She persuaded her superior to let her accompany him to a bigger hospital in Kabul as part of a suicide watch. She stayed friends with Vshivtsev, and he later became a leading activist in the Russian Society for the Blind. Decades later, he briefly served in the Russian parliament.
Raising awareness
Alla Smolina was 30 when she joined the Soviet military prosecutor's office in Jalalabad near the Pakistani border in 1985. It wasn't until 20 years later that Smolina started having nightmares about the war.
"The shelling, running away from bullets and mines whizzing above me — I was literally scared of my own pillow," she said.
She put her memories on paper and contacted other women who were there, telling the stories of those who endured the hardships of war but who are largely absent from the male-dominated narratives.
She is trying to raise awareness of the role the Soviet women played in Afghanistan, believing they have been unfairly portrayed or not even mentioned in fiction and nonfiction written mostly by men.
The deaths of Soviet women who held civilian jobs in Afghanistan are not part of the official toll, and Smolina has written about 56 women who lost their lives. Some died when a plane was shot down by the Afghan mujahedeen, one was killed when a drunken soldier threw a grenade into her room, and one woman was slain after being raped by a soldier.
In an era when the concept of sexual harassment was largely unfamiliar in the Soviet Union, the women in the war in Afghanistan — usually young and unmarried — often started a relationship to avoid unwanted attention from other soldiers.
"Because if a woman has someone, the whole brigade won't harass you like a pack of wolves," Rybalchenko said. "Sometimes it was reciprocal, sometimes there was no choice."
She said she found boyfriends to "protect" her.
Denied war benefits
While the war grew unpopular at home, Soviet troops and support staff in Afghanistan mostly focused on survival rather than politics. While Afghans largely saw Moscow's involvement as a hostile foreign intervention, the Soviets thought they were doing the right thing.
"We really believed that we were helping the oppressed Afghan nation, especially because we saw with our own eyes all the kindergartens and schools that the Soviet people were building there," Smolina said.
After Rybalchenko came home, she could hardly get out of bed for the first three months, one of thousands with undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder.
When she asked officials about benefits for veterans and other personnel in Afghanistan, she faced hostility and insults. She said one told her: "How do I know what you were actually up to over there?"
In 2006, Russian lawmakers decided that civilians who worked in Afghanistan were not entitled to war benefits. Women have campaigned unsuccessfully to reinstate them.
Rybalchenko eventually got an apartment from the government, worked in physiotherapy and now lives in retirement in Moscow, where her passion for interior decorating is reflected by the exotic bamboo-forest wallpaper in her home.
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Smolina, who lives in Sweden, is wary of disclosing all the details about her own Afghan experiences after facing a backlash from other veterans about her publications.
"Our society is not ready yet to hear the truth. There is still a lingering effect from the harsh Soviet past," she said. "In Soviet society, you were not supposed to speak out." (VOA)