Sitting quietly behind his market stool reading his book, nestled away in a building deep in the centre of Yangiabod market on the southern edge of Tashkent, Pashit notices me looking at his stool. He gets up to help me and before long we are in conversation, I had been collecting Soviet pin badges from flea markets such as this for a while and Pashit had offered me some that caught my eye. His market stool sold all sorts, many pieces of Soviet nostalgia, from badges and books to carpets with Lenin’s portrait on, however the main bulk of his treasure was his collection of old Soviet and East German cameras. His daughter also helps him at the weekends when she’s not at school. Pashit starts telling me about his time in the Soviet Union, so I ask him to tell me about his life.

 

Pashit was born in Tashkent in 1966. He had grown up like any normal child in the Soviet Union at the time, living in a house on the edge of the city with his parents and sister. He attended the local school and was a member of the young pioneers, the Soviet youth program, just like all the other children. His father worked as a mechanic for the buses in the city at the depot and would usually be kept at the end of the day to clean them. His mother worked in a local citizens administration office. He remembers when his house, along with many other homes in his district got their ‘Soviet hats’. Many of the houses were old, predating the Soviet Union, and due to this the roofs were not the best. Their house got fitted with a large metal roof funded by the government, he tells me how much warmer it was in winter and how great it was. Pashit tells me that his childhood was great and that even at 58 he misses it.

 

He became very interested in Photography when he was a teenager, after his father had bought a Zenit model EM. He would save up and buy film with the Rubles he could find and get given by his parents, usually taking photos around his Neighbourhood and of the other teenagers. “At first, I had no Idea what to do. It was just take it and see. It was how I learnt to use this because my father was not good. I became a better shooter than him” he chuckles to me. Pashit explains how he would take the camera everywhere with him in his bag, even to school. He eventually went onto college in Tashkent to study mechanics, he found the course interesting as it covered everything, but mostly machinery, whether it be for agriculture, transport, or production. He praises his father for helping him much with school, and for teaching him a lot of his understandings of how things work, including his camera. “I would sometimes get in trouble with people if I take their photo without them knowing, one time someone even slapped me because of it”. Taking the camera apart and re-assembling it was something that he used to find enjoyable.

 

He eventually went onto take a higher qualification in engineering covering mechanical design and technical drawings when he was 19, however this did not finish as he received a draft for the red army, as all men had to complete 2 years of military service. The problem however was that the Soviets had entered a war with Afghanistan in 1979, supporting the communist Afghan government against the western funded Mujaheddin fighters. “Many others in my school received a letter, we heard about it on the radio and in newspaper, but we don’t think we would go there. We keep thinking this will be over soon”. He spent the next few weeks miserable and worried about joining the army. “The weeks felt like a year. I did not want to go because my life was good”. Soon however it came time to go to training, he recalls the morning, it was in the winter and the new recruits were being picked up from the college building. Pashit remembers feeling ‘Cold to the bone’ when the bus turned up to take them.

 

The training was hard, many of the recruits did not want to be there, and the strict way of life was hard to adapt too. Basic training started in the winter, where in Uzbekistan it can be well below freezing in the middle of the day. “I found everything hard, I didn’t like the running, and the shooting. There were Russian men there too, they were better at it than us”, he tells me he remembers being told off by an instructor for talking Uzbek to a fellow recruit rather than Russian. At the end of training, they were lined up one morning and told they were being given roles in the army in various different units and places, like many of them, Pashit was to be sent to Afghanistan to assist the Afghan government fight the rebels. He was granted some time before being deployed which he spent at his family home. “I was so upset, and so were my parents. They cried when I told them I will go to Afghanistan. I felt like I was going to die”. Before going back to the army to be deployed, Pashit packed some extra things with him, one thing being his camera and a few rolls of film.

 

The next thing Pashit tells me was when he was in Termez, a city on the southern border of Uzbekistan. It was the sight of the bridge crossing into Afghanistan over the Amu Darya River, one of the places where Soviet ground forces would cross into Afghanistan. He tells me of the morning him and the other conscripts were put in the back of a truck and Driven across the border and down the long road to Kabul. “I got in the truck first, so I could see very little, and the road was so bad. In USSR the roads were good but here it is just dirt. It took many hours to get there”. Recalling his emotions during the journey, he called it ‘terrifying’ and he just thought about going home. The convoy they were in arrived at the Soviet Barracks just after night fall, and upon arriving he tells me it was craziness. Troops started instantly unloading trucks of supplies and new recruits were lined up and taken to their billets, which were freezing cold and lacked electricity half the time. The camp was grim, the food was horrible and many of the soldiers had no interest in making friends. He spent the first few months on Guard duty, being assigned various places around Kabul to keep it secure, mostly Afghan government places of interest that the Mujaheddin might target.

 

The first time Pashit left Kabul was when he was put on a guard outpost along with a squad of other Red Army soldiers in a town north of Kabul called Jabal-os-Saraj. It was here he found it somewhat enjoyable. “The people I was with were nice here. It was easier than the camp, there wasn’t the rush of people”. They would see many soviet trucks, tanks and convoys come through, coming, and going between Kabul, other Afghan cities and the Soviet border. They had to do road checks on the Afghans coming through, some of which thanked them and sometimes they would spit and throw things at them from their carts. Pashit tells me the things he thought when going on patrol in this northern area, “It was the first time I had left [the USSR], it was crazy because we were close to our borders, but it was 100 years behind us. I see animals in the road everywhere”. It was beautiful however, the mountains and rivers near them, he would look at them and take photos when off duty. “The clouds would change so much; they would look so amazing”. A few times there he heard gunfire coming from the mountains, and sometimes their outpost was fired upon. Many times, Mujaheddin launched hit and run attacks on Soviet occupied areas. “Running outside when gunfire was heard always gets the rush going, but I was always scared”. Shooting the Kalashnikov was never to Pashit’s enjoyment, he did not like holding a gun and always felt as if he was threatening the locals when walking with one. “The locals we met were always nice to us in the town, sometimes they would give us bread or tea. We were told not to interact but most of us did”. The worst day in Afghanistan came in that autumn, when the post they were stationed at on a town called Paghman, guarding the grounds of Paghman palace. The town itself had taken heavy damage from fighting and many of the buildings were destroyed and was subject to frequent attacks from the rebels. It was in the evening when the Mujahadeen would launch an attack on them that would put Pashit through hours of gun fighting. “It was awful, we were shooting up at the trees and the mountains, but we could not see them, they were hidden in the hills”. He and some others took cover in a building where they took refuge for hours, shooting out the window and cracks when the enemy stopped. “It was the first the time I saw a dead body, I still remember this day, he was a man I was with in the camp”. The rebels fired upon them with rockets which shook the ground and caused multiple casualties. “When the fighting had stopped, we ran out to the other buildings where they (other soldiers) were covered in blood, some other soldiers ran up to the hill to make sure they were gone”. That evening, multiple trucks of soldiers came up from Kabul to secure the area. The rest of the war Pashit managed to avoid being directly in the line of fire, he does tell me however how multiple men he knew, some being as young as 18 were killed in Afghanistan.

 

“I remember my heart beating so fast as I got in the truck back home, Along the road there were burnt tanks, vehicles and destroyed buildings”. In 1987, Pashit had completed his time in Afghanistan, and was granted approval to return home to Tashkent. “The second I went back over the border, I felt relieved, I just wanted to go home and see my family. I never forget seeing my mother, she looked older than when I saw her last, she couldn’t stop crying when she opened the door”. He hadn’t slept as well for the last two years, and his first night in his bed was as if he ‘slept away two years of tiredness’. “The first thing I did when I was back was I ran to the camera shop, I had these film for two years, I wanted to see the photographs. Every day I would come to see if they were ready”. When he finally got his photos back, he was amazed with what he had taken, as he gets his phone out to show me the scanned versions and which he thanks his daughter for doing. Some of the rolls of film he had taken home had been ruined through exposure to light and moisture, but the photographs that had survived showed the beautiful colours and landscapes of Afghanistan combined with the destruction and desolation from the war, giving the photographs an almost contradicting look to them. He tells me these are some of his best photos he has ever taken, and that they are better than any medal that he received.