Cheers and Tears Greet Returning Soviet Soldiers

The wife of one soldier wore her wedding dress Wednesday so her husband could easily spot her in the crowd and see that her love was just as strong as the day he left for Afghanistan eight months ago.

An elderly Red Army veteran, campaign medals decorating the front of his suit coat, wept uncontrollably throughout the two-hour patriotic ceremony at a massive reviewing ground constructed for the occasion on the banks of the big, muddy Amu Darya River.

Various officials from the Soviet republic of Uzbekistan, in which this cotton-growing border town is located, gave long-winded speeches. So did Communist Party officials. So did visiting dignitaries from Afghanistan. In between, a uniformed cadre of Young Pioneers announced tributes to the soldiers with stentorian voices that sometimes cracked.

After more than two hours of this civic spectacle, Oxana Gerasimenko could stand waiting no longer. Pushing her way through police lines, she ran to the arms of her soldier-husband where he was standing at attention in front of his infantry squad’s armored vehicle.

She gave him a crushing hug, then a swooning kiss. He had been fighting in Afghanistan for more than two years.

The kiss of Oxana Gerasimenko made it official: Eight years and 143 days after Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan, the first of the boys were home and the rest were on the way.

“I feel beautiful,” one 19-year-old soldier, Igor Lukyanchuk, told a reporter. “I am glad to see my people again.”

Under an agreement signed last month in Geneva, the estimated 115,000 Soviet troops in Afghanistan are to be withdrawn within nine months, leaving the Soviet-trained and -equipped Afghan army on its own to deal with the moujahedeen guerrillas .

Cross Friendship Bridge

The first unit across the frontier was identified as the 1st Motorized Infantry Brigade, 1,200 men commanded by Col. Yuri Starov. At 9:22 a.m. local time, Starov’s command car rolled across Friendship Bridge and into the Soviet Union.

Speaking to the crowd at the ceremony, Starov said: “Our officers and men have done all they could for peace on Afghan soil. Our best comrades have not laid down their lives there in vain. Afghanistan remains free and independent.”

But in the eight years of fighting in Afghanistan, the Soviets appear to have accomplished little. The rebels seem to be stronger than ever, and the government Moscow sought to shore up is no more stable than before. Many Western diplomats expect it to fall as soon as the Soviet pullout is complete.

Col. Alexi Gorokov, chief military editor of the party newspaper Pravda, accompanied the brigade into Termez. He said it had covered 420 miles since Sunday, when it pulled out of its garrison at Jalalabad, about 80 miles east of Kabul.

“We went from the subtropics to the mountains to the desert,” he told a group of reporters, “from 104-degree heat to 41-degree cold, and from snow and ice into heat again.”

Attacked Near Kabul

Gorokov, who has a son who served six months in Afghanistan as a motor mechanic, said the column of 230 tanks and armored personnel carriers was fired on about 20 miles north of Kabul. The rebels fired three rockets, he said, but failed to hit any of the Soviet vehicles.

He added that about an hour afterward, the column was warned by radio to expect another attack, but it failed to materialize.

From then on, he said, the worst they had to deal with was the harassment of several hundred Soviet and foreign reporters on hand to report the withdrawal.

At four “photo opportunities,” reporters and television crews had clambered over the vehicles. Some were Americans, whose government has provided the Afghan rebel forces with millions of dollars in military aid. More than 15,000 Soviet soldiers are reported to have been killed in Afghanistan.

Days before Wednesday’s ceremony, it had become clear that the Soviets were planning a show for the media. Preparation of the parade ground at Termez had been noted by U.S. intelligence satellites, and U.S. officials had advised reporters that the Soviets were planning something out of the ordinary.

No Customs Check

About 100 foreign reporters were bused up to the border from Kabul and given special permission to cross into the Soviet Union without visas.

“There will be no customs check today,” a Soviet official told the reporters. “We will trust you.”

The 1st Brigade’s vehicles crossed the river and entered Termez with red flags and garlands of flowers streaming from their antennae.

Yet the official hoopla did nothing to diminish the obvious joy of the soldiers, most of them in their late teens or early 20s, drawn mostly from the poor, rural and working-class populations. Teen-age girls in Uzbek ethnic costumes gave them bread and salt, a traditional gesture of welcome.

Like many of the men coming home, Lukyanchuk spoke of the beauty of Afghanistan. “I love its green valleys and steep mountains,” he said, “but I would love it more without the bandits, the enemy.”

Even at the highest ranks of the Communist Party, people’s lives have been touched by the war.

Among the welcoming officials was Vladimir Sevruk, deputy head of the party Central Committee’s propaganda department, who is coordinating publicity for the withdrawal. Sevruk has been in Afghanistan a dozen times, and a few weeks ago he had planned to meet his son, Sergei, 34, in Kabul.

Son Was Wounded

The son was working in Afghanistan as a reporter for the official newspaper Izvestia. A few days before the planned meeting in Kabul, young Sevruk was severely wounded in a rebel action north of Kabul.

Sevruk said his son, partially paralyzed and unable to talk at first, was flown to Moscow and hospitalized. On Tuesday, he said, the young man spoke for the first time since the attack--”his first sentence, eight words.” He said his son had asked about a friend who was with him at the time, who had been killed.

One of the thousands of people on hand to greet the returning soldiers was Alexander Pleshakov, 19, an engineering student from Moscow. He was dressed as the soldiers were, in a brown uniform, blue-and-white-striped undershirt and floppy campaign hat.

He is not a soldier, but an actor in a television movie being filmed nearby.

Soviet Anti-War Film

It is an anti-war film, Pleshakov said, “the first film about Afghanistan in the Soviet Union.” It is to be called “All Expenses Paid,” and is being directed by Alexei Sotikov. Pleshakov plays a young Russian who goes to Afghanistan and is killed there. Fellow soldiers write home in an effort to get a memorial built to their comrade, and to all the others who have fallen there.

Pleshakov said the film reflects his own anti-war feelings and those of his friends. Blond and bright, fluent in English and a son of the privileged class, he may never have to serve in the army. And he evoked the outrage over war similar to that in the United States over the Vietnam conflict two decades ago.

“I think we had no reason to go to Afghanistan,” he said. “We should never have gone. I see no reason for it. It was a crazy and stupid war.”