ABOUT A BRIGHT AND UNUSUAL BOOK

Soviet military assistance to young African states in the 1960s-1990s... This topic has always been with us and still remains one of the most "closed". We knew that we were helping African states in their struggle for independence - we were sending weapons, sending military advisers - but what they were doing there, how they lived, how they interacted with the local population and the national armed forces, what benefits they brought - this was always discussed sparsely and inaudibly on radio and television, in newspapers and magazines and indistinct. It is not an exception in recent times, when the opinion often spreads that helping countries that were freed from colonialism, the Soviet Union was just "wasting money".

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of our military and civilian specialists were working in African countries at that time. For example, only in the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria (ANDR) from 1962 to 1991, more than 10 thousand Soviet servicemen, including more than 400 conscripts, were on long-term business trips. Their work was not easy and extremely risky. On the Algerian-Moroccan and Algerian-Tunisian borders, our sappers neutralized about one and a half million mines, cleared more than 800 km of mine-explosive strips and cleared about 120 thousand hectares of land from the deadly "stuffing". The Algerian army was equipped with 90% of our weapons, about 4 thousand. Its officers were trained in the Soviet Union.

These figures are given in the book " Memoirs of participants in providing assistance to the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria (1960-2000s,)", published in the publishing house "Vse Mir" in 2013 and prepared at the Institute of Africa of the Russian Academy of Sciences (editor-compiler Candidate of Historical Sciences A. A. Tokarev).

The book is small in volume - it contains 164 pages, containing the memories of 15 participants in our country's assistance to Algeria in different years. Most of the authors are military personnel; for all of them, a business trip to this distant country became a vivid fact of their biography, was filled with many different events. Their stories about their experiences, collected under one cover, form a picture that inspires respect for people of high duty, for all those who worked together with them, for our country, which selflessly supported the struggle of distant peoples for independence.

At first glance, the author-a scientist, candidate of historical sciences-did not take up his own business: what is the research in this book of his? This is journalism, nothing more!

Not at all! Do not rush to give the book such an assessment. Before us is the comprehension of materials related to extremely poorly studied pages of Russian history, one might even say its "white spots" - to the help of our country to young African states that gained independence in the second half of the XX century. Help that is diverse in form, impressive in scale, and ambiguous in results.

The book inspires hope that on the basis of this collection, with the possible use of data for several other countries, A. A. Tokarev will prepare a broader study on the significance of this assistance and its assessment from a modern perspective. In any case, the basis, the "backbone" for this research in the published book is there.

In an extensive interview entitled "At the Origins of Soviet-Algerian Military Cooperation," which begins the book, retired Vice Admiral V. A. Vlasov recalls:: "When I arrived (in 1965-three years after the independence of the Republic of Belarus - N. P.), our representatives were included everywhere: both to the Chief of the General Staff and to the commanders of branches of the armed forces... With our help, 16 military schools were created at the same time: flight, aviation and technical, repair shops for aviation, armored vehicles, communications equipment, a naval school, etc.

Further, V. A. Vlasov notes: "Civil affairs also went well. Much has been done in the area of economic relations. Dams were built to provide irrigation and electricity to businesses. Our country

It supplied agricultural machinery, and provided a lot of assistance in the field of geology, including conducting geological surveys... Many specialists were sent to Algeria through the State Committee for Foreign Economic Relations under the Council of Ministers of the USSR.

This is the "facade" of our assistance to Algeria - and what is behind it? Without exception, our specialists - both military and civilian - worked in extremely difficult conditions. Retired Colonel A. A. Migachev, the author of the essay "Cite Russe" ("Russian Town" - N. P.), was sent as a military interpreter to the Algerian technical military school: "The cadets were illiterate. Most of them only finished elementary school. For them, even a bearing is a very complex mechanism... not to mention electricity, jet propulsion, ballistics, the laws of gravity, and other things. Classes were conducted with a double translation (from Russian to French, and from it to Arabic). Therefore, the training was mainly based on "fingers", the method of showing using posters and split parts."

The living conditions of our specialists in Algeria were good almost everywhere. Reserve Colonel A.M. Shatalin in his essay "My business trips to Algeria" recalls that a special military camp-"City of Banana" - was built near the Algerian city of Blida in the late 1970s for our specialists: "At that time, all our groups settled down well and, as a rule, lived according to the laws of the garrison or military town. That is, mandatory snort training, all sorts of competitions. We had volleyball and gorodoshny playgrounds. Departures, of course, were prohibited, but we still left. There was something to see, we went to the mountains, to the river."

But it wasn't always so peaceful. Military translator S. N. Petrov in his interview "From literary Arabic to Algerian dialect" recalls: "At the end of 1991, parliamentary elections were held, which were won by the Islamic party "Front for Islamic Salvation". The military canceled the election results - in response, followers of this party launched terrorist activities. First against the police, then against the military, and then they switched to foreigners who were on the territory of Algeria. There were victims, including in our group. On October 16, a group of terrorists drove up to our place of residence and opened automatic fire. Two of our specialists were killed, and one was left disabled."

In the book " Memoirs of participants..."it is reported that a total of 34 Soviet soldiers were killed in Algeria; there were also casualties among civilian specialists. There are pages in it that cannot be read without heartache. This is "An excerpt from the diary of Senior Lieutenant Nikolai Pisisyuk." From the photo, a very young man looks at us, in fact, a boy. The recordings are dated to the summer months of 1994: "I was listening to the radio this afternoon, and they said that five of our people were killed in the capital... And three days ago, seven Italians were shot... According to updated data, 19 foreigners were killed in the last week: 7 Italians, 7 Yugoslavs, 4 Ours and 1 Romanian."

Then the diary is interrupted for a long time, and on January 21, 1995, the officer writes a letter home. It says that "...the attitude towards us has become much cooler, although even before that it did not shine with positive aspects - we are sure that this is because of Chechnya..."

The letter arrived in Russia on time. But the wife of Nikolai Pisisyuk did not see her husband again: on February 10, he was killed by Algerian terrorists...

Yes, in the book, as in life, there are tragic pages, there are many of them. All the more clearly you understand how significant the contribution of our military and civilian specialists is to the formation of an independent state, which - how quickly time flies! - I turned 50 three years ago. And it is still unknown whether the Algerians would have celebrated this date now, if not for the fraternal help and support of the Soviet people, who did what would be correct to call the word feat!

This high word could also be used to describe the colossal work done by the editor-compiler of the book, Andrey Tokarev, an employee of the Institute of Africa of the Russian Academy of Sciences, whose essay "Algeria in my Destiny" is also published in the book. It was he, A. A. Tokarev, who persistently encouraged those who worked in Algeria in different years to write and submit their memoirs for publication. And in cases where veterans, for various reasons, were unable to put their experiences on paper, I interviewed them, which form a significant part of the book.

But even this is not the end of all his works. A beautiful and - without exaggeration-unique work is preceded by the phrase: "The book was published on the initiative and at the expense of the editor-compiler."

We can say that the Soviet and Russian military and civilian specialists who worked in Algeria were lucky: among them there was a talented and disinterested editor, publicist and scientist who spared no time and effort to prepare a book that is interesting, useful and, of course, necessary for understanding the insufficiently disclosed stages of the country's history.

I would like to hope that our veterans of military operations in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Egypt and other countries will have their own chroniclers, like Andrey Tokarev, whose work opens up little-known but vivid pages of Russian history to the Russian reader, which can rightly be proud of.

N. I. PETROV, Editor of Asia and Africa Today magazine

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