decided it was better to live than to die, so I became a Muslim.”

For the past 29 years, Tseuma and maybe around a hundred other Soviet POW/MIAs have lived through some of the most violent history of one of the most violent countries on earth. After serving in the European-style Soviet army, they lived and sometimes fought as Afghans. Those of them still alive have an extraordinary window into Afghan society combined with unique insight into the historical parallels between the Soviet defeat and the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces at the end of 2014.

Life has improved in the past 10 years but Tseuma — or Nek Mohammad as he was renamed after his conversion to Islam — senses grave danger ahead. “I’m afraid. Right now there are roads and there is light. But let’s see what happens down the road. Then there won’t be lights. Then the war will start,” he says. “People will be gobbled up everywhere. People will start killing each other. Then what will be here? Life will be here, but it will be bad.”

Mohammad switches off the TV set — he had been watching a Russian quiz show playing via satellite TV in the guest room of his mud-brick house on the edge of Kunduz city. He seems to be pondering both the past and the future with his quick, blue eyes — eyes that contrast with the white of his shalwar kameez — the traditional clothing of an Afghan man. “The Soviet government was looking for us, but I didn’t let them find me because I didn’t know what they would do to me,” says Mohammad in the soft-accented Russian of his native eastern Ukraine. The mujahedin pushed him to wage jihad against his former comrades, but “I have not shot one bullet since I became a Muslim,” he says.

Mohammad lived as a prisoner in the compound of a local mujahedin commander, which lies just a few miles from his old post with the Red Army. Many of the other shuravi — as the vets are known in the former Soviet Union — had similar experiences. “When they were captured, they became slaves. Psychologically, these guys are damaged,” Alexander Lavrentyev, the vice-chairman of Russia’s War Veterans Committee, tells TIME. “They are in their late 40s, but they all look like they are in their 60s.”

In a vicious and confused war, the Afgantsy — another term for the Soviet vets — could disappear “like a puff of smoke,” says Lavrentyev. “Afghans were sitting, watching and you didn’t know if they were mujahedin or not. And that’s it. They’d pull you behind a wall and the troops would never find you again.” There are the stories of Soviet soldiers being stolen in the night, the stories of fighters disappearing after wandering onto remote corners of their own base, or the stories that begin and end with “they went to a village to buy cigarettes, and suddenly …,” Lavrentyev says. “And those were not isolated incidents.” Around 266 are still missing, he says. Some of those were buried in Afghanistan in unmarked graves — like the set of six uniformed remains accidentally unearthed by a bulldozer a few years ago at an old Soviet camp in Kunduz — now the base of the German Provincial Reconstruction Team. Lavrentyev has found 29 alive so far, and 22 have returned home. The rest have chosen to stay because they have family or because — to Lavrentyev at least — they have become more Afghan than Soviet.

Read more: Left in Afghanistan, Soviet Veterans Fear U.S. Pullout | World | TIME.com