[Skybird]

Excursion.


Mikhail Shishkin was born in Moscow in 1961 and is one of the most important contemporary Russian authors. He studied German and English at the Moscow State Pedagogical University, where he received military training as a translator. Shishkin has lived in Switzerland since 1995 and has been critical of Vladimir Putin's policies for years.
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Starving, suffering, fleeing: Putin's army is a slave school

Ukrainians know what they are fighting for. Do Russian soldiers know? In my time as a Soviet officer I learned: the good recruit first gives up his human dignity.

The war plan of the Russian General Staff foresaw that NATO would not interfere with its forces in the so-called liberation of Ukraine. Why should the world end in nuclear inferno because of some Mariupol? This calculation worked out. There would be no no-fly zone in Ukrainian skies either.

The U.S. intelligence agencies, in turn, knew exactly how many tanks, fighter planes and missiles Russia had. They assumed that Ukraine would be defeated after a few days. In this respect, the Americans miscalculated. The war is not decided by tanks, but by soldiers.

The Russian army has failed. Ukrainians know what they are fighting for. Do the Russian soldiers know it?

Russia's army is still an army of the hungry

Russia is losing the war in Ukraine. Russian soldiers abandon their tanks out of fear and flee. The offensive is stuck, soldiers are demotivated, lack fuel, lack food. A glaring example of the desolate state of the Russian army is its rations.
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The whole world was amazed to see pictures of 2015 expired field rations that killed and captured soldiers carried on them. Putin's army has to maraud in order not to starve. All this says that the new army of Russia has remained the old Soviet army, the army of the hungry.

I graduated from the military training as a military translator at the Moscow Pedagogical College. I am an officer of the Soviet Army, a lieutenant of the reserve. I will never forget reading in the military camp in Kovrov at the swearing-in ceremony: "I swear to defend my socialist fatherland to the last drop of blood." Thereupon I kissed the flag, it smelled of smoked fish. Our commanders had drunk beer, eaten fish with it and then rubbed their hands on the flag.

The food in the military was miserable, incessantly gruel and an indefinable swill, so that we always ran around with a growling stomach and on Sundays committed raids on the nearest village. There we stole vegetables from the gardens, shook apples from the trees and almost all got diarrhea from it.

Kitchen duty was very popular, it was considered a feast, because we could eat as much as we wanted. When we opened the tins of stewed meat in the kitchen, we secretly ate half of it ourselves. The other half went to the officers' table. For the common soldiers there remained only porridge without meat. No one was offended by this, no one thought it base to steal the food from the other's bowl, after all, everyone did it when it was their turn at kitchen duty.

Each army reflects the quintessence of the social order. The Russian army plays an important social role in the country, it is a focal point for Éducation sentimentale. And the Russian army was and remains a school of slaves.

The deeper meaning of military service lies in the "non-regulatory rules of conduct," those unbreakable, unwritten army laws called dedovshchina. A soldier's position in the social hierarchy depends on the amount of time he has served. The older soldiers have virtually unlimited power over the new recruits and take advantage of it by forcing the recruits to perform heavy labor on a daily basis.

The good recruit first lets go of his human dignity

If you want to survive as a recruit, you must first become a slave, let your human dignity ride. Later, you go from being a slave to a master, and now it's your turn to beat the new recruits, to piss in their boots, to make them eat a slice of bread smeared with shoe polish, to take away the food sent to them from home.

Most Russian men complete this slave training and carry the acquired skills and abilities into each family. The brutality in everyday conflicts in my country is frightening. Tolerance is virtually unheard of.

In its 2006 report on the "Situation of the Russian Armed Forces," the Konrad Adenauer Foundation published the following figures: About 130,000 criminal offenses were committed annually. Criminal proceedings were initiated against 15,700 soldiers and officers, and 15,000 of them were convicted.

More than a thousand soldiers and officers received prison sentences for the theft of weapons, technology, equipment and financial resources. Physical violence accounted for 40 percent of all crimes. An average of 88 soldiers and officers died monthly (in peacetime!), making 1064 soldiers annually, 276 of them by suicide and 16 by physical abuse of superiors and other soldiers.

These were the figures from open sources. Later, Putin's army reform began. In recent years, such data were kept secret, according to the opposition Novaya Gazeta. The Minister of Defense swore several times that Dedovshchina had been eradicated in the army. That it is not so, testifies regular media reports about soldiers shooting and fleeing their so-called brothers in arms.

To be fair, it must be said that the army in Russia also plays a civilizing role. On February 15, 2006, then Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov told the Duma: "Many draftees see a toilet bowl, a toothbrush and three meals a day for the first time in their lives. Therefore, it is not easy to educate such soldiers."

Now this Russian generation also has its war

Who said that every generation needs its war? In Russia, it's true. Two friends of mine fell in Afghanistan. The next generation had to participate in the wars in Chechnya. Countless reports from veterans present the same picture of the Russian army: Hunger and corruption. It was common for commanders to sell weapons and information to Chechen rebels, in other words, the lives of their own soldiers.

The well-known journalist Arkady Babchenko, who himself had fought in Chechnya, formulated the now-famous principle of soldier morale in the Russian army: "Your homeland will always let you down, son, always."

Now the next generation has its war. The image of the reformed, modern, combat-ready army proved to be a self-deception of Putin's propaganda. If the whole criminal regime was based on the corruption and embezzlement of state funds, it was primarily related to the immense expenses for the reforms and re-equipment of the army.

The opaque practices of money allocation brought down all attempts at reform. Even the horrendous military expenditures could not change the critical state of affairs. The embarrassment of the defense industry became famous when a new-generation Armata T-14 tank broke down during the military parade in Red Square in May 2015 and had to be towed away. Production of this new development stalled. Moreover, much of the equipment is outdated and dates back to the Soviet era.

As for warfare in Ukraine, the same tried-and-true tactics apply to the Russian army as in all previous wars: tirelessly firing masses of soldiers. Russia has an advantage that the entire civilized world is deprived of: Putin does not care how many thousands or tens of thousands of soldiers he sacrifices in Ukraine. The famous "victory marshal" Georgy Zhukov put it most clearly: "Never mind. Russian women will give birth to even more soldiers."

Putin rejected the ICRC's offer to transfer the bodies of Russian soldiers from Ukraine to Russia. That's all you need to know about relations between power and the rank and file in my country.

Just when I was thinking how to conclude this text about the Russian army and its soldiers, my son came and asked, "Dad, why was a Greek foot soldier on the battlefield stronger than a dozen mercenaries of the Persian king?" I answered, "He was a free citizen defending his freedom, and these were slaves."



Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Der Tagesspiegel
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)