The Faces of War : A Russian soldier smuggled a camera to the front in Afghanistan. In his searing memoir, he says he writes of what he cannot speak.

Vladislav Tamarov stares down a street lined with upscale art galleries and restaurants. He lights a cigarette that will burn to a nub. Then he will have another and another.

“I was drafted at 19,” he remarks. “I felt this was bad, and I was right.”

The 27-year-old Russian photographer has traveled far from Afghanistan, where he left his youth on the battlefields.

In December, 1979, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan. On Aug. 10, 1984, Tamarov arrived in Kabul to begin his two-year tour of duty. Kept in ignorance of the ferocity of the war--as were most Soviet citizens--he thought he was going to build hospitals and plant trees.

He found himself in a mine-sweeping unit. He was stationed there for 621 days, patrolling the mountains.

Now Tamarov stands on a sidewalk in front of a San Francisco gallery where his pictures from his life as a soldier are on display. He has just published a memoir, “Afghanistan: Soviet Vietnam,” based on his war diaries and filled with his pictures of fresh-faced Soviet soldiers at the front.

Tamarov’s book is probably the first that looks at the Afghanistan war from the view of a “grunt,” says Thomas Christensen, executive editor at Mercury House, a small San Francisco publisher that has printed 7,500 copies of “Afghanistan: Soviet Vietnam.”

While in the army, Tamarov secretly photographed whatever he saw around him with a cheap camera. He rigged up a darkroom at his base camp and made prints for his comrades. Some officers permitted his photography, though his government forbade it.

When he returned to Leningrad, he read news accounts of victorious Soviet soldiers; there was nothing of what he had seen. Tamarov made a futile attempt to tell his story in the Soviet press.

Frustrated, he began to write: “On our base, where instead of resting between combat missions, we practiced marching in formation. On our base, where the ones who took orders never returned, while their medals went to those who gave the orders. On our base, where kind people were transformed into vicious ones. Where the vicious became cruel. Where they made boys into murderers. For what?”

Tamarov spent five years writing his manuscript, drawing from notes he kept in Afghanistan, conversations with American veterans about Vietnam and visions of fallen comrades who revisit him in dreams.

In one photograph, his close friend, Sasha walks through tall grass, an automatic in one hand, his smooth boyish face looking into the camera. It was taken just before a combat mission, and Tamarov made a quick print so his friend could send it to his family. Twelve hours later, Sasha died in an ambush.

“When he was killed, I had no problem killing,” Tamarov says “I had a mission of anger. This was real anger. . . . Take aim to kill, to kill, to kill, to kill. And I was 20. This was a dangerous game to play, and who survives is who kills first. In this game, the prize is the chance to play again.”

As he goes back to his days as a soldier, Tamarov chokes up, then apologizes. He says he writes of what he cannot speak.

Of Tamarov’s book, “if you substitute the word Vietnam for Afghanistan, you’d be reading about American veterans 20 years ago. It’s like examining myself 20 years ago,” says Jack McCloskey, who was a medic in Vietnam and helped establish the veterans’ service group Swords to Plowshares. He first met Tamarov several years ago when the Russian visited the United States with a delegation of Afghanistan vets.

“He feels a strong kinship to Vietnam veterans,” says Vietnam veteran John Messmore, who lives in Virginia and is Tamorov’s friend. “He knows what we went through and he wants the American public to know that it was the same for the Russian soldier.”

It was the American Vietnam veterans he met during exchange delegations who inspired him to tell his story, Tamarov says. “At first, we had trouble with the language. But we understood each other without interpreters. Sometimes you can look into someone’s eyes and understand everything. We received more understanding from Americans than we did from our friends at home.

“I learned that everything was the same: In any foreign war, you go because you are drafted. You’re not stopping anything. You’re just killing people.”

The Americans brought to Russia practical information about post-traumatic stress syndrome, advice on organizing veterans’ groups and lobbying for benefits and examples of advances in prosthetics.

“In some ways, they have it worse,” says U. S. veteran Messmore, who traveled with the first group of Vietnam veterans to the Soviet Union in 1988. “If you lost your arm and leg because of the war, you are doomed to being hidden in your family’s home. You become an embarrassment.”

The early meetings between decades-old enemies, American and Soviet veterans, had tense beginnings: “We were in somebody’s home, and everybody was drinking, smoking. After a couple of drinks, one Afghanistan veteran from Moscow, who had had a real bad concussion, his hearing was bad, said, ‘I get this because of your American rocket!’ ” Tamarov says.

“And this person he was talking to pulls up his pant leg and shows that he has a prosthesis. And he said, ‘But this I got from a Russian rocket.’ After that, there was no problem. They were best friends.”

Tamarov grew up in Leningrad--now St. Petersburg--and has spent, off and on, about two years in the United States and plans to remain here through next spring, staying with people he met through the veterans’ exchange programs.

He says he is impelled only to tell what he saw, heard, and tasted in Afghanistan. The soldier is uncomfortable when he sees his original prints, pictures of his buddies, selling for $850 a copy in the art gallery.

He wants to use his book profits to self-publish his story in Russia. He hopes his story will help his people understand what Afghan veterans experienced and make it easier for them to get psychological and medical care.

Mercury House is not funding a book tour, so Tamarov plans to spend the next year--at his own expense--traveling across the country. He is negotiating to get his prints shown in other cities. Eladio J. Ballestas, co-director of Lee & Lees Contemporary Inc. in San Francisco, which displayed Tamarov’s work, believes it will not have wide popularity.

“There is a segment of society that will have a hard time with this because it’s about war,” says Ballestas, a Vietnam vet. “And it’s not a glorious thing; it’s about the waste of human life. People don’t want to be reminded. He’s making a political statement, and bringing a much clearer view about what the other side was about. Some of us would like to keep thinking the Russians are all bad people.”

Tamarov, who fought vigorously against the U.S.-supplied moujahedeen , is not bitter: “This book is not about war; it is about people, me, my friends. Sometimes when people talk about war, they forget the people. You can talk about policy, politics and all this kind of stuff, but the most important are people. It’s not just words and pictures. I tried to make people feel my way, how I felt in this world, how my friends felt in this world.

“I do not think this book is for veterans,” he says. “It’s for people who do not know anything about war.”

Vietnam veteran Messmore says the book is something parents should give their children: “What scares me is that in America we now have an image of war that is the Persian Gulf. It’s cool again to run around and play GI Joe. I don’t know if these kids will be able to question (their government).”

In the art gallery, Tamarov looks at one of his prints. Two fawn-eyed recruits who could pass for twins stand harmlessly, arms resting lazily on their weapons, a swarm of helicopters behind them. They were 19, but hardly look old enough to drive. Forty minutes later, they were in battle.

“I saw them fighting, and there was a strange feeling about that,” Tamarov says. “Their young faces, automatics in their hands, and they are fighting to kill. Something’s wrong with this picture, I thought.”

He stops to pull on his cigarette. “But I didn’t see my face when I was fighting,” he finally says. “Maybe I had the same face. I was young also.”