Dead Afghan Vet Chief Triumphed by Sheer Will

Sergei Trakhirov, a slim-built man on crutches with short dark hair and a pencil-thin mustache, seemed more the army veteran in his dark suit and sober tie than any mafia boss.


Until Sunday's bomb blast at Kotlyakovskoye cemetery that also killed the widow of Trakhirov's best friend and 12 others in what bore every mark of the classic gangland massacre, Trakhirov, 30, seemed a walking success story.


Crippled at age 20 while fighting in Afghanistan, Trakhirov had in the last 10 years defied his doctors, climbing out of his wheelchair to become a successful businessman and political campaigner.


Elected head of the Russian Fund for Invalids of the War in Afghanistan, or RFIVA, last year, he ran a string of businesses as well as the Rus sanatorium outside Moscow -- the only free health-care center in the country for veterans of the Afghan and Chechen wars.


Trakhirov -- who is survived by his wife, Olga, and two sons, Ruslan, 4, and Artyom, 1 -- was also on a presidential consultative body run by Security Council secretary Ivan Rybkin and had been working with the State Duma deputies on drafting a new law on rights for invalids.


He started humbly, grouping together with fellow Afghan veterans in his hometown of Samara to sell hunting trophies -- the stuffed and mounted heads of bear and wild boar. Then they moved on to making neon shop signs from old television screens, he told The Moscow Times in an interview a month before his death in his modest office on Leninsky Prospekt.


The main aim at the beginning was to help Afghan veterans, he said, especially invalids and the war-traumatized, as well as families of those killed. In 1991, they created RFIVA and were granted special charitable status with accompanying tax benefits.


At about the same time, they bought several trucks social security to which they are entitled. Trakhirov was head of the Samara branch of the fund until he took over from his murdered friend, Mikhail Likhodey, to become director of the nationwide fund, based in Moscow.


The fund, by most accounts, was extremely wealthy, earning $200 million a year mostly from the import of alcohol and cigarettes, according to police sources quoted by Kommersant Daily in an article Monday.


Where that money went is unclear. But the assassinations of Likhodey and Trakhirov, together with an attempt in October on the life of a rival in the fund, make it clear that there were fierce disputes over who should control such enormous profits.


Incredibly, Trakhirov said in the interview last month that he was struggling to raise the 2 billion rubles ($366,000) needed every month to run the Rus sanatorium. Tax benefits had been largely taken away, leaving the fund not much different from any other business, he said at the time.


Vassily Sadovnik, one of his deputies at the Moscow branch, praised Trakhirov for his organizational qualities and his hard work for Afghan veterans.


"He was a very interesting, clever, well-educated man," Sadovnik said Monday. "He even wrote poetry. We could recognize what pains us in the things he wrote. He was a great guy."


By Trakhirov's own admission, the experience of being thrown into the Afghan war as a young conscript and having his life smashed up in a military adventure that was later condemned as worthless, had marked him forever.


Doctors told him he would be paralyzed for life after breaking his back in a fall from an armored vehicle, but he put himself through an extensive physical training regime and eventually regained the use of his legs.


But his physical injury was only minor compared to the psychological battle he fought. He came home in 1986 to find Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost questioning the ethics of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The shock that society was not grateful for the huge sacrifice he had made was devastating, Trakhirov said.


"For the young guys who went through danger and difficulties, risked their lives and fulfilled the orders of their commanders and their country, it was like shooting them in the back," he said.


"They also came up against a wall of bureaucracy. Very many of the guys simply cracked, psychologically," he said. "One by one, alone with their problems, they turned to drinking; they began to take drugs."


"When many of us went through that, we realized that it is too difficult to tackle alone. You need joint force to solve these problems," he said.


The spirit of looking out for their own is very strong.


At the Rus, the vast marble and granite sanatorium outside Moscow that was originally built for the Communist Party's Central Committee until Gorbachev gave it to the Afghan veterans, Trakhirov greeted fellow vets with a punchy handshake redolent of the camaraderie of the battlefield.


Some were from Chechnya, raw recruits Trakhirov visited in military hospitals when the first news came back of the terrible casualties in Grozny.


"We took down 20 million rubles of humanitarian aid, basic things like track suits, comfortable clothes to wear in hospital, gloves and hats, pens and envelopes to write home, chocolate, small television sets," he said.


"But most of all we talked to them. It was very clear there was huge interest. They needed to talk. I said to them, 'I am on crutches and am proof that life can go on. Despite what has happened, I am alive and you can keep going, too.'"