SPETSNAZ - THE SOVIET SPECIAL FORCES

The Inside Story Of The Soviet Special Forces

Selection And Training

Chapter 7 Page 3 NEXT PAGE >

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The atmosphere of the interview is relaxed, with smiles and jokes on both sides. `Tell us about yourself, lieutenant. What are your interests? What games do you play? You hold the divisional record on skis over ten kilometres? Very good. How did your men do in the last rifle-shooting test? How do you get along with your deputy? Is he a difficult chap? Uncontrolled character? Our information is that you tamed him. How did you manage it?' continued next page...