Spetsnaz
Viktor
Suvorov
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Translated from the Russian by David Floyd
First published in Great Britain 1987 by Hamish Hamilton Ltd
ISBN 0-241-11961-8
Origin: http://www.geocities.com/Suvorov_book/
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Viktor Suvorov. Spetsnaz.
The Inside Story of the Soviet Special Forces
To Natasha and Alexander
Every infantryman in the Soviet Army carries with him a small spade.
When he is given the order to halt he immediately lies flat and starts to dig a
hole in the ground beside him. In three minutes he will have dug a little
trench 15 centimetres deep, in which he can lie stretched out flat, so that
bullets can whistle harmlessly over his head. The earth he has dug out forms a
breastwork in front and at the side to act as an additional cover. If a tank
drives over such a trench the soldier has a 50% chance that it will do him no
harm. At any moment the soldier may be ordered to advance again and, shouting
at the top of his voice, will rush ahead. If he is not ordered to advance, he
digs in deeper and deeper. At first his trench can be used for firing in the
lying position. Later it becomes a trench from which to fire in the kneeling
position, and later still, when it is 110 centimetres deep, it can be used for
firing in the standing position. The earth that has been dug out protects the
soldier from bullets and fragments. He makes an embrasure in this breastwork
into which he positions the barrel of his gun. In the absence of any further
commands he continues to work on his trench. He camouflages it. He starts to
dig a trench to connect with his comrades to the left of him. He always digs
from right to left, and in a few hours the unit has a trench linking all the
riflemen's trenches together. The unit's trenches are linked with the trenches
of other units. Dug-outs are built and communication trenches are added at the
rear. The trenches are made deeper, covered over, camouflaged and reinforced.
Then, suddenly, the order to advance comes again. The soldier emerges, shouting
and swearing as loudly as he can.
The infantryman uses the same spade for digging graves for his fallen
comrades. If he doesn't have an axe to hand he uses the spade to chop his bread
when it is frozen hard as granite. He uses it as a paddle as he floats across
wide rivers on a telegraph pole under enemy fire. And when he gets the order to
halt, he again builds his impregnable fortress around himself. He knows how to
dig the earth efficiently. He builds his fortress exactly as it should be. The
spade is not just an instrument for digging: it can also be used for measuring.
It is 50 centimetres long. Two spade lengths are a metre. The blade is 15
centimetres wide and 18 centimetres long. With these measurements in mind the
soldier can measure anything he wishes.
The infantry spade does not have a folding handle, and this is a very
important feature. It has to be a single monolithic object. All three of its
edges are as sharp as a knife. It is painted with a green matt paint so as not
to reflect the strong sunlight.
The spade is not only a tool and a measure. It is also a guarantee of
the steadfastness of the infantry in the most difficult situations. If the
infantry have a few hours to dig themselves in, it could take years to get them
out of their holes and trenches, whatever modern weapons are used against them.
___
In this book we are not talking about the infantry but about soldiers
belonging to other units, known as spetsnaz.
These soldiers never dig trenches; in fact they never take up defensive
positions. They either launch a sudden attack on an enemy or, if they meet with
resistance or superior enemy forces, they disappear as quickly as they appeared
and attack the enemy again where and when the enemy least expects them to
appear.
Surprisingly, the spetsnaz
soldiers also carry the little infantry spades. Why do they need them? It is
practically impossible to describe in words how they use their spades. You
really have to see what they do with them. In the hands of a spetsnaz soldier the spade is a terrible
noiseless weapon and every member of spetsnaz
gets much more training in the use of his spade then does the infantryman. The
first thing he has to teach himself is precision: to split little slivers of
wood with the edge of the spade or to cut off the neck of a bottle so that the
bottle remains whole. He has to learn to love his spade and have faith in its
accuracy. To do that he places his hand on the stump of a tree with the fingers
spread out and takes a big swing at the stump with his right hand using the
edge of the spade. Once he has learnt to use the spade well and truly as an axe
he is taught more complicated things. The little spade can be used in
hand-to-hand fighting against blows from a bayonet, a knife, a fist or another
spade. A soldier armed with nothing but the spade is shut in a room without
windows along with a mad dog, which makes for an interesting contest. Finally a
soldier is taught to throw the spade as accurately as he would use a sword or a
battle-axe. It is a wonderful weapon for throwing, a single, well-balanced
object, whose 32-centimetre handle acts as a lever for throwing. As it spins in
flight it gives the spade accuracy and thrust. It becomes a terrifying weapon. If
it lands in a tree it is not so easy to pull out again. Far more serious is it
if it hits someone's skull, although spetsnaz
members usually do not aim at the enemy's face but at his back. He will rarely
see the blade coming, before it lands in the back of his neck or between his
shoulder blades, smashing the bones.
The spetsnaz soldier loves his
spade. He has more faith in its reliability and accuracy than he has in his
Kalashnikov automatic. An interesting psychological detail has been observed in
the kind of hand-to-hand confrontations which are the stock in trade of spetsnaz. If a soldier fires at an enemy
armed with an automatic, the enemy also shoots at him. But if he doesn't fire
at the enemy but throws a spade at him instead, the enemy simply drops his gun
and jumps to one side.
This is a book about people who throw spades and about soldiers who work
with spades more surely and more accurately than they do with spoons at a
table. They do, of course, have other weapons besides their spades.
Chapter
2. Spetsnaz and the GRU
It is impossible to translate the Russian word razvedka precisely into any foreign language. It is usually
rendered as `reconnaissance' or `spying' or `intelligence gathering'. A fuller
explanation of the word is that it describes any means and any actions aimed at
obtaining information about an enemy, analysing it and understanding it
properly.
Every Soviet military headquarters has its own machinery for gathering
and analysing information about the enemy. The information thus collected and
analysed about the enemy is passed on to other headquarters, higher up, lower
down and on the same level, and each headquarters in turn receives information
about the enemy not only from its own sources but also from the other
headquarters.
If some military unit should be defeated in battle through its ignorance
of the enemy, the commanding officer and his chief of staff have no right to
blame the fact that they were not well enough informed about the enemy. The
most important task for every commander and chief of staff is that, without
waiting for information to arrive from elsewhere, they must organise their own
sources of information about the enemy and warn their own forces and their
superior headquarters of any danger that is threatened.
Spetsnaz is
one of the forms of Soviet military razvedka
which occupies a place somewhere between reconnaissance and intelligence.
It is the name given to the shock troops of razvedka in which there are combined elements of espionage,
terrorism and large-scale partisan operations. In personal terms, this covers a
very diverse range of people: secret agents recruited by Soviet military razvedka among foreigners for carrying
out espionage and terrorist operations; professional units composed of the
country's best sportsmen; and units made up of ordinary but carefully selected
and well trained soldiers. The higher the level of a given headquarters is, the
more spetsnaz units it has at its
disposal and the more professionals there are among the spetsnaz troops.
The term spetsnaz is a
composite word made up from spetsialnoye
nazhacheniye, meaning `special purpose'. The name is well chosen. Spetsnaz differs from other forms of razvedka in that it not only seeks and
finds important enemy targets, but in the majority of cases attacks and
destroys them.
Spetsnaz has
a long history, in which there have been periods of success and periods of
decline. After the Second World War spetsnaz
was in the doldrums, but from the mid-1950s a new era in the history of the
organisation began with the West's new deployment of tactical nuclear weapons.
This development created for the Soviet Army, which had always prepared itself,
and still does, only for `liberation' wars on foreign territory, a practically
insuperable barrier. Soviet strategy could continue along the same lines only
if the means could be found to remove Western tactical nuclear weapons from the
path of the Soviet troops, without at the same time turning the enemy's
territory into a nuclear desert.
The destruction of the tactical nuclear weapons which render Soviet
aggression impossible or pointless could be carried out only if the whereabouts
of all, or at least the majority, of the enemy's tactical nuclear weapons were
established. But this in itself presented a tremendous problem. It is very easy
to conceal tactical missiles, aircraft and nuclear artillery and, instead of
deploying real missiles and guns, the enemy can deploy dummies, thus diverting
the attention of Soviet razvedka and
protecting the real tactical nuclear weapons under cover.
The Soviet high command therefore had to devise the sort of means of
detection that could approach very close to the enemy's weapons and in each
case provide a precise answer to the question of whether they were real, or
just well produced dummies. But even if a tremendous number of nuclear
batteries were discovered in good time, that did not solve the problem. In the
time it takes for the transmission of the reports from the reconnaissance units
to the headquarters, for the analysis of the information obtained and the
preparation of the appropriate command for action, the battery can have changed
position several times. So forces had to be created that would be able to seek
out, find and destroy immediately the nuclear weapons discovered in the course
of war or immediately before its outbreak.
Spetsnaz
was, and is, precisely such an instrument, permitting commanding officers at
army level and higher to establish independently the whereabouts of the enemy's
most dangerous weapons and to destroy them on the spot.
Is it possible for spetsnaz to
pinpoint and destroy every single one of the enemy's nuclear weapons? Of course
not. So what is the solution to this problem? It is very simple. Spetsnaz has to make every effort to
find and destroy the enemy's nuclear armament. Nuclear strength represents the
teeth of the state and it has to be knocked out with the first blow, possibly
even before the fighting begins. But if it proves impossible to knock out all
the teeth with the first blow, then a blow has to be struck not just at the
teeth but at the brain and nervous system of the state.
When we speak of the `brain' we mean the country's most important
statesmen and politicians. In this context the leaders of the opposition
parties are regarded as equally important candidates for destruction as the
leaders of the party in power. The opposition is simply the state's reserve
brain, and it would be silly to destroy the main decision-making system without
putting the reserve system out of action. By the same token we mean, for
example, the principal military leaders and police chiefs, the heads of the
Church and trade unions and in general all the people who might at a critical
moment appeal to the nation and who are well known to the nation.
By the `nervous system' of the state we mean the principal centres and
lines of government and military communications, and the commercial
communications companies, including the main radio stations and television
studios.
It would hardly be possible, of course, to destroy the brain, the
nervous system and the teeth at once, but a simultaneous blow at all three of
the most important organs could, in the opinion of the Soviet leaders,
substantially reduce a nation's capacity for action in the event of war,
especially at its initial and most critical stage. Some missiles will be
destroyed and others will not be fired because there will be nobody to give the
appropriate command or because the command will not be passed on in time due to
the breakdown of communications.
Having within its sphere an organisation like spetsnaz, and having tested its potential on numerous exercises,
the Soviet high command came to the conclusion that spetsnaz could be used with success not only against tactical but
also against strategic nuclear installations: submarine bases, weapon
stockpiles, aircraft bases and missile launching sites.
Spetsnaz
could be used too, they realised, against the heart and blood supply of the
state: ie. its source and distribution of energy — power stations,
transformer stations and power lines, as well as oil and gas pipelines and
storage points, pumping station and oil refineries. Putting even a few of the
enemy's more important power stations out of action could present him with a
catastrophic situation. Not only would there be no light: factories would be
brought to a standstill, lifts would cease to work, the refrigeration
installations would be useless, hospitals would find it almost impossible to
function, blood stored in refrigerators would begin to coagulate, traffic
lights, petrol pumps and trains would come to a halt, computers would cease to
operate.
Even this short list must lead to the conclusion that Soviet military razvedka (the GRU) and its integral spetsnaz is something more than the
`eyes and ears of the Soviet Army'. As a special branch of the GRU spetsnaz is intended primarily for
action in time of war and in the very last days and hours before it breaks out.
But spetsnaz is not idle in peacetime
either. I am sometimes asked: if we are talking about terrorism on such a
scale, we must be talking about the KGB. Not so. There are three good reasons
why spetsnaz is a part of the GRU and
not of the KGB. The first is that if the GRU and spetsnaz were to be removed from the Soviet Army and handed over to
the KGB, it would be equivalent to blindfolding a strong man, while plugging
his ears and depriving him of some other important organs, and making him fight
with the information he needs for fighting provided by another person standing
beside him and telling him the moves. The Soviet leaders have tried on more
than one occasion to do this and it has always ended in catastrophe. The
information provided by the secret police was always imprecise, late and
insufficient, and the actions of a blind giant, predictably, were neither
accurate or effective.
Secondly, if the functions of the GRU and spetsnaz were to be handed over to the KGB, then in the event of a
catastrophe (inevitable in such a situation) any Soviet commanding officer or
chief of staff could say that he had not had sufficient information about the
enemy, that for example a vital aerodrome and a missile battery nearby had not
been destroyed by the KGB's forces. These would be perfectly justified
complaints, although it is in any case impossible to destroy every aerodrome,
every missile battery and every command post because the supply of information
in the course of battle is always insufficient. Any commanding officer who
receives information about the enemy can think of a million supplementary questions
to which there is no answer. There is only one way out of the situation, and
that is to make every commanding officer responsible for gathering his own
information about the enemy and to provide him with all the means for defeating
his own enemy. Then, if the information is insufficient or some targets have
not been destroyed, only he and his chief of staff are to blame. They must
themselves 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 groups 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 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.'1
1 B. Bazhanov: `Memoirs of a Secretary to Stalin', pub.
Tretya volna 1980, pp 67-69.
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 Unshlikht were expected to
do no more than put the spark to the powder keg.
There were many reasons why the plans came to nothing. But there were
two especially important ones: the absence of a common frontier between the
USSR and Germany, and the split in the German Communist Party. The lack of a
common frontier was at the time a serious obstacle to the penetration into
Germany of substantial forces of Soviet subversives. Stalin understood this
very well, and he was always fighting to have Poland crushed so that common
frontiers could be established with Germany. When he succeeded in doing this in
1939, it was a risky step, since a common frontier with Germany meant that
Germany could attack the USSR without warning, as indeed happened two years
later. But without a common frontier Stalin could not get into Europe.
The split in the German Communist Party was an equally serious hindrance
to the carrying out of Soviet plans. One group pursued policy, subservient to
the Comintern and consequently to the Soviet Politburo, while the other pursued
an antagonistic one. Zinoviev was `extremely displeased by this and he raised
the question in the Politburo of presenting Maslov one of the dissenting German Communist leaders with an ultimatum:
either he would take a large sum of money, leave the party and get out of
Germany, or Unshlikht would be given orders to liquidate him.'2
2 Ibid. p. 68
___
At the same time as preparations were being made for revolution in
Germany preparations were also going ahead for revolutions in other countries.
For example, in September 1923, groups of terrorists trained in the USSR (of
both Bulgarian and Soviet nationality) started causing disturbances in Bulgaria
which could very well have developed into a state of general chaos and
bloodletting. But the `revolution' was suppressed and its ringleaders escaped
to the Soviet Union. Eighteen months later, in April 1925, the attempt was
repeated. This time unknown persons caused a tremendous explosion in the main
cathedral in Sofia in the hope of killing the king and the whole government.
Boris III had a miraculous escape, but attempts to destabilise Bulgaria by acts
of terrorism continued until 1944, when the Red Army at last entered Bulgaria.
Another miracle then seemed to take place, because from that moment on nobody
has tried to shoot the Bulgarian rulers and no one has let off any bombs. The
terror did continue, but it was aimed at the population of the country as a
whole rather than the rulers. And then Bulgarian terrorism spread beyond the
frontiers of the country and appeared on the streets of Western Europe.
The campaign of terrorism against Finland is closely linked with the
name of the Finnish Communist Otto Kuusinen who was one of the leaders of the
Communist revolt in Finland in 1918. After the defeat of the `revolution' he
escaped to Moscow and later returned to Finland for underground work. In 1921
he again fled to Moscow to save himself from arrest. From that moment
Kuusinen's career was closely linked with Soviet military intelligence
officers. Kuusinen had an official post and did the same work: preparing for
the overthrow of democracy in Finland and other countries. In his secret career
Kuusinen had some notable successes. In the mid-1930s he rose to be deputy head
of Razvedupr as the GRU was known
then. Under Kuusinen's direction an effective espionage network was organised
in the Scandinavian countries, and at the same time he directed the training of
military units which were to carry out acts of terrorism in those countries. As
early as the summer of 1918 an officer school was founded in Petrograd to train
men for the `Red Army of Finland'. This school later trained officers for other
`Red Armies' and became the International Military School — an institute
of higher education for terrorists.
After the Civil War was over Kuusinen insisted on carrying on
underground warfare on Finnish territory and keeping the best units of Finnish
Communists in existence. In 1939, after the Red Army invaded Finland, he
proclaimed himself `prime minister and minister of foreign affairs' of the
`Finnish Democratic Republic'. The `government' included Mauri Rosenberg (from
the GRU) as `deputy prime minister', Axel Antila as `minister of defence' and
the NKVD interrogator Tuure Lekhen as `minister of internal affairs'. But the
Finnish people put up such resistance that the Kuusinen government's bid to
turn Finland into a `people's republic' was a failure.
(A curious fact of history must be mentioned here. When the Finnish
Communists formed their government on Soviet territory and started a war
against their own country, voluntary formations of Russians were formed in
Finland which went into battle against both the Soviet and the Finnish
Communists. A notable member of these genuinely voluntary units was Boris
Bazhanov, formerly Stalin's personal secretary, who had fled to the West.)
Otto Kuusinen's unsuccessful attempt to become the ruler of Communist
Finland did not bring his career to an end. He continued it with success, first
in the GRU and later in the Department of Administrative Organs of the Central
Committee of the CPSU — the body that supervises all the espionage and
terrorist institutions in the Soviet Union, as well as the prisons,
concentration camps, courts and so forth. From 1957 until his death in 1964
Kuusinen was one of the most powerful leaders in the Soviet Union, serving
simultaneously as a member of the Politburo and a Secretary of the Central
Committee of the Party. In the Khodynki district of Moscow, where the GRU has
its headquarters, one of the bigger streets is called Otto Kuusinen Street.
In the course of the Civil War and after it, Polish units, too, were
formed and went into action on Soviet territory. One example was the 1st
Revolutionary Regiment, `Red Warsaw', which was used for putting down
anti-Communist revolts in Moscow, Tambov and Yaroslav. For suppressing
anti-Communist revolts by the Russian population the Communists used a Yugoslav
regiment, a Czechoslovak regiment, and many other formations, including
Hungarians, Rumanians, Austrians and others. After the Civil War all these
formations provided a base for the recruitment of spies and for setting up
subversive combat detachments for operating on the territory of capitalist
states. For example, a group of Hungarian Communist terrorists led by Ferenc
Kryug, fought against Russian peasants in the Civil War; in the Second World
War Kryug led a special purpose group operating in Hungary.
Apart from the `internationalist' fighters, i.e. people of foreign
extraction, detachments were organised in the Soviet Union for operating abroad
which were composed entirely, or very largely, of Soviet citizens. A bitter
battle was fought between the army commanders and the secret police for control
of these detachments.
On 2 August 1930 a small detachment of commando troops was dropped in
the region of Voronezh and was supposed during the manoeuvres to carry out
operations in the rear of the `enemy'. Officially this is the date when Soviet
airborne troops came into being. But it is also the date when spetsnaz was born. Airborne troops and spetsnaz troops subsequently went
through a parallel development. At certain points in its history spetsnaz passed out of the control of
military intelligence into the hands of the airborne forces, at others the
airborne troops exercised administrative control while military intelligence
had operational control. But in the end it was reckoned to be more expedient to
hand spetsnaz over entirely to
military intelligence. The progress of spetsnaz
over the following thirty years cannot be studied in isolation from the
development of the airborne forces.
1930 marked the beginning of a serious preoccupation with parachute
troops in the USSR. In 1931 separate detachments of parachutists were made into
battalions and a little later into regiments. In 1933 an osnaz brigade was formed in the Leningrad military district. It
included a battalion of parachutists, a battalion of mechanised infantry, a
battalion of artillery and three squadrons of aircraft. However, it turned out
to be of little use to the Army, because it was not only too large and too
awkward to manage, but also under the authority of the NKVD rather than the
GRU. After a long dispute this brigade and several others created on the same
pattern were reorganised into airborne brigades and handed over entirely to the
Army.
To begin with, the airborne forces or VDV consisted of transport
aircraft, airborne regiments and brigades, squadrons of heavy bombers and
separate reconnaissance units. It is these reconnaissance units that are of
interest to us. How many there were of them and how many men they included is
not known. There is fragmentary information about their tactics and training.
But it is known, for example, that one of the training schools was situated in
Kiev. It was a secret school and operated under the disguise of a parachute
club, while being completely under the control of the Razvedupr (GRU). It included a lot of women. In the course of the
numerous manoeuvres that were held, the reconnaissance units were dropped in
the rear of the `enemy' and made attacks on his command points, headquarters,
centres and lines of communications. It is known that terrorist techniques were
already well advanced. For example, a mine had been developed for blowing up
railway bridges as trains passed over them. However, bridges are always
especially well guarded, so the experts of the Razvedupr and the Engineering Directorate of the Red Army produced
a mine that could be laid on the tracks several kilometres away from the
bridge. A passing train would pick up the mine which would detonate at the very
moment when the train was on the bridge.
To give some idea of the scale of the VDV, on manoeuvres in 1934 900 men
were dropped simultaneously by parachute. At the famous Kiev manoeuvres in 1935
no less than 1188 airborne troops were dropped at once, followed by a normal
landing of 1765 men with light tanks, armoured cars and artillery. In
Belorussia in 1936 there was an air drop of 1800 troops and a landing of 5700
men with heavy weapons. In the Moscow military district in the same year the
whole of the 84th rifle division was transferred from one place to another by
air. Large-scale and well armed airborne attacks were always accompanied by the
dropping in neighbouring districts of commando units which operated both in the
interests of the security of the major force and in the interests of Razvedupr.
In 1938 the Soviet Union had six airborne brigades with a total of
18,000 men. This figure is, however, deceptive, since the strength of the
`separate reconnaissance units' is not known, nor are they included in that
figure. Parachutists were also not trained by the Red Army alone but by
`civilian' clubs. In 1934 these clubs had 400 parachute towers from which
members made up to half a million jumps, adding to their experience by jumps
from planes and balloons. Many Western experts reckon that the Soviet Union
entered the Second World War with a million trained parachutists, who could be
used both as airborne troops and in special units — in the language of
today, in spetsnaz.
___
A continual, hotly contested struggle was going on in the General Staff
of the Red Army. On what territory were the special detachments to
operate — on the enemy's territory, or on Soviet territory when it was
occupied by the enemy?
For a long time the two policies existed side by side. Detachments were
trained to operate both on home territory and enemy territory as part of the
preparations to meet the enemy in the Western regions of the Soviet Union.
These were carried out very seriously. First of all large partisan units were
formed, made up of carefully screened and selected soldiers. The partisans went
on living in the towns and villages, but went through their regular military
training and were ready at any moment to take off into the forests. The units
were only the basis upon which to develop much larger-scale partisan warfare.
In peacetime they were made up largely of leaders and specialists; in the
course of the fighting each unit was expected to expand into a huge formation
consisting of several thousand men. For these formations hiding places were
prepared in secluded locations and stocked with weapons, ammunition, means of
communications and other necessary equipment.
Apart from the partisans who were to take to the forests a vast network
of reconnaissance and commando troops was prepared. The local inhabitants were
trained to carry out reconnaissance and terrorist operations and, if the enemy
arrived, they were supposed to remain in place and pretend to submit to the
enemy, and even work for him. These networks were supposed later to organise a
fierce campaign of terror inside the enemy garrisons. To make it easier for the
partisans and the terrorists to operate, secret communication networks and
supplies were set up in peacetime, along with secret meeting places,
underground hospitals, command posts and even arms factories.
To make it easier for the partisans to operate on their own territory a
`destruction zone' was created, also known as a `death strip'. This was a strip
running the length of the Western frontiers of the Soviet Union between 100 and
250 kilometres wide. Within that strip all
bridges, railway depots, tunnels, water storage tanks and electric power stations
were prepared for destruction by explosive. Also in peacetime major embankments
on railway lines and highways and cuttings through which the roads passed were
made ready for blowing up. Means of communication, telephone lines, even the
permanent way, all were prepared for destruction.
Immediately behind the `death strip' came the `Stalin Line' of
exceptionally well fortified defences. The General Staff's idea was that the
enemy should be exhausted in the `death strip' on the vast minefields and huge
obstacles and then get stuck on the line of fortifications. At the same time
the partisans would be constantly attacking him in the rear.
It was a magnificent defence system. Bearing in mind the vast
territories involved and the poor network of roads, such a system could well
have made the whole of Soviet territory practically impassable for an enemy.
But — in 1939 the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was signed.
The Pact was the signal for a tremendous expansion of Soviet military
strength. Everything connected with defence was destroyed, while everything
connected with offensive actions was expanded at a great rate, particularly
Soviet sabotage troops and the airborne troops connected with them. In April
1941 five airborne corps were formed. All five were in the first strategic
echelon of the Red Army, three facing Germany and two facing Rumania. The
latter were more dangerous for Germany than the other three, because the
dropping of even one airborne corps in Rumania and the cutting off, even
temporarily, of supplies of oil to Germany meant the end of the war for the
Germans.
Five airborne corps in 1941 was more than there were in all the other
countries of the world together. But this was not enough for Stalin. There was
a plan to create another five airborne corps, and the plan was carried out in
August and September 1941. But in a defensive war Stalin did not, of course,
need either the first five or the second five. Any discussion of Stalin's
`defence plans' must first of all explain how five airborne corps, let alone
ten, could be used in a defensive war.
In a war on one's own territory it is far easier during a temporary
retreat to leave partisan forces or even complete fighting formations hidden on
the ground than it is to drop them in later by parachute. But Stalin had
destroyed such formations, from which one can draw only one conclusion; Stalin
had prepared the airborne corps specifically for dropping on other people's
territory.
At the same time as the rapid expansion of the airborne forces there was
an equally rapid growth of the special reconnaissance units intended for
operations on enemy territory.
The great British strategist and historian B. H. Liddell Hart, dealing
with this period, speaks of Hitler's fears concerning Stalin's intentions,
referring to `a fatal attack in the back from Russia'.3
And moves by the Soviet Union in June 1940 did evoke particular nervousness in
the German high command. Germany had thrown all her forces against France at
that time, and the Soviet Union rushed troops into the Baltic states and
Bessarabia. The airborne troops especially distinguished themselves. In June
1940 the 214th Soviet airborne brigade was dropped with the idea of seizing a
group of aerodromes in the region of Shaulyai in Lithuania, under a hundred
kilometres from the East Prussian border. In the same month the 201st and 204th
airborne brigades were dropped in Bessarabia to capture the towns of Ismail and
Belgrad-Dnestrovsky. This was close by the Ploesti oilfields. What would Stalin
do if the German Army advanced further into North Africa and the British Isles?
3 Strategy. The
Indirect Approach, p.241.
It is easy to understand why Hitler took the decision in that next
month, July 1940, to prepare for war against the USSR. It was quite impossible
for him to move off the continent of Europe and into the British Isles or
Africa, leaving Stalin with his huge army and terrifying airborne forces which
were of no use to him for anything but a large-scale offensive.
Hitler guessed rightly what Stalin's plans were, as is apparent from his
letter to Mussolini of 21 June 1941.4 Can we
believe Hitler? In this case we probably can. The letter was not intended for
publication and was never published in Hitler's lifetime. It is interesting in
that it repeats the thought that Stalin had voiced at a secret meeting of the
Central Committee. Moreover, in his speech at the 18th Congress of the Soviet
Communist Party Stalin had had this to say about Britain and France; In their policy
of nonintervention can be detected an attempt and a desire not to prevent the
aggressors from doing their dirty work... not to prevent, let us say, Germany
getting bogged down in European affairs and involved in a war... to let all the
participants in the war get stuck deep in the mud of battle, to encourage them
to do this on the quiet, to let them weaken and exhaust each other, and then,
when they are sufficiently weakened, to enter the arena with fresh forces,
acting of course «in the interests of peace», and to dictate their own
conditions to the crippled participants in the war.'5
Once again, he was attributing to others motives which impelled him in his
ambitions. Stalin wanted Europe to exhaust itself. And Hitler understood that.
But he understood too late. He should have understood before the Pact was
signed.
4 `I cannot take responsibility for the waiting any
longer, because I cannot see any way that the danger will disappear.... The
concentration of Soviet force is enormous.... All available Soviet armed forces
are now on our border.... It is quite possible that Russia will try to destroy
the Rumanian oilfields.'
5 Pravda, 11
March 1939.
However, Hitler still managed to upset Stalin's plans by starting the
war first. The huge Soviet forces intended for the `liberation' of Russia's
neighbours were quite unnecessary in the war of defence against Germany. The
airborne corps were used as ordinary infantry against the advancing German
tanks. The many units and groups of airborne troops and commandos were forced
to retreat or to dig trenches to halt the advancing German troops. The airborne
troops trained for operations in the territory of foreign countries were able
to be used in the enemy's rear, but not in his territory so much as in Soviet
territory occupied by the German army.
The reshaping of the whole philosophy of the Red Army, which had been
taught to conduct an offensive war on other people's territory, was very
painful but relatively short. Six months later the Red Army had learnt to
defend itself and in another year it had gone over to offensive operations.
From that moment everything fell into place and the Red Army, created only for
offensive operations, became once again victorious.
The process of reorganising the armed forces for operations on its own
territory affected all branches of the services, including the special forces.
At the beginning of 1942 thirteen guards battalions6
of spetsnaz were organised in the Red
Army for operations in the enemy's rear, as well as one guards engineering
brigade of spetsnaz, consisting of
five battalions. The number of separate battalions corresponded exactly to the
number of fighting fronts. Each front received one such battalion under its
command. A guards brigade of spetsnaz
remained at the disposal of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, to be used only
with Stalin's personal permission in the most crucial locations.
6 In the Soviet Army the title of `guards' can be won
only in battle, the only exceptions being certain formations which were awarded
the title when they were being formed. These included spetsnaz detachments.
So as not to reveal the real name of spetsnaz,
the independent guards battalion and the brigade were given the code name of
`guards minelayers'. Only a very limited circle of people knew what the name
concealed.
A special razvedka department
was set up in the Intelligence directorate of each front to direct the work of
the `guards minelayers'. Each department had at its disposal a battalion of spetsnaz. Later the special razvedka departments began recruiting spetsnaz agents in territories occupied
by the enemy. These agents were intended for providing support for the
`minelayers' when they appeared in the enemy rear. Subsequently each special razvedka department was provided with a
reconaissance point of spetsnaz to
recruit agents.
The guards brigade of spetsnaz
was headed by one of the outstanding Soviet practitioners of fighting in the
rear of the enemy — Colonel (later Lieutenant-General) Moshe Ioffe.
The number of spetsnaz
increased very quickly. In unclassified Soviet writings we come across
references to the 16th and the 33rd engineering brigade of spetsnaz. Apart from detachments operating behind the enemy's
lines, other spetsnaz units were
formed for different purposes: for example, radio battalions for destroying the
enemy's radio links, spreading disinformation and tracing the whereabouts of
enemy headquarters and communication centres so as to facilitate the work of
the spetsnaz terrorist formations. It
is known that from 1942 there existed the 130th, 131st, 132nd and 226th
independent radio battalions of spetsnaz.
The operations carried out by the `minelayers' were distinguished by
their daring character and their effectiveness. They usually turned up behind
the enemy's lines in small groups. Sometimes they operated independently, at
others they combined their operations with the partisans. These joint
operations always benefited both the partisans and spetsnaz. The minelayers taught the partisans the most difficult
aspects of minelaying, the most complicated technology and the most advanced
tactics. When they were with the partisans they had a reliable hiding place,
protection while they carried out their operation, and medical and other aid in
case of need. The partisans knew the area well and could serve as guides. It
was an excellent combination: the local partisans who knew every tree in the
forest, and the first-class technical equipment for the use of explosives
demonstrated by real experts.
The `guards minelayers' usually came on the scene for a short while, did
their work swiftly and well and then returned whence they had come. The
principal way of transporting them behind the enemy's lines was to drop them by
parachute. Their return was carried out by aircraft using secret partisan
airfields, or they made their way by foot across the enemy's front line.
The high point in the partisan war against Germany consisted of two
operations carried out in 1943. By that time, as a result of action by osnaz, order had been introduced into
the partisan movement; it had been `purged' and brought under rigid central
control. As a result of spetsnaz work
the partisan movement had been taught the latest methods of warfare and the
most advanced techniques of sabotage.
The operation known as the `War of the Rails' was carried out over six
weeks from August to September 1943. It was a very fortunate time to have
chosen. It was at that moment when the Soviet forces, having exhausted the
German army in defensive battles at Kursk, themselves suddenly went over to the
offensive. To support the advance a huge operation was undertaken in the rear
of the enemy with the object of paralysing his supply routes, preventing him
from bringing up ammunition and fuel for the troops, and making it impossible
for him to move his reserves around. The operation involved the participation
of 167 partisan units with a total strength of 100,000 men. All the units of spetsnaz were sent behind the enemy
lines to help the partisans. More than 150 tons of explosives, more than 150
kilometres of wire and over half a million detonators were transported to the
partisan units by air. The spetsnaz
units were instructed to maintain a strict watch over the fulfilment of their tasks.
Most of them operated independently in the most dangerous and important places,
and they also appointed men from their units to instruct the partisan units in
the use of explosives.
Operation `War of the Rails' was carried out simultaneously in a territory
with a front more than 1000 kilometres wide and more than 500 kilometres in
depth. On the first night of the operation 42,000 explosions took place on the
railway lines, and the partisan activity increased with every night that
passed. The German high command threw in tremendous forces to defend their
lines of communication, so that every night could be heard not only the sound
of bridges and railway lines being blown up but also the sounds of battle with
the German forces as the partisans fought their way through to whatever they
had to destroy. Altogether, in the course of the operation 215,000 rails, 836
complete trains, 184 rail and 556 road bridges were blown up. A vast quantity
of enemy equipment and ammunition was also destroyed.
Having won the enormous battle at Kursk, the Red Army sped towards the
river Dnieper and crossed it in several places. A second large-scale operation
in support of the advancing troops was carried out in the enemy's rear under
the name of `Concert', which was in concept and spirit a continuation of the
`War of the Rails'. In the final stage of that operation all the spetsnaz units were taken off to new
areas and were enabled to rest along with the partisan formations which had not
taken part in it. Now their time had come. Operation `Concert' began on 19
September 1943. That night in Belorussia alone 19,903 rails were blown up. On
the night of 25 September 15,809 rails were destroyed. All the spetsnaz units and 193 partisan units
took part in the operation `Concert'. The total number of participants in the
operation exceeded 120,000. In the course of the whole operation, which went on
until the end of October, 148,557 rails were destroyed, several hundred trains
with troops, weapons and ammunition were derailed, and hundreds of bridges were
blown up. Despite a shortage of explosives and other material needed for such
work, on the eve of the operation only eighty tons of explosives could be sent
to the partisan. Nevertheless `Concert' was a tremendous success.
After the Red Army moved into the territory of neighbouring states spetsnaz went through a radical
reorganisation. The independent reconnaissance units, the reconnaissance posts
which recruited agents for terrorist actions, and the independent radio
battalions for conducting disinformation, were all retained in their entirety.
There are plenty of references in the Soviet military press to operations by
special intelligence units in the final stages of the war. For example, in the
course of an operation in the Vistula-Oder area special groups from the
Intelligence directorate of the headquarters of the 1st Ukrainian Front
established the scope of the network of aerodromes and the exact position of
the enemy's air bases, found the headquarters of the 4th Tank Army and the 17th
Army, the 48th Tank Corps and the 42nd Army Corps, and also gathered a great
deal of other very necessary information.
The detachments of `guards minelayers' of spetsnaz were reformed, however, into regular guards sapper
detachments and were used in that form until the end of the war. Only a
relatively small number of `guards minelayers' were kept in being and used
behind the enemy lines in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. Such a
decision was absolutely right for the times. The maintargets for spetsnaz operations had been the enemy's
lines of communication. But that had been before the Red Army had started to
advance at great speed. When that happened, there was no longer any need to
blow up bridges. They needed to be captured and preserved, not destroyed. For
this work the Red Army had separate shock brigades of motorised guards
engineering troops which, operating jointly with the forward units, would
capture especially important buildings and other objects, clear them of mines
and defend them until the main force arrived. The guards formations of spetsnaz were used mainly for
strengthening these special engineering brigades. Some of the surviving guards
battalions of spetsnaz were
transferred to the Far East where, in August 1945, they were used against the
Japanese Army.
The use of spetsnaz in the
Manchurian offensive of 1945 is of special interest, because it provides the
best illustration of what was supposed to happen to Germany if she had not
attacked the USSR.
Japan had a peace treaty with the Soviet Union. But Japan had gone to
war with other states and had exhausted her military, economic and other
resources. Japan had seized vast territories inhabited by hundreds of millions
of people who wanted to be liberated and were ready to welcome and support any
liberator who came along. Japan was in exactly the situation in which Stalin
had wanted to see Germany: exhausted by war with other countries, and with
troops scattered over expansive territories the populations of which hated the
sight of them.
Thus, in the interests naturally of peace and humanity Stalin struck a
sudden crushing blow at the armed forces of Japan in Manchuria and China,
violating the treaty signed four years earlier. The operation took place over
vast areas. In terms of the distances covered and the speed at which it moved,
this operation has no equal in world history. Soviet troops operated over
territories 5000 kilometres in width and 600-800 kilometres in depth. More than
a million and a half soldiers took part in the operation, with over 5000 tanks
and nearly 4000 aircraft. It really was a lightning operation, in the course of
which 84,000 Japanese officers and men were killed and 593,000 taken prisoner.
A tremendous quantity of arms, ammunition and other equipment was seized.
It may be objected that Japan was already on the brink of catastrophe.
That is true. But therein lies Soviet strategy: to remain neutral until such
time as the enemy exhausts himself in battle against someone else, and then to
strike a sudden blow. That is precisely how the war against Germany was planned
and that was why the partisan units, the barriers and defensive installations
were all dispensed with, and why the ten airborne corps were created in 1941.
In the Manchurian offensive the spetsnaz
detachments put up their best performance. Twenty airborne landings were made
not by airborne troops, but by special reconnaissance troops. Spetsnaz units of the Pacific Fleet were
landed from submarines and surface boats. Some spetsnaz units crossed the frontier by foot, captured Japanese cars
and used them for their operations. Worried about the railway tunnels on a
strip of the 1st Far Eastern front, the Soviet high command created special
units for capturing the tunnels. The groups crossed the frontier secretly, cut
the throats of the guards, severed the wires connected to the explosive
charges, and put the detonators out of action. They then held the tunnels until
their own forces arrived.
In the course of the offensive a new and very risky type of operation
was employed by spetsnaz. Senior GRU
officers, with the rank of colonel or even major-general, were put in charge of
small groups. Such a group would suddenly land on an airfield close to an
important Japanese headquarters. The appearance of a Soviet colonel or general
deep in the Japanese rear never failed to provoke astonished reactions from
both the Japanese high command and the Japanese troops, as well as from the
local population. The transport planes carrying these were escorted by Soviet
fighter aircraft, but the fighters were soon obliged to return to their bases,
leaving the Soviet transport undefended until it landed. Even after it landed
it had at best only one high-ranking officer, the crew and no more than a
platoon of soldiers to guard over the plane. The Soviet officer would demand
and usually obtain a meeting with a Japanese general, at which he would demand
the surrender of the Japanese garrison. He and his group really had nothing to
back them up: Soviet troops were still hundreds of kilometres away and it was
still weeks to the end of the war. But the local Japanese military leaders (and
the Soviet officers too, for that matter) naturally did not realise this.
Perhaps the Emperor had decided to fight on to the last man....
In several recorded instances, senior Japanese military leaders decided
independently to surrender without having permission to do so from their
superiors. The improvement in the morale and position of the Soviet troops can
be imagined.
___
After the end of the Second World War spetsnaz practically ceased to exist for several years. Its
reorganisation was eventually carried out under the direction of several
generals who were fanatically devoted to the idea of spetsnaz. One of them was Viktor Kondratevich Kharchenko, who is
quite rightly regarded as the `father' of the modern spetsnaz. Kharchenko was an outstanding sportsman and expert in the
theory and practice of the use of explosives. In 1938 he graduated from the
military electrotechnical academy which, apart from training specialists in
communications, at that time also produced experts in the business of applying
the most complicated way of blowing up buildings and other objectives. During
the war he was chief of staff of the directorate of special works on the Western
front. From May 1942 he was chief of staff on the independent guards spetsnaz brigade, and from June he was
deputy commander of that brigade. In July 1944 his brigade was reorganised into
an independent guards motorised engineering brigade.
Kharchenko was working in the General Staff after the war when he wrote
a letter to Stalin, the basic point of which was: `If before the outbreak of
war our sportsmen who made up the spetsnaz
units spent some time in Germany, Finland, Poland and other countries, they
could be used in wartime in enemy territory with greater likelihood of
success.' Many specialists in the Soviet Union now believe that Stalin put an
end to the Soviet Union's self-imposed isolation in sport partly because of the
effect Kharchenko's letter had on him.
In 1948 Kharchenko completed his studies at the Academy of the General
Staff. From 1951 he headed the scientific research institute of the engineering
troops. Under his direction major researches and experiments were carried out
in an effort to develop new engineering equipment and armaments, especially for
small detachments of saboteurs operating behind the enemy's lines.
In the immediate postwar years Kharchenko strove to demonstrate at the
very highest level the necessity for reconstructing spetsnaz on a new technical level. He had a great many opponents.
So then he decided not to argue any more. He selected a group of sportsmen from
among the students at the engineering academy, succeeded in interesting them in
his idea, and trained them personally for carrying out very difficult tasks.
During manoeuvres held at the Totskyie camps, when on Marshal Zhukov's
instructions a real nuclear explosion was carried out, and then the behaviour
of the troops in conditions extremely close to real warfare was studied,
Kharchenko decided to deploy his own group of men at his own risk.
The discussions that took place after the manoeuvres were, the senior
officers all agreed, instructive — all except General Kharchenko. He
pointed out that in circumstances of actual warfare nothing of what they had
been discussing would have taken place because, he said, a small group of
trained people had been close to where the nuclear charges had been stored and
had had every opportunity to destroy the transport when the charges were being
moved from the store to the airfield. Moreover, he said, the officers who took
the decision to use nuclear weapons could easily have been killed before they
took the decision. Kharchenko produced proof in support of his statements. When
this produced no magic results, Kharchenko repeated his `act' at other major
manoeuvres until his persistence paid off. Eventually he obtained permission to
form a battalion for operations in the enemy's rear directed at his nuclear
weapons and his command posts.
The battalion operated very successfully, and that was the beginning of
the resurrection of spetsnaz. All the
contemporary formations of spetsnaz
have been created anew. That is why, unlike those which existed during the war,
they are not honoured with the title of `guards' units.7
7 Kharchenko himself moved steadily up the promotion
ladder. From 1961 he was deputy to the Chief of Engineering troops and from
February 1965 he was head of the same service. In 1972 he was promoted Marshal
of engineering troops. Having attained such heights, however, Kharchenko did
not forget his creation, and he was a frequent guest in the `Olympic Village',
the main spetsnaz training centre
near Kirovograd. When he was killed in 1975 during the testing of a new weapon,
his citations used the highest peacetime formula `killed in the course of
carrying out his official duties', which is very seldom met with in reference
to this senior category of Soviet officers.
Chapter
4. The Fighting Units of Spetsnaz
Spetsnaz is
made up of three distinct elements: the fighting units, the units of
professional sportsmen and the network of secret agents. In numerical terms the
fighting units of spetsnaz are the
largest. They are composed of soldiers from the ranks, out of those who are
especially strong, especially tough and especially loyal.
A factor that facilitates the selection process is that within the
Soviet Army there exists a hidden system for the selection of soldiers. Long
before they put on a military uniform, the millions of recruits are carefully
screened and divided into categories in acordance with their political
reliability, their physical and mental development, the extent of their
political involvement, and the `cleanliness' (from the Communist point of view)
of their personal and family record. The Soviet soldier does not know to which
category he belongs, and in fact he knows nothing about the existence of the
various categories. If a soldier is included in a higher category than his
comrades that does not necessarily mean that he is fortunate. On the contrary,
the best thing for a soldier is to be put into the lowest category and to
perform his two years of military service in some remote and God-forsaken
pioneer battalion in which there is neither discipline nor supervision, or in
units of which the officers have long since drunk away all the authority they
had. The higher the category the soldier is put into the more difficult his
military service will be.
Soldiers of the highest category make up the Kremlin guard, the troops
protecting the government communications, the frontier troops of the KGB and spetsnaz. Being included in the highest
category does not necessarily mean being posted to the Kremlin, to a spetsnaz brigade or to a government
communications centre. The highest-category men selected by the local military
authorities simply represent the best human material which is offered to the
`customer' for him to choose from. The `customer' selects only what suits his
need. All those who do not appeal to the customers move down to a lower level
and are offered to representatives of the next echelon, that of the strategic
missile troops, the airborne forces and crews of nuclear submarines.
The young soldier does not realise, of course, what is going on. He is
simply summoned to a room where people he doesn't know ask him a lot of
questions. A few days later he is called to the room again and finds a
different set of strangers there who also ask him questions.
This system of sorting out recruits reminds one of the system of closed
shops for leading comrades. The highest official has the first choice. Then his
deputy can go to the shop and choose something from what remains. Then lower
ranking officials are allowed into the shop, then their deputies, and so on. In
this system spetsnaz rank as the very
highest category.
The soldiers who have been picked out by spetsnaz officers are gathered together into groups and are
convoyed by officers and sergeants to fighting units of spetsnaz, where they are formed into groups and go through an
intensive course of training lasting several weeks. At the end of the course
the soldier fires shots from his Kalashnikov automatic rifle for the first time
and is then made to take the military oath. The best out of the group of young
soldiers are then sent to a spetsnaz
training unit from which they return six months later with the rank of
sergeant, while the rest are posted to fighting units.
In spetsnaz, as throughout the
Soviet Army, they observe the `cult of the old soldier'. All soldiers are
divided into stariki (`old men') and salagi (`small fry'). A real salaga is a soldier who has only just
started his service. A really `old man' (some twenty years' old) is one who is
about to complete his service in a few months. A man who is neither a real starik nor a real salaga falls between the two, a starik
being compared to anyone who has done less time than he has, and a salaga to anyone who has served in the
army a few months longer than he.
Having been recruited into spetsnaz,
the soldier has to sign an undertaking not to disclose secret information. He
has no right ever to tell anyone where he has served or what his service
consisted of. At most he has the right to say he served with the airborne
corps. Disclosure of the secrets of spetsnaz
is treated as high treason, punishable by death according to article 64 of the
Soviet criminal code.
Once he has completed his two years' service in spetsnaz a soldier has three choices. He can become an officer, in
which case he is offered special terms for entering the higher school for
officers of the airborne forces in Ryazan. He can become a regular soldier in spetsnaz, for which he has to go through
a number of supplementary courses. Or he has the option to join the reserve. If
he chooses the last course he is regarded as being a member of the spetsnaz reserve and is with it for the
next five years. Then, up to the age of 30, he is part of the airborne reserve.
After that he is considered to belong to the ordinary infantry reserve until he
is fifty. Like any other reserve force, the existence of a spetsnaz reserve makes it possible at a time of mobilisation to
multiply the size of the spetsnaz
fighting units with reservists if necessary.
___
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. The