Rodric Braithwaite: Bullying in the Russian Army
[Rodric Braithwaite is a writer and former diplomat , who has spent much of his career dealing with Russia. He was British ambassador in Moscow from 1988-1992. In 1992-3 he was Foreign Policy Adviser to Prime Minister Major and Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee.]
The Russian army today, like any other army, is an institution for organising and channelling violence in the pursuit of some concept of the national interest. But violence is not easy to control, and all armies have to cope with atrocities against the enemy and the civilian population; and with various kinds of military and civilian crime. They need to limit these excesses, lest they lead to a breakdown of discipline and a loss of function. They therefore all have military policemen and military courts to enforce order with greater or lesser severity. In Afghanistan the Soviet military authorities imposed severe penalties for looting, rape, and random violence against the population. By the end of that war over two thousand five hundred Soviet soldiers were serving prison sentences, more than two hundred for crimes of premeditated murder....
Bullying and violence as a way of enforcing discipline can happen in all armies. It was common in the Tsarist army that preceded it, and indeed it was formalised in the British armed forces up to the middle of the nineteenth century. It is not unknown in the US Army. There was a great deal of it within the Red Army that won the Second World War. Though in theory the authorities disapproved, physical assault was a common means for enforcing discipline, used by many in authority from Marshal Zhukov downwards. It can be very difficult to eradicate....
How bad it was depended on where you were. The Soviet army could not afford to employ substandard soldiers in the elite strategic rocket forces, where the grandfather system was much less brutal. It was the same in the KGB’s frontier forces, who had a real job to do. It was largely true among the soldiers who fought in Afghanistan. In the elite special forces and parachute units, morale was usually high. When the soldiers were not on operations, all they wanted to do was eat and sleep. Even in the less prestigious motor-rifle units, where the grandfathers still gave their juniors the run-around, it was hard to preserve the distinctions in battle: a bully risked being cut down by a bullet from his own side, as well as from the enemy: in the heat of the fight no one would bother to investigate. People who were there will tell you that the seasoned soldiers taught the new arrivals to keep clean, obey orders, and care for their equipment; and they looked after the juniors in battle. New recruits were kept from the difficult missions until they had acquired some battle experience. Some evidence supports this benign interpretation....
Though it pays to be cautious - not least because the appalling incidents reported in the Russian press today would not have seen the light of day in Soviet times - most observers agree that things have got worse since the war in Afghanistan, fuelled by the demoralisation that accompanied the break-up of the Soviet Union, the bungled war in Chechnya in the middle of the 1990s, lack of money for new equipment and proper training, and the failure to carry through a well thought-out and properly funded reform which would adapt the Russian armed forces to the threats and tasks of the twenty-first century....
Read entire article at openDemocracy
The Russian army today, like any other army, is an institution for organising and channelling violence in the pursuit of some concept of the national interest. But violence is not easy to control, and all armies have to cope with atrocities against the enemy and the civilian population; and with various kinds of military and civilian crime. They need to limit these excesses, lest they lead to a breakdown of discipline and a loss of function. They therefore all have military policemen and military courts to enforce order with greater or lesser severity. In Afghanistan the Soviet military authorities imposed severe penalties for looting, rape, and random violence against the population. By the end of that war over two thousand five hundred Soviet soldiers were serving prison sentences, more than two hundred for crimes of premeditated murder....
Bullying and violence as a way of enforcing discipline can happen in all armies. It was common in the Tsarist army that preceded it, and indeed it was formalised in the British armed forces up to the middle of the nineteenth century. It is not unknown in the US Army. There was a great deal of it within the Red Army that won the Second World War. Though in theory the authorities disapproved, physical assault was a common means for enforcing discipline, used by many in authority from Marshal Zhukov downwards. It can be very difficult to eradicate....
How bad it was depended on where you were. The Soviet army could not afford to employ substandard soldiers in the elite strategic rocket forces, where the grandfather system was much less brutal. It was the same in the KGB’s frontier forces, who had a real job to do. It was largely true among the soldiers who fought in Afghanistan. In the elite special forces and parachute units, morale was usually high. When the soldiers were not on operations, all they wanted to do was eat and sleep. Even in the less prestigious motor-rifle units, where the grandfathers still gave their juniors the run-around, it was hard to preserve the distinctions in battle: a bully risked being cut down by a bullet from his own side, as well as from the enemy: in the heat of the fight no one would bother to investigate. People who were there will tell you that the seasoned soldiers taught the new arrivals to keep clean, obey orders, and care for their equipment; and they looked after the juniors in battle. New recruits were kept from the difficult missions until they had acquired some battle experience. Some evidence supports this benign interpretation....
Though it pays to be cautious - not least because the appalling incidents reported in the Russian press today would not have seen the light of day in Soviet times - most observers agree that things have got worse since the war in Afghanistan, fuelled by the demoralisation that accompanied the break-up of the Soviet Union, the bungled war in Chechnya in the middle of the 1990s, lack of money for new equipment and proper training, and the failure to carry through a well thought-out and properly funded reform which would adapt the Russian armed forces to the threats and tasks of the twenty-first century....