A couple of weeks ago they showed a Russian film about the Russian Afghan war on TV called 9 Rota, or 9th Company.
You actually saw this when it first came out back in 2005 or thereabouts, but settled in to watch it anyway as you remembered it as being quite good, and in any case this time you had the chance to see it with English subtitles.
You distinctly remember that the first time round you sat down to it in some trepidation. This is because you have heard horrendous things about life in the Soviet/ Russian army and were somehow expecting the film to be one long tale of bloody hazings punctuated by the odd suicide. Which just goes to show you how much you had acclimatised back into the British way of doing things after a full year or so back in Blighty. That’s definitely the film a British director would have made.
However, what it actually is, is a war buddy film akin to all those American movies about Vietnam that were so popular in the 80s. Which is entirely appropriate as the Soviet action in Afghanistan was at least as successful as the US involvement in ‘Nam.
So it’s not particularly original as a story. Young recruits, who just happen to run the gamut of character types from an artist and an oversensitive weakling through new father to a thug and a hooligan, get whipped into shape by an aggressive drill sergeant, before getting sent off to the wilds of Afghanistan where all but one of them get massacred, along with their entire unit, in the last fifteen minutes or so.
You hope that giving the end away is not a spoiler. But frankly they were doomed from the moment they set foot on enemy soil and encountered a set of soldiers who had completed their tour of duty and were on their way home. The vaugue sense of forboding that has been building up throughout the training section is lifted and pretty much everyone, on screen and in front of it, gets carried away by their fierce joy.
And then their plane takes off, promptly gets hit by someone with a granade launcher in the nearby hills and comes down in a ball of flame.
Clearly no one is getting out of here alive.
Anyway, watching it again, a number of things struck you.
There was rather more swearing than you had remembered, for a start.
And you also had to keep reminding yourself that this was something set in the 80s. The late 80s no less. Of course, army life is never luxurious, but to say that the overall quality of life was unrecognisable is probably an understatement, and yet this was a period where you were not only alive but well into your teens.
More than this, however, the sheer geographical range of the characters’ backgrounds which struck you this time round. You have been having the multiculturalism of the UK rather rammed down your throat lately – the fact of it, the desirability (or not) of it, the tensions caused by it and the future of it – and it was with a certain amount of amusement that you recognised that in terms of ethnic diversity, the Soviet Union could certainly give the UK a run for its money.
If this were a British film, you’d tend towards the cynical and suggest that the fact that there were soldiers from all corners of the Slavic empire, as well as representatives from the Caucuses (Chechnya no less) as well as at least one person of obviously Mongolian descent was the traditional nod towards the idea that we are all one big happy family in this nationality.
But Russians on the whole don’t bother with the kind of thinking that suggests we of different backgrounds should all be able to get along, and in any case, the whole thing seemed more an opportunity for the characters to indulge in a bit of energetic and thoroughly un PC racial banter than anything else.
Apart from the whole can of worms which is the use of ‘Chorny’ (’Black’) to describe people of swarthy appearance from the Southern states and whether or not this is supposed to be as insulting as calling someone by the N word, a question you have always rather studiously avoided asking, take the nickname of one of the old lags the raw recruits meet up with once they get in country (or do I mean up country?).
Calling someone from the Ukraine ‘Khokol’ is about as harmless as calling a Welshman ‘Taffy’. It might seem perfectly ok when you are all living in Manchester together as students, but less of a good idea when you have just screamed it across a street while visiting Cardiff.
However, you wouldn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. This name calling is neither a particularly frequent nor particularly notable part of the film, and in fact the whole tone is, you suppose, supposed to evoke the kind of gruff male bonding that women get so very irritated by when it is accompanied by the need to down 13 pints and eat a curry of a Friday evening. The artist’s nickname of ‘Giaconda’ (’Mona Lisa’) isn’t meant to be particularly complimentary either.
More obvious despite the studious avoidance of any real political message in the film, is the complete indifference to the loss of life which is being shown by the Soviet Union towards its own soldiers.
It’s not the shoot out at the end. This is, apparently, based on a real incident, except that instead of the whole company getting slaughtered, only (only) six of the forty odd soldiers actually died, although a good many more were injured ( a lot more Afghans died than that, of course, but this is not a film about the Afghan experience of the conflict).
But the fact that there is a tacit acknowledgement though out the film that there is no winning this war, and yet men will continue to be thrown, virtually unsupported and distinctly underequiped and undertrained, at the problem indefinitely, is frankly absolutely typical of the Soviet and now Russia’s attitude towards its own people.
You have occasionally found yourself slightly impatient with the way that everybody in the US and the UK seems so surprised, nay outraged, that soldiers tend to get a bit killed when engaging in war. It is, of course, an example of the insistence that it’s the individual that counts above everything, and that is something that you often find so obnoxious in this society.
Yet without that constant pressure, would the casualty rate not be even higher? At the moment, the US death count in Iraq is about 4,000. Which if you consider that they have been there for about half the time the Soviets spent in Afghanistan, is about half of half of the total deaths in Afghanistan (15,000). It is a good thing that the standard of equipment and support given to troops is a matter of debate and investigation. It is a good thing that there is some sense that people should not be used as cannon fodder.
What you find absolutely unsupportable is the acceptance of the routine disposal of Soviet/ Russian citizens in acts of mass carnage which this film reflects. It’s not the first war film to deal with this issue. It’s not the preserve of Soviet or Russian warfare. But you could really have done with it little less fatality and a little more outrage on this point.
Although your dismay may have also been brought about by the thought that you are about to give birth to someone who in 18 years will be eligible for conscription into the Russian army.
