Boris Gromov
Boris Gromov was the last commander of the Soviet Fortieth Army in Afghanistan, brought it out in two phases over nine months without losing the columns to the mujahideen, and on 15 February 1989 walked across the Friendship Bridge over the Amu Darya at Termez last and on foot, met by his son with flowers, for the cameras; the war had killed fifteen thousand Soviet soldiers and something over a million Afghans, and he said as he crossed that not one of his men was left behind him, which was true of the living. He was born in Saratov in 1943, the son of a soldier killed that year, went through the Suvorov school and the Leningrad command school, and served three tours in Afghanistan. He was a divisional chief of staff from 1980, as a divisional commander from 1982, and as the army's commander from June 1987, by which time Gorbachev had decided to leave and the question was how. Operation Magistral in the winter of 1987, which broke the blockade of Khost with the paratroopers' fight for Hill 3234, was his last offensive and the one the films are about. The withdrawal was the harder task, negotiated locally with Ahmad Shah Massoud for the Salang pass and covered by air strikes that Moscow ordered against the commanders' wishes. He was made Hero of the Soviet Union in 1988. In 1991 he was deputy interior minister and, in August, on the list of the coup committee's supporters, which he denied and which did not stop his career. He was deputy defence minister under Yeltsin, opponent of the Chechen war in 1994, which he called a crime, a Duma deputy, and from 2000 to 2012 the elected governor of the Moscow region, where the money was. He founded the veterans' movement Combat Brotherhood, which became a political vehicle, and has spent his old age in the Duma as a member of the ruling party. He is the man in the photograph on the bridge, and most of what he did since has been explaining that the army did not lose.
- Lived: 1943 CE – ?
- Nationality: Russian
- Roles: general, politician
