Spetsnaz: The Inside Story of the Soviet Special Forces Read online

  organise the collection and interpretation of information about the enemy,

  so as to have, if not all the information, at least the most essential

  information at the right time. They must organise the operation of their

  forces so as to destroy the most important obstacles which the enemy has put

  in the way of their advance. This is the only way to ensure victory. The

  Soviet political leadership, the KGB and the military leaders have all had

  every opportunity to convince themselves that there is no other.

  Thirdly, the Soviet secret police, the KGB, carries out different

  functions and has other priorities. It has its own terrorist apparatus,

  which includes an organisation very similar to spetsnaz, known as osnaz. The

  KGB uses osnaz for carrying out a range of tasks not dissimilar in many

  cases to those performed by the GRU's spetsnaz. But the Soviet leaders

  consider that it is best not to have any monopolies in the field of secret

  warfare. Competition, they feel, gives far better results than ration.

  Osnaz is not a subject I propose to deal with in this book. Only a KGB

  officer directly connected with osnaz could describe what it is. My

  knowledge is very limited. But just as a book about Stalin would not be

  complete without some reference to Hitler, osnaz should not be overlooked

  here.

  The term osnaz is usually met only in secret documents. In unclassified

  documents the term is written out in full as osobogo nazhacheniya or else

  reduced to the two letters `ON'. In cases where a longer title is

  abbreviated the letters ON are run together with the preceding letters. For

  example, DON means `division of osnaz', OON means a `detachment of osnaz".

  The two words osoby and spetsialny are close in meaning but quite

  different words. In translation it is difficult to find a precise equivalent

  for these two words, which is why it is easier to use the terms osnaz and

  spetsnaz without translating them. Osnaz apparently came into being

  practically at the same time as the Communist dictatorship. In the very

  first moments of the existence of the Soviet regime we find references to

  detachments osobogo nazhacheniya -- special purpose detachments. Osnaz means

  military-terrorist units which came into being as shock troops of the

  Communist Party whose job was to defend the party. Osnaz was later handed

  over to the secret police, which changed its own name from time to time as

  easily as a snake changes its skin: Cheka -- VCheka -- OGPU -- NKVD -- NKGB

  -- MGB -- MVD -- KGB. Once a snake, however, always a snake.

  It is the fact the spetsnaz belongs to the army, and osnaz to the

  secret police, that accounts for all the differences between them. Spetsnaz

  operates mainly against external enemies; osnaz does the same but mainly in

  its own territory and against its own citizens. Even if both spetsnaz and

  osnaz are faced with carrying out one and the same operation the Soviet

  leadership is not inclined to rely so much on co-operation between the army

  and the secret police as on the strong competitive instincts between them.

  --------

  Chapter 3. A History of Spetsnaz

  In order to grasp the history behind spetsnaz it is useful to cast our

  minds back to the British Parliament in the time of Henry VIII. In 1516 a

  Member of the Parliament, Thomas More, published an excellent book entitled

  Utopia. In it he showed, simply and persuasively, that it was very easy to

  create a society in which universal justice reigned, but that the

  consequences of doing so would be terrible. More describes a society in

  which there is no private property and in which everything is controlled by

  the state. The state of Utopia is completely isolated from the outside

  world, as completely as the bureaucratic class rules the population. The

  supreme ruler is installed for his lifetime. The country itself, once a

  peninsula, has after monumental efforts on the part of the population and

  the army to build a deep canal dividing it from the rest of the world,

  become an island. Slavery has been introduced, but the rest of the

  population live no better than slaves. People do not have their own homes,

  with the result that anybody can at any time go into any home he wishes, a

  system which is worse even than the regulations in the Soviet Army today, in

  which the barracks of each company are open only to soldiers of that

  company.

  In fact the system in Utopia begins to look more like that in a Soviet

  concentration camp. In Utopia, of course, it is laid down when people are to

  rise (at four o'clock in the morning), when they are to go to bed and how

  many minutes' rest they may have. Every day starts with public lectures.

  People must travel on a group passport, signed by the Mayor, and if they are

  caught without a passport outside their own district they are severely

  punished as deserters. Everybody keeps a close watch on his neighbour:

  `Everyone has his eye on you.'

  With fine English humour Thomas More describes the ways in which Utopia

  wages war. The whole population of Utopia, men and women, are trained to

  fight. Utopia wages only just wars in self-defence and, of course, for the

  liberation of other peoples. The people of Utopia consider it their right

  and their duty to establish a similarly just regime in neighbouring

  countries. Many of the surrounding countries have already been liberated and

  are now ruled, not by local leaders, but by administators from Utopia. The

  liberation of the other peoples is carried out in the name of humanism. But

  Thomas More does not explain to us what this `humanism' is. Utopia's allies,

  in receipt of military aid from her, turn the populations of the

  neighbouring states into slaves.

  Utopia provokes conflicts and contradictions in the countries which

  have not yet been liberated. If someone in such a country speaks out in

  favour of capitulating to Utopia he can expect a big reward later. But

  anyone who calls upon the people to fight Utopia can expect only slavery or

  death, with his property split up and distributed to those who capitulate

  and collaborate.

  On the outbreak of war Utopia's agents in the enemy country post up in

  prominent places announcements concerning the reward to be paid to anyone

  killing the king. It is a tremendous sum of money. There is also a list of

  other people for whose murder large sums of money will be paid.

  The direct result of these measures is that universal suspicion reigns

  in the enemy country.

  Thomas More describes only one of the strategems employed, but it is

  the most important:

  When the battle is at its height a group of specially selected young

  men, who have sworn to stick together, try to knock out the enemy general.

  They keep hammering away at him by every possible method -- frontal attacks,

  ambushes, long-range archery, hand-to-hand combat. They bear down on him in

  a long, unbroken wedge-formation, the point of which is constantly renewed

  as tired men are replaced by fresh ones. As a result the general is nearly

  always killed or taken prisoner -- unless he saves his skin by running away.

  It is the grou
ps of `specially selected young men' that I want to

  discuss in this book.

  ___

  Four hundred years after the appearance of Utopia the frightful

  predictions of that wise Englishman became a reality in Russia. A successful

  attempt was made to create a society of universal justice. I had read Thomas

  More's frightening forecasts when I was still a child and I was amazed at

  the staggering realism with which Utopia was described and how strikingly

  similar it was to the Soviet Union: a place where all the towns looked like

  each other, people knew nothing about what was happening abroad or about

  fashion in clothes (everybody being dressed more or less the same), and so

  forth. More even described the situation of people `who think differently'.

  In Utopia, he said, `It is illegal for any such person to argue in defence

  of his beliefs.'

  The Soviet Union is actually a very mild version of Utopia -- a sort of

  `Utopia with a human face'. A person can travel in the Soviet Union without

  having an internal passport, and Soviet bureaucrats do not yet have such

  power over the family as their Utopia counterparts who added up the number

  of men and women in each household and, if they exceeded the number

  permitted, simply transferred the superfluous members to another house or

  even another town where there was a shortage of them.

  The Communists genuinely have a great deal left to do before they bring

  society down to the level of Utopia. But much has already been done,

  especially in the military sphere, and in particular in the creation of

  `specially selected groups of young men'.

  It is interesting to note that such groups were formed even before the

  Red Army existed, before the Red Guard, and even before the Revolution. The

  origins of spetsnaz are to be found in the revolutionary terrorism of the

  nineteenth century, when numerous groups of young people were ready to

  commit murder, or possibly suicide, in the cause of creating a society in

  which everything would be divided equally between everybody. As they went

  about murdering others or getting killed themselves they failed to

  understand one simple truth: that in order to create a just society you had

  to create a control mechanism. The juster the society one wants to build the

  more complete must be the control over production and consumption.

  Many of the first leaders of the Red Army had been terrorists in the

  past, before the Revolution. For example, one of the outstanding organisers

  of the Red Army, Mikhail Frunze, after whom the principal Soviet military

  academy is named, had twice been sentenced to death before the Revolution.

  At the time it was by no means easy to get two death sentences. For

  organising a party which aimed at the overthrow of the existing regime by

  force, Lenin received only three years of deportation in which he lived well

  and comfortably and spent his time shooting, fishing and openly preaching

  revolution. And the woman terrorist Vera Zasulich, who murdered a provincial

  governor was acquitted by a Russian court. The court was independent of the

  state and reckoned that, if she had killed for political reasons, it meant

  that she had been prompted by her conscience and her beliefs and that her

  acts could not be regarded as a crime. In this climate Mikhail Frunze had

  managed to receive two death sentences. Neither of them was carried out,

  naturally. On both occasions the sentence was commuted to deportation, from

  which he had no great difficulty in escaping. It was while he was in exile

  that Frunze organised a circle of like-minded people which was called the

  `Military Academy': a real school for terrorists, which drew up the first

  strategy to be followed up by armed detachments of Communists in the event

  of an uprising.

  The seizure of power by the Bolsheviks demonstrated, primarily to the

  revolutionaries themselves, that it was possible to neutralise a vast

  country and then to bring it under control simply and quickly. What was

  needed were `groups of specially selected young men' capable of putting out

  of action the government, the postal services, the telegraph and telephone,

  and the railway terminals and bridges in the capital. Paralysis at the

  centre meant that counteraction on the outskirts was split up. Outlying

  areas could be dealt with later one at a time.

  Frunze was undoubtedly a brilliant theoretician and practician of the

  art of war, including partisan warfare and terrorism. During the Civil War

  he commanded an army and a number of fronts. After Trotsky's dismissal he

  took over as People's Commissar for military and naval affairs. During the

  war he reorganised the large but badly led partisan formations into regular

  divisions and armies which were subordinated to the strict centralised

  administration. At the same time, while commanding those formations, he kept

  sending relatively small but very reliable mobile units to fight in the

  enemy's rear.

  The Civil War was fought over vast areas, a war of movement without a

  continuous stable front and with an enormous number of all sorts of armies,

  groups, independent detachments and bands. It was a partisan war in spirit

  and in content. Armies developed out of small, scattered detachments, and

  whenever they were defeated they were able to disintegrate into a large

  number of independent units which carried on the war on a partisan scale.

  But we are not concerned here with the partisan war as a whole, only

  with the fighting units of the regular Red Army specially created for

  operating in the enemy's rear. Such units existed on various fronts and

  armies. They were not known as spetsnaz, but this did not alter their

  essential nature, and it was not just Frunze who appreciated the importance

  of being able to use regular units in the rear of the enemy. Trotsky,

  Stalin, Voroshilov, Tukhachevsky, inter alia, supported the strategy and

  made extensive use of it.

  Revolutionary war against the capitalist powers started immediately

  after the Bolsheviks seized power. As the Red Army `liberated' fresh

  territory and arrived at the frontiers with other countries the amount of

  subversion directed against them increased. The end of the Civil War did not

  mean the end of the secret war being waged by the Communists against their

  neighbours. On the contrary, it was stepped up, because, once the Civil War

  war was over, forces were released for other kinds of warfare.

  Germany was the first target for revolution. It is interesting to

  recall that, as early as December 1917, a Communist newspaper Die Fackel,

  was being published in Petrograd with a circulation of 500,000 copies. In

  January 1918 a Communist group called `Spartak' emerged in the same place.

  In April 1918 another newspaper Die Weltrevolution, began to appear. And

  finally, in August 1919, the famous paper of the German Communists, Die Rote

  Fahne, was founded in Moscow.

  At the same time as the first Communist groups appeared, steps were

  taken to train terrorist fighting units of German Communists. These units

  were used for suppressing the anti-Communist resistance put up by Russian

&n
bsp; and Ukrainian peasants. Then, in 1920, all the units of German Communists

  were gathered together in the rear of the Red Army on the Western front.

  That was when the Red Army was preparing for a breakthrough across Poland

  and into Germany. The Red Army's official marching song, `Budenny's March',

  included these words: `We're taking Warsaw -- Take Berlin too!'

  In that year the Bolsheviks did not succeed in organising revolution in

  Germany or even in `liberating' Poland. At the time Soviet Russia was

  devastated by the First World War and by the far more terrible Civil War.

  Famine, typhus and destruction raged across the country. But in 1923 another

  attempt was made to provoke a revolution in Germany. Trotsky himself

  demanded in September 1923 to be relieved of all his Party and Government

  posts and to be sent as an ordinary soldier to the barricades of the German

  Revolution. The party did not send Trotsky there, but sent other Soviet

  Communist leaders, among them, Iosef Unshlikht. At the time he was deputy

  chairman of the Cheka secret police. Now he was appointed deputy head of the

  `registration administration', now known as the GRU or military

  intelligence, and it was in this position that he was sent illegally to

  Germany. `Unshlikht was given the task of organising the detachments which

  were to carry out the armed uprising and coup d'état, recruiting them and

  providing them with weapons. He also had the job of organising a German

  Cheka for the extermination of the bourgeoisie and opponents of the

  Revolution after the transfer of power.... This was how the planned

  Revolution was planned to take place. On the occasion of the anniversary of

  the Russian October Revolution the working masses were to come out on the

  streets for mass demonstrations. Unshlikht's "Red hundreds" were to provoke

  clashes with the police so as to cause bloodshed and more serious conflicts,

  to inflame the workers' indignation and carry out a general working-class

  uprising.

  In view of the instability of German Society at that time, the absence

  of a powerful army, the widespread discontent and the frequent outbursts of

  violence, especially in 1923, the plan might have been realised. Many

  experts are inclined to the view that Germany really was close to

  revolution. Soviet military intelligence and its terrorist units led by