Spetsnaz Read online

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  Mud, nothing but mud all round, and it was pouring with rain. It had been raining throughout the summer, so that everything was wet and hanging limp. Everything was stuck in the mud. Every soldier’s boot carried kilograms of it. But their bodies were covered in mud as well, and their hands and faces up to their ears and further. It was clear that the sergeant had not taken pity on the young spetsnaz recruits that day. They had been called up only a month before. They had been formed up into a provisional group and been put through a month’s course for young soldiers which every one of them would remember all his life in his worst nightmare.

  That morning they had been divided up into companies and platoons. Before letting them back into their mud-covered, sodden tent at the end of the day each sergeant had time to show his platoon the extent of his authority.

  ‘Get inside!’

  There were ten young men crowding around the entrance to a huge tent, as big as a prison barracks.

  ‘Get inside, damn you!’ The sergeant urged them on.

  The first soldier thrust aside the heavy wet tarpaulin which served as a door and was about to enter when something stopped him. On the muddy, much trampled ground just inside the entrance a dazzlingly white towel had been laid down in place of a doormat. The soldier hesitated. But behind him the sergeant was pushing and shouting: ‘Go on in, damn you!’

  The soldier was not inclined to step on the towel. At the same time he couldn’t make up his mind to jump over it, because the mud from his boots would inevitably land on the towel. Eventually he jumped, and the others jumped across the towel after him. For some reason no one dared to take the towel away. Everyone could see that there was some reason why it had been put there right in the entrance. A beautiful clean towel. With mud all around it. What was it doing there?

  A whole platoon lived in one huge tent. The men slept in two- tier metal bunks. The top bunks were occupied by the stariki- the ‘old men’ of nineteen or even nineteen and a half, who had already served a year or even eighteen months in spetsnaz. The salagi slept on the bottom bunks. They had served only six months. By comparison with those who were now jumping over the towel they were of course stariki too. They had all in their day jumped awkwardly across the towel. Now they were watching silently, patiently and attentively to see how the new men behaved in that situation.

  The new men behaved as anybody would in their situation. Some pushed from behind, and there was the towel in front. So they jumped, and clustered together in the centre of the tent, not knowing where to put their hands or where to look. It was strange. They seemed to want to look at the ground. All the young men behaved in exactly the same way: a jump, into the crowd and eyes down. But no - the last soldier behaved quite differently. He burst into the tent, helped by a kick from the sergeant. On seeing the white towel he pulled himself up sharply, stood on it in his dirty boots and proceeded to wipe them as if he really were standing on a doormat. Having wiped his feet he didn’t join the crowd but marched to the far corner of the tent where he had seen a spare bed.

  ‘Is this mine?’

  ‘It’s yours,’ the platoon shouted approvingly. ‘Come here, mate, there’s a better place here! Do you want to eat?’

  That night all the young recruits would get beaten. And they would be beaten on the following nights. They would be driven out into the mud barefoot, and they would be made to sleep in the lavatories (standing up or lying down, as you wish). They would be beaten with belts, with slippers and with spoons, with anything suitable for causing pain. The stariki would use the salagi on which to ride horseback in battles with their friends. The salagi would clean the ‘old men’s’ weapons and do their dirty jobs for them. There would be the same goings-on as in the rest of the Soviet Army. Stariki everywhere play the same kind of tricks on the recruits. The rituals and the rules are the same everywhere. The spetsnaz differs from the other branches only in that they place the dazzlingly clean towel at the entrance to the tent for the recruits to walk over. The sense of this particular ritual is clear and simple: We are nice people. We welcome you, young man, cordially into our friendly collective. Our work is very hard, the hardest in the whole army, but we do not let it harden our hearts. Come into our house, young man, and make yourself at home. We respect you and will spare nothing for you. You see - we have even put the towel with which we wipe our faces for you to walk on in your dirty feet. So that’s it, is it - you don’t accept our welcome? You reject our modest gift? You don’t even wish to wipe your boots on what we wipe our faces with! What sort of people do you take us for? You may certainly not respect us, but why did you come into our house with dirty boots?

  Only one of the salagi, the one who wiped his feet on the towel, will be able to sleep undisturbed. He will receive his full ration of food and will clean only his own weapon; and perhaps the stariki will give instructions that he should not do even that. There are many others in the platoon to do it.

  Where on earth could a young eighteen-year-old soldier have learnt about the spetsnaz tradition? Where could he have heard about the white towel? Spetsnaz is a secret organisation which treasures its traditions and keeps them to itself. A former spetsnaz soldier must never tell tales: he’ll lose his tongue if he does. In any case he is unlikely to tell anyone about the towel trick, especially someone who has yet to be called up. I was beaten up, so let him be beaten up as well, he reasons.

  There are only three possible ways the young soldier could have found out about the towel. Either he simply guessed what was happening himself. The towel had been laid down at the entrance, so it must be to wipe his feet on. What else could it be for? Or perhaps his elder brother had been through the spetsnaz. He had, of course, never called it by that name or said what it was for, but he might have said about the towel: ‘Watch out, brother, there are some units that have very strange customs. . . . But just take care -if you let on I’ll knock your head off. And I can.’ Or his elder brother might have spent some time in a penal battalion. Perhaps he had been in spetsnaz and in a penal battalion. For the custom of laying out a towel in the entrance before the arrival of recruits did not originate in spetsnaz but in the penal battalions. It is possible that it was handed on to the present-day penal battalions from the prisons of the past.

  The links between spetsnaz and the penal battalions are invisible, but they are many and very strong.

  In the first place, service in spetsnaz is the toughest form of service in the Soviet Army. The physical and psychological demands are not only increased deliberately to the very highest point that a man can bear; they are frequently, and also deliberately, taken beyond any permissible limits. It is quite understandable that a spetsnaz soldier should find he cannot withstand these extreme demands and breaks down. The breakdown may take many different forms: suicide, severe depression, hysteria, madness or desertion. As I was leaving an intelligence unit of a military district on promotion to Moscow I suddenly came across, on a little railway station, a spetsnaz officer I knew being escorted by two armed soldiers.

  ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ I exclaimed. ‘You don’t see people on this station more than once in a month!’

  ‘One of my men ran away!’

  ‘A new recruit?’

  ‘That’s the trouble, he’s a starik. Only another month to go.’ ‘Did he take his weapon?’

  ‘No, he went without it.’

  I expressed my surprise, wished the lieutenant luck and went on my way. How the search ended I do not know. At the very next station soldiers of the Interior Ministry’s troops were searching the carriages. The alarm had gone out all over the district.

  Men run away from spetsnaz more often than from other branches of the services. But it is usually a case of a new recruit who has been stretched to the limit and who usually takes a rifle with him. A man like that will kill anyone who gets in his path. But he is usually quickly run down and killed. But in this case it was a starik who had run off, and without a rifle. Where had h
e gone, and why? I didn’t know. Did they find him? I didn't know that either. Of course they found him. They are good at that. If he wasn’t carrying a rifle he would not have been killed. They don’t kill people without reason. So what could he expect? Two years in a penal battalion and then the month in spetsnaz that he had not completed.

  Spetsnaz has no distinguishing badge or insignia - officially, at any rate. But unofficially the spetsnaz badge is a wolf, or rather a pack of wolves. The wolf is a strong, proud animal which is remarkable for its quite incredible powers of endurance. A wolf can run for hours through deep snow at great speed, and then, when he scents his prey, put on another astonishing burst of speed. Sometimes he will chase his prey for days, reducing it to a state of exhaustion. Exploiting their great capacity for endurance, wolves first exhaust and then attack animals noted for their tremendous strength, such as the elk. People say rightly that the ‘wolf lives on its legs’. Wolves will bring down a huge elk, not so much by the strength of their teeth as by the strength of their legs.

  The wolf also has a powerful intellect. He is proud and independent. You can tame and domesticate a squirrel, a fox or even a great elk with bloodshot eyes. And there are many animals that can be trained to perform. A performing bear can do really miraculous things. But you cannot tame a wolf or train it to perform. The wolf lives in a pack, a closely knit and well organised fighting unit of frightful predators. The tactics of a wolf pack are the very embodiment of flexibility and daring. The wolves’ tactics are an enormous collection of various tricks and combinations, a mixture of cunning and strength, confusing manoeuvres and sudden attacks.

  No other animal in the world could better serve as a symbol of the spetsnaz. And there is good reason why the training of a spetsnaz soldier starts with the training of his legs. A man is as strong and young as his legs are strong and young. If a man has a sloppy way of walking and if he drags his feet along the ground, that means he himself is weak. On the other hand, a dancing, springy gait is a sure sign of physical and mental health. Spetsnaz soldiers are often dressed up in the uniform of other branches of the services and stationed in the same military camps as other especially secret units, usually with communications troops. But one doesn’t need any special experience to pick out the spetsnaz man from the crowd. You can tell him by the way he walks. I shall never forget one soldier who was known as ‘The Spring’. He was not very tall, slightly stooping and round-shouldered. But his feet were never still. He kept dancing about the whole time. He gave the impression of being restrained only by some invisible string, and if the string were cut the soldier would go on jumping, running and dancing and never stop. The military commissariat whose job it was to select the young soldiers and sort them out paid no attention to him and he fetched up in an army missile brigade. He had served almost a year there when the brigade had to take part in manoeuvres in which a spetsnaz company was used against them. When the exercise was over the spetsnaz company was fed there in the forest next to the missile troops. The officer commanding the spetsnaz company noticed the soldier in the missile unit who kept dancing about all the time he was standing in the queue for his soup.

  ‘Come over here, soldier.’ The officer drew a line on the ground. ‘Now jump.’

  The soldier stood on the line and jumped from there, without any run-up. The company commander did not have anything with him to measure the length of the jump, but there was no need. The officer was experienced in such things and knew what was good and what was excellent.

  ‘Get into my car!’

  ‘I cannot, comrade major, without my officer’s permission.’

  ‘Get in and don’t worry, you’ll be all right with me. I will speak up for you and tell the right people where you have been.’

  The company commander made the soldier get into his car and an hour later presented him to the chief of army intelligence, saying:

  ‘Comrade colonel, look what I’ve found among the missile troops.’

  ‘Now then, young man, let’s see you jump.’

  The soldier jumped from the spot. This time there was a tape measure handy and it showed he had jumped 2 metres 41 centimetres.

  ‘Take the soldier into your lot and find him the right sort of cap,’ the colonel said.

  The commander of the spetsnaz company took off his own blue beret and gave it to the soldier. The chief of intelligence immediately phoned the chief of staff of the army, who gave the appropriate order to the missile brigade - forget you ever had such a man.

  The dancing soldier was given the nickname ‘The Spring’ on account of his flexibility. He had never previously taken a serious interest in sport, but he was a born athlete. Under the direction of experienced trainers his talents were revealed and he immediately performed brilliantly. A year later, when he completed his military service, he was already clearing 2 metres 90 centimetres. He was invited to join the professional athletic service of spetsnaz, and he agreed.

  The long jump with no run has been undeservedly forgotten and is no longer included in the programme of official competitions. When it was included in the Olympic Games the record set in 1908, was 3 metres 33 centimetres. As an athletic skill the long jump without a run is the most reliable indication of the strength of a person’s legs. And the strength of his legs is a reliable indicator of the whole physical condition of a soldier. Practically half a person’s muscles are to be found in his legs. Spetsnaz devotes colossal attention to developing the legs of its men, using many simple but very effective exercises: running upstairs, jumping with ankles tied together up a few steps and down again, running up steep sandy slopes, jumping down from a great height, leaping from moving cars and trains, knee-bending with a barbell on the shoulders, and of course the jump from a spot. At the end of the 1970s the spetsnaz record in this exercise, which has not been recognised by the official sports authorities, was 3 metres 51 centimetres.

  A spetsnaz soldier knows that he is invincible. This may be a matter of opinion, but other people’s opinions do not interest the soldier. He knows himself that he is invincible and that’s enough for him. The idea is instilled into him carefully, delicately, not too insistently, but continually and effectively. The process of psychological training is inseparably linked to the physical toughening. The development of a spirit of self-confidence and of independence and of a feeling of superiority over any opponent is carried out at the same time as the development of the heart, the muscles and the lungs. The most important element in training a spetsnaz soldier is to make him believe in his own strength.

  A man’s potential is unlimited, the reasoning goes. A man can reach any heights in life in any sphere of activity. But in order to defeat his opponents a man must first overcome himself, combat his own fears, his lack of confidence and laziness. The path upwards is one of continual battle with oneself. A man must force himself to rise sooner than the others and go to bed later. He must exclude from his life everything that prevents him from achieving his objective. He must subordinate the whole of his existence to the strictest regime. He must give up taking days off. He must use his time to the best possible advantage and fit in even more than was thought possible. A man aiming for a particular target can succeed only if he uses every minute of his life to the maximum advantage for carrying out his plan. A man should find four hours’ sleep quite sufficient, and the rest of his time can be used for concentrating on the achievement of his objective.

  I imagine that to instil this psychology into a mass army formed by means of compulsory mobilisation would be impossible and probably unnecessary. But in separate units carefully composed of the best human material such a philosophy is entirely acceptable.

  In numbers spetsnaz amounts to less than one per cent of all the Soviet armed forces in peacetime. Spetsnaz is the best, carefully selected part of the armed forces, and the philosophy of each man’s unlimited potential has been adopted in its entirety by every member of the organisation. It is a philosophy which cannot be put into words. The soldier
grasps it not with his head, but with his feet, his shoulders and his sweat. He soon becomes convinced that the path to victory and self-perfection is a battle with himself, with his own mental and physical weakness. Training of any kind makes sense only if it brings a man to the very brink of his physical and mental powers. To begin with, he must know precisely the limits of his capabilities. For example: he can do 40 press-ups. He must know this figure precisely and that it really is the limit of his capacity. No matter how he strains he can do no more. But every training session is a cruel battle to beat his previous record. As he starts a training session a soldier has to promise himself that he will beat his own record today or die in the attempt.

  The only people who become champions are those who go into each training session as if they are going to their death or to their last battle in which they will either win or die. The victor is the one for whom victory is more important than life. The victor is the one who dives a centimetre deeper than his maximum depth, knowing that his lungs will not hold out and that death lies beyond his limit. And once he has overcome the fear of death, the next time he will dive even deeper! Spetsnaz senior lieutenant Vladimir Salnikov, world champion and Olympic champion swimmer, repeats the slogan every day: conquer yourself, and that was why he defeated everyone at the Olympic Games.

  An excellent place to get to know and to overcome oneself is the ‘Devil’s Ditch’ which has been dug at the spetsnaz central training centre near Kirovograd. It is a ditch with metal spikes stuck into the bottom. The narrowest width is three metres. From there it gets wider and wider.