Spetsnaz Read online

  Again, a group may be given the task of getting from one place to another by a very complicated and confused route without losing a single man. And again the group will soon appoint its own leader. Every day, every hour and every minute of the soldier’s time is taken up with hard work, lessons, running, jumping, overcoming obstacles, and practically all the time the group is without a commander. In a few days of very intensive training the company commander and platoon commanders pick out the most intelligent, most imaginative, strongest, most brash and energetic in the group. After completing the course the majority of recruits finish up in sections and platoons of the same company, but the best of them are sent thousands of kilometres away to one of the spetsnaz training battalions where they become sergeants. Then they return to the companies they came from.

  It is a very long road for the recruit. But it has one advantage: the potential sergeant is not selected by the local military authority nor even by the training unit, but by a regular officer at a very low level - at platoon or company level. What is more, the selection is made on a strictly individual basis and by the very same officer who will in five months’ time receive the man he has selected back again, now equipped with sergeant’s stripes.

  It is impossible, of course, to introduce such a system into the whole of the Soviet Armed Forces. It involves transporting millions of men from one place to another. In all other branches the path of the future sergeant from where he lives follows this plan: training division - regular division. In spetsnaz the plan is: regular unit - training unit - regular unit.

  There is yet another difference of principle. If any other branch of the services needs a sergeant the military commissariat despatches a recruit to the training division, which has to make him into a sergeant. But if spetsnaz needs a sergeant the company commander sends three of his best recruits to the spetsnaz training unit.

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  The spetsnaz training battalion works on the principle that before you start giving orders, you have to learn to obey them. The whole of the thinking behind the training battalions can be put very simply. They say that if you make an empty barrel airtight and drag it down below the water and then let it go it shoots up and out above the surface of the water. The deeper it is dragged down the faster it rises and the further it jumps out of the water. This is how the training battalions operate. Their task is to drag their ever-changing body of men deeper down.

  Each spetsnaz training battalion has its permanent staff of officers, warrant officers and sergeants and receives its intake of 300-400 spetsnaz recruits who have already been through a recruit’s course in various spetsnaz units.

  The regime in the normal Soviet training divisions can only be described as brutal. I experienced it first as a student in a training division. I have already described the conditions within spetsnaz. To appreciate what conditions are like in a spetsnaz training battalion, the brutality has to be multiplied many times over.

  In the spetsnaz training battalions the empty barrel is dragged so far down into the deep that it is in danger of bursting from external pressure. A man’s dignity is stripped from him to such an extent that it is kept constantly at the very brink, beyond which lies suicide or the murder of his officer. The officers and sergeants of the training battalions are, every one of them, enthusiasts for their work. Anyone who does not like this work will not stand it for so long but goes off voluntarily to other easier work in spetsnaz regular units. The only people who stay in the training battalions are those who derive great pleasure from their work. Their work is to issue orders by which they make or break the strongest of characters. The commander’s work is constantly to see before him dozens of men, each of whom has one thought in his head: to kill himself or to kill his officer? The work for those who enjoy it provides complete moral and physical satisfaction, just as a stuntman might derive satisfaction from leaping on a motorcycle over nineteen coaches. The difference between the stuntman risking his neck and the commander of a spetsnaz training unit lies in the fact that the former experiences his satisfaction for a matter of a few seconds, while the latter experiences it all the time.

  Every soldier taken into a training battalion is given a nickname, almost invariably sarcastic. He might be known as The Count, The Duke, Caesar, Alexander of Macedon, Louis XI, Ambassador, Minister of Foreign Affairs, or any variation on the theme. He is treated with exaggerated respect, not given orders, but asked for his opinion:

  ‘Would Your Excellency be of a mind to clean the toilet with his toothbrush?’

  ‘Illustrious Prince, would you care to throw up in public what you ate at lunch?’

  In spetsnaz units men are fed much better than in any other units of the armed forces, but the workload is so great that the men are permanently hungry, even if they do not suffer the unofficial but very common punishment of being forced to empty their stomachs:

  ‘You’re on the heavy side, Count, after your lunch! Would you care to stick two fingers down your throat? That’ll make things easier!’

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  The more humiliating the forms of punishment a sergeant thinks up for the men under him, and the more violently he attacks their dignity, the better. The task of the training battalions is to crush and completely destroy the individual, however strong a character he may have possessed, and to fashion out of that person a type to fit the standards of spetsnaz, a type who will be filled with an explosive charge of hatred and spite and a craving for revenge.

  The main difficulty in carrying out this act of human engineering is to turn the fury of the young soldier in the right direction. He has to have been reduced to the lowest limits of his dignity and then, at precisely the point when he can take no more, he can be given his sergeant’s stripes and sent off to serve in a regular unit. There he can begin to work off his fury on his own subordinates, or better still on the enemies of Communism.

  The training units of spetsnaz are a place where they tease a recruit like a dog, working him into a rage and then letting him off the leash. It is not surprising that fights inside spetsnaz are a common occurrence. Everyone, especially those who have served in a spetsnaz training unit, bears within himself a colossal charge of malice, just as a thunder cloud bears its charge of electricity. It is not surprising that for a spetsnaz private, or even more so for a sergeant, war is just a beautiful dream, the time when he is at last allowed to release his full charge of malice.

  Apart from the unending succession of humiliations, insults and punishments handed out by the commanders, the man serving in a spetsnaz training unit has continually to wage a no less bitter battle against his own comrades who are in identical circumstances to his own.

  In the first place there is a silent competition for pride of place, for the leadership in each group of people. In spetsnaz, as we have seen, this struggle has assumed open and very dramatic forms. Apart from this natural battle for first place there exists an even more serious incentive. It derives from the fact that for every sergeant’s place in a spetsnaz training battalion there are three candidates being trained at the same time. Only the very best will be made sergeant at the end of five months. On passing out some are given the rank of junior sergeant, while others are not given any rank at all and remain as privates in the ranks. It is a bitter tragedy for a man to go through all the ordeals of a spetsnaz training battalion and not to receive any rank but to return to his unit as a private at the end of it.

  The decision whether to promote a man to sergeant after he has been through the training course is made by a commission of GRU officers or the Intelligence Directorate of the military district in whose territory the particular battalion is stationed. The decision is made on the basis of the result of examinations conducted in the presence of the commission, on the main subjects studied: political training; the tactics of spetsnaz (including knowledge of the probable enemy and the main targets that spetsnaz operates); weapons training (knowledge of spetsnaz armament, firing from various kinds of weapons including forei
gn weapons, and the use of explosives); parachute training; physical training; and weapons of mass destruction and defence against them.

  The commission does not distinguish between the soldiers according to where they have come from, but only according to their degree of readiness to carry out missions. Consequently, when the men who have passed out are returned to their units there may arise a lack of balance among them. For example, a spetsnaz company that sends nine privates to a training battalion in the hope of receiving three sergeants back after five months, could receive one sergeant, one junior sergeant and seven privates, or five sergeants, three junior sergeants and one private. This system has been introduced quite deliberately. The officer commanding a regular company, with nine trained men to choose from, puts only the very best in charge of his sections. He can put anybody he pleases into the vacancies without reference to his rank. Privates who have been through the training battalion can be appointed commanders of sections. Sergeants and junior sergeants for whom there are not enough posts as commanders will carry out the work of privates despite their sergeant’s rank.

  The spetsnaz company commander may also have, apart from the freshly trained men, sergeants and privates who completed their training earlier but were not appointed to positions as commanders. Consequently the company commander can entrust the work of commanding sections to any of them, while all the new arrivals from the training battalion can be used as privates.

  The private or junior sergeant who is appointed to command a section has to struggle to show his superiors that he really is worthy of that trust and that he really is the best. If he succeeds in doing so he will in due course be given the appropriate rank. If he is unworthy he will be removed. There are always candidates for his job.

  This system has two objectives: the first is to have within the spetsnaz regular units a large reserve of commanders at the very lowest level. During a war spetsnaz will suffer tremendous losses. In every section there are always a minimum of two fully trained men capable of taking command at any moment; the second is to generate a continual battle between sergeants for the right to be a commander. Every commander of a section or deputy commander of a platoon can be removed at any time and replaced by someone more worthy of the job. The removal of a sergeant from a position of command is carried out on the authority of the company commander (if it is a separate spetsnaz company) or on the authority of the battalion commander or regiment. When he is removed the former commander is reduced to the status of a private soldier. He may retain his rank, or his rank may be reduced, or he may lose the rank of sergeant altogether.

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  The training of officers for spetsnaz often take place at a special faculty of the Lenin Komsomol Higher Airborne Command School in Ryazan. Great care is taken over their selection for the school. The ones who join the faculty are among the very best.

  The four years of gruelling training are also four years of continual testing and selection to establish whether the students are capable of becoming spetsnaz officers or not. When they have completed their studies at the special faculty some of them are posted to the airborne troops or the air assault troops. Only the very best are posted to spetsnaz, and even then a young officer can at any moment be sent off into the airborne forces. Only those who are absolutely suitable remain in spetsnaz. Other officers are appointed from among the men passing out from other command schools who have never previously heard of spetsnaz.

  The heads of the GRU consider that special training is necessary for every function, except that of leader. A leader cannot be produced by even the best training scheme. A leader is born a leader and nobody can help him or advise him how to manage people. In this case advice offered by professors does not help; it only hinders. A professor is a man who has never been a leader and never will be, and nobody ever taught Hitler how to lead a nation. Stalin was thrown out of his theological seminary. Marshal Georgi Zhukov, the outstanding military leader of the Second World War, had a million men, and often several million, under his direct command practically throughout the war. Of all the generals and marshals at his level he was the only one who did not suffer a single defeat in battle. Yet he had no real military education. He did not graduate from a military school to become a junior officer; he did not graduate from a military academy to become a senior officer; and he did not graduate from the Academy of General Staff to become a general and later a marshal. But he became one just the same. There was Khalkhin-Gol, Yelnya, the counter-offensive before Moscow, Stalingrad, the lifting of the Leningrad blockade, Kursk, the crossing of the Dnieper, the Belorussian operation, and the Vistula-Oder and Berlin operations. What need had he of education? What could the professors teach him?

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  The headquarters of every military district has a Directorate for Personnel, which does a tremendous amount of work on officers’ records and on the studying, selecting and posting of officers. On instructions from the chief of staff of the military district, the Directorate for Personnel of each district will do a search for officers who come up to the spetsnaz standard.

  The criteria which the Intelligence directorate sends to the Directorate of Personnel are top secret. But one can easily tell by looking at the officers of spetsnaz the qualities which they certainly possess.

  The first and most important of them are of course a strong, unbending character and the marks of a born leader. Every year thousands of young officers with all kinds of specialities - from the missile forces, the tank troops, the infantry, the engineers and signallers pass through the Personnel directorate of each military district. Each officer is preceded by his dossier in which a great deal is written down. But that is not the decisive factor. When he arrives in the Directorate for Personnel the young officer is interviewed by several experienced officers specialising in personnel matters. It is in the course of these interviews that a man of really remarkable personality stands out, with dazzling clarity, from the mass of thousands of other strong-willed and physically powerful men. When the personnel officers discover him, the interviewing is taken over by other officers of the Intelligence directorate and it is they who will very probably offer him a suitable job.

  But officers for spetsnaz are occasionally not selected when they pass through the Personnel directorate. They pass through the interviewing process without distinguishing themselves in any way, and are given jobs as commanders. Then stories may begin to circulate through the regiment, division, army and district to the effect that such and such a young commander is a brute, ready to attack anyone, but holds his own, performs miracles, has turned a backward platoon into a model unit, and so forth. The man is rapidly promoted and can be sure of being appointed to a penal battalion - not to be punished, but to take charge of the offenders. At this point the Intelligence directorate takes a hand in the matter. If the officer is in command of a penal platoon or company and he is tough enough to handle really difficult men without being scared of them or fearing to use his own strength, he will be weighed up very carefully for a job.

  There is one other way in which officers are chosen. Every officer with his unit has to mount guard for the garrison and patrol the streets and railway stations in search of offenders. The military commandant of the town and the officer commanding the garrison (the senior military man in town) see these officers every day. Day after day they take over the duty from another officer, perform it for twenty-four hours and then hand over to another officer. The system has existed for decades and all serving officers carry out these duties several times a year. It is the right moment to study their characters.

  Say a drunken private is hauled into the guardroom. One officer will say, ‘Pour ice-cold water over him and throw him in a cell!’ Another officer will behave differently. When he sees the drunken soldier, his reaction will be along the lines of: ‘Just bring him in here! Shut the door and cover him with a wet blanket (so as not to leave any marks). I’ll teach him a lesson! Kick him in the guts! That’ll teach him not to drink nex
t time. Now lads, beat him up as best you can. Go on! I’d do the same to you, my boys! Now wipe him off with snow.’ It needs little imagination to see which of the officers is regarded more favourably by his superiors. The Intelligence directorate doesn’t need very many people - just the best.

  The second most important quality is physical endurance. An officer who is offered a post is likely to be a runner, swimmer, skier or athlete in some form of sport demanding long and very concentrated physical effort. And a third factor is the physical dimensions of the man. Best of all is that he should be an enormous hulk with vast shoulders and huge fists. But this factor can be ignored if a man appears of small build and no broad shoulders but with a really strong character and a great capacity for physical endurance. Such a person is taken in, of course. The long history of mankind indicates that strong characters are met with no less frequently among short people than among giants.

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  Any young officer can be invited to join spetsnaz irrespective of his previous speciality in the armed forces. If he possesses the required qualities of an iron will, an air of unquestionable authority, ruthlessness and an independent way of taking decisions and acting, if he is by nature a gambler who is not afraid to take a chance with anything, including his own life, then he will eventually be invited to the headquarters of the military district. He will be led along the endless corridors to a little office where he will be interviewed by a general and some senior officers. The young officer will not of course know that the general is head of the Intelligence directorate of the military district or that the colonel next to him is head of the third department (spetsnaz) of the directorate.