Spetsnaz: The Inside Story of the Soviet Special Forces
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with manned surface ships and submarines. It is quite possible that for the
foreseeable future these tactics will be continued, because there has to be
a man somewhere nearby. Even so, the unmanned automatic submarines make it
possible substantially to increase the spetsnaz potential. It is perfectly
easy for a Soviet ship with a crew to remain innocently in international
waters while an unmanned submarine under its control is penetrating into an
enemy's territorial waters.
___
Apart from manned and unmanned submarines spetsnaz has for some decades
now been paying enormous attention to `live submarines' -- dolphins. The
Soviet Union has an enormous scientific centre on the Black Sea for studying
the behaviour of dolphins. Much of the centre's work is wrapped in the thick
shroud of official secrecy.
From ancient times the dolphin has delighted man by its quite
extraordinary abilities. A dolphin can easily dive to a depth of 300 metres;
its hearing range is seventy times that of a human being; its brain is
surprisingly well developed and similar to the human brain. Dolphins are
very easy to tame and train.
The use of dolphins by spetsnaz could widen their operations even
further, using them to accompany swimmers in action and warning them of
danger; guarding units from an enemy's underwater commandos; hunting for all
kinds of objects under water -- enemy submarines, mines, underwater cables
and pipelines; and the dolphin could be used to carry out independent acts
of terrorism: attacking important targets with an explosive charge attached
to it, or destroying enemy personnel with the aid of knives, needles or more
complicated weapons attached to its body.
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Chapter 10. Battle Training
It was a cold, grey day, with a gusty wind blowing and ragged clouds
sweeping across the sky. The deputy chief of the spetsnaz department, 17th
Army, and I were standing near an old railway bridge. Many years previously
they had built a railway line there, but for some reason it had been
abandoned half-built. There remained only the bridge across leaden-coloured
water. It seemed enormously high up. Around us was a vast emptiness, forest
covering enormous spaces, where you were more likely to meet a bear than a
man.
A spetsnaz competition was in progress. The lieutenant-colonel and I
were umpires. The route being covered by the competitors was many tens of
kilometres long. Soldiers, sodden with the rain and red in the face, laden
with weapons and equipment, were trying to cover the route in the course of
a few days -- running, quick-marching, running again. Their faces were
covered with a dirty growth of beard. They carried no food and got their
water from the streams and lakes. In addition there were many unpleasant and
unforeseen obstacles for them on the way.
At our control point, orange arrows told the soldiers to cross the
bridge. In the middle of the bridge another arrow pointed to the handrail at
the edge. A soldier lagging a long way behind his group ran onto the bridge.
His tiredness kept his head down, so he ran to the middle of the bridge, and
then a little further before he came to a sharp halt. He turned back and saw
the arrow pointing to the edge. He looked over the rail and saw the next
arrow on a marshy island, some way away and overgrown with reeds. It was
huge and orange, but only just visible in the distance. The soldier let out
a whistle of concern. He clambered onto the rail with all his weapons and
equipment, let out a violent curse and jumped. As he dropped, he also tried
to curse his fate and spetsnaz in good soldier's language, but the cry
turned into a long drawn-out howl. He hit the black freezing water with a
crash and for a long time did not reappear. Finally his head emerged from
the water. It was late autumn and the water was icy cold. But the soldier
set off swimming for the distant island.
At our control point, where one after the other the soldiers plunged
from the high bridge, there was no means of rescuing any soldier who got
into difficulty. And there was no one to rescue anybody either. We officers
were there only to observe the men, to make sure each one jumped, and from
the very middle of the bridge. The rest did not concern us.
`What if one of them drowns?' I asked the spetsnaz officer.
`If he drowns it means he's no good for spetsnaz.'
___
It means he's no good for spetsnaz. The sentence expresses the whole
philosophy of battle training. The old soldiers pass it on to the young ones
who take it as a joke. But they very soon find out that nobody is joking.
Battle training programmes for spetsnaz are drawn up in consultation
with some of the Soviet Union's leading experts in psychology. They have
established that in the past training had been carried out incorrectly, on
the principle of moving from the simple to the more difficult. A soldier was
first taught to jump from a low level, to pack his parachute, to land
properly, and so forth, with the prospect later of learning to make a real
parachute jump. But the longer the process of the initial training was drawn
out, the longer the soldier was made to wait, the more he began to fear
making the jump. Experience acquired in previous wars also shows that
reservists, who were trained for only a few days and then thrown into
battle, in the majority of cases performed very well. They were sometimes
short of training, but they always had enough courage. The reverse was also
shown to be true. In the First World War the best Russian regiments stayed
in Saint Petersburg. They protected the Emperor and they were trained only
to be used in the most critical situations. The longer the war went on, the
less inclined the guards regiments became to fight. The war dragged on,
turned into a senseless carve-up, and finally the possibility arose of a
quick end to it. To bring the end nearer the Emperor decided to make use of
his guards....
The Revolution of 1917 was no revolution. It was simply a revolt by the
guards in just one city in a huge empire. The soldiers no longer wanted to
fight; they were afraid of war and did not want to die for nothing.
Throughout the country there were numerous parties all of which were in
favour of ending the war, and only one of them called for peace. The
soldiers put their trust in that party. Meanwhile, the regiments that were
fighting at the front had suffered enormous losses and their morale was very
low, but they had not thought of dispersing to their homes. The front
collapsed only when the central authority in Saint Petersburg collapsed.
Lenin's party, which seized power in that vast empire by means of the
bayonets of terrified guards in the rear, drew the correct conclusions.
Today soldiers are not kept for long in the rear and they don't spend much
time in training. It is judged much wiser to throw the young soldier
straight into battle, to put those who remain alive into the reserve,
reinforce with fresh reservists, and into battle again. The title of
`guards' is then granted only in the cours
e of battle, and only to those
units that have suffered heavy losses but kept fighting.
Having absorbed these lessons, the commanders have introduced other
reforms into the methods of battle training. These new principles were tried
out first of all on spetsnaz and gave good results.
The most important feature of the training of a young spetsnaz soldier
is not to give him time to reflect about what is ahead for him. He should
come up against danger and terror and unpleasantness unexpectedly and not
have time to be scared. When he overcomes this obstacle, he will be proud of
himself, of his own daring, determination and ability to take risks. And
subsequently he will not be afraid.
Unpleasant surprises are always awaiting the spetsnaz soldier in the
first stage of his service, sometimes in the most unlikely situations. He
enters a classroom door and they throw a snake round his neck. He is roused
in the morning and leaps out of bed to find, suddenly, an enormous grey rat
in his boot. On a Saturday evening, when it seems that a hard week is behind
him, he is grabbed and thrown into a small prison cell with a snarling dog.
The first parachute jump is also dealt with unexpectedly. A quite short
course of instruction, then into the sky and straight away out of the hatch.
What if he smashes himself up? The answer, as usual: he is no good for
spetsnaz!
Later the soldier receives his full training, both theoretical and
practical, including ways to deal with a snake round his neck or a rat in
his boot. But by then the soldier goes to his training classes without any
fear of what is to come, because the most frightful things are already
behind him.
___
One of the most important aspects of full battle training is the
technique of survival. In the Soviet Union there are plenty of places where
there are no people for thousands of square kilometres. Thus the method is
to drop a small group of three or four men by parachute in a completely
unfamiliar place where there are no people, no roads and nothing except
blinding snow from one horizon to the other or burning sand as far as the
eye can see. The group has neither a map nor a compass. Each man has a
Kalashnikov automatic, but only one round of ammunition. In addition he has
a knife and a spade. The food supply is the minimum, sometimes none at all.
The group does not know how long it will have to walk -- a day, five days, a
fortnight? The men can use their ammunition as they please. They can kill a
deer, an elk or a bear. That would be plenty for the whole group for a long
journey. But what if wolves were to attack and the ammunition were finished?
To make the survival exercises more realistic the groups take no radio
sets with them, and they cannot transmit distress signals, whatever has
happened within the group, until they meet the first people on their way.
Often they begin with a parachute drop in the most unpleasant places: on
thin ice, in a forest, in mountains. In 1982 three Soviet military
parachutists made a jump into the crater of the Avachinsk volcano. First of
all they had to get themselves out of the crater. Two other Soviet military
parachutists have several times begun their exercises with a landing on the
summit of Mount Elbruz (5,642 metres). Having successfully completed the
survival route they have done the same thing on the highest mountains in the
Soviet Union -- the peaks named after Lenin (7,134 metres) and Communism
(7,495 metres).
In the conditions prevailing in Western Europe today different habits
and different training methods are necessary. For this part of their
training spetsnaz soldiers are dressed in black prison jackets and dropped
off at night in the centre of a big city. At the same time the local radio
and television stations report that a group of especially dangerous
criminals have escaped from the local prison. Interestingly, it is forbidden
to publish such reports in the press in the Soviet Union but they may be put
out by the local radio and television. The population thus gets only small
crumbs of information, so that they are scared stiff of criminals about whom
all sorts of fantastic stories start circulating.
The `criminals' are under orders to return to their company. The local
police and MVD troops are given the job of finding them. Only the senior
officers of the MVD know that it is only an exercise. The middle and lower
ranks of the MVD operate as if it were the real thing. The senior officers
usually tell their subordinates that the `criminals' are not armed and they
are to report immediately one of them is arrested. There is a problem,
though: the police often do not trust the report that the criminal is not
armed (he may have stolen a gun at the last moment) and so, contrary to
their instructions, they use their guns. Sometimes the arrested soldier may
be delivered back to his superior officers in a half-dead state -- he
resisted, they say, and we simply had to defend ourselves.
In some cases major exercises are carried out, and then the whole of
the police and the MVD troops know that it is just an exercise. Even so, it
is a risky business to be in a spetsnaz group. The MVD use dogs on
exercises, and the dogs do not understand the difference between an exercise
and real fighting.
___
The spetsnaz soldier operates on the territory of the enemy. One of his
main tasks is, as we have seen, to seek out specially important targets, for
which purpose he has to capture people and extract the necessary information
from them by force. That the soldier knows how to extract the information we
have no doubt. But how can he understand what his prisoner is saying?
Spetsnaz officers go through special language training and in addition every
spetsnaz company has an officer-interpreter who speaks at least two foreign
languages fluently. But there is not always an officer to hand in a small
group, so every soldier and sergeant questioning a prisoner must have some
knowledge of a foreign language. But most spetsnaz soldiers serve for only
two years and their battle training is so intense that it just is not
possible to fit in even a few extra hours.
How is this problem solved? Can a spetsnaz soldier understand a
prisoner who nods his head under torture and indicates his readiness to
talk?
The ordinary spetsnaz soldier has a command of fifteen foreign
languages and can use them freely. This is how he does it.
Imagine that you have been taken prisoner by a spetsnaz group. Your
companion has had a hot iron on the palms of his hands and a big nail driven
into his head as a demonstration. They look at you questioningly. You nod
your head -- you agree to talk. Every spetsnaz soldier has a silken
phrase-book -- a white silk handkerchief on which there are sixteen rows of
different questions and answers. The first sentence in Russian is: `Keep
your mouth shut or I'll kill you.' The sergeant points to this sentence.
Next to it is a translation into English, German, French and many other
languages. You find the answer you need i
n your own language and nod your
head. Very good. You understand each other. They can free your mouth. The
next sentence is: `If you don't tell the truth you'll be sorry!' You quickly
find the equivalent in your own language. All right, all clear. Further down
the silk scarf are about a hundred simple sentences, each with translations
into fifteen languages -- `Where?', `Missile', `Headquarters', `Airfield',
`Store', `Police checkpoint', `Minefield', `How is it guarded?', `Platoon?',
`Company?', `Battalion?', `Dogs?', `Yes', `No', and so forth. The last
sentence is a repetition of the second: `If you don't tell the truth you'll
be sorry!'
It takes only a couple of minutes to teach the stupidest soldier to
communicate with the aid of the silken phrase-book. In addition the soldier
is taught to say and understand the simplest and most necessary words, like
`forward', `back', `there', `here', `to the right', `to the left', `metres',
`kilometres' and the numbers from one to twenty. If a soldier is not able to
learn this no harm is done, because it is all written on the silk scarf, of
which there is one for every man in the group.
In the early 1970s Soviet scientists started to develop a very light
electronic device for translating in place of the silken phrase-book or to
supplement it. The high command's requirements were simple: the device had
to weigh not more than 400 grams, had to fit into a satchel and to be the
size of a small book or even smaller. It had to have a display on which
could appear a word or simple phrase in Russian which would immediately be
translated into one of the most widely used languages. The person being
questioned would print out his answer which would immediately be translated
into Russian. I do not know whether such a device is now in use. But
progress in technology will soon permit the creation of something similar.
Not only spetsnaz but many other organisations in the Soviet Army have
displayed interest in the device. However, no device can replace a real
interpreter, and that is why, along with the real interpreters, so many
people of different foreign nationalities are to be found in spetsnaz.
A Soviet soldier who escaped from Afghanistan told how he had been put
into a reconnaissance company from an air-assault brigade. This is a case of
not-quite spetsnaz. Somebody found out that he spoke one of the local