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Суворов, Виктор - Суворов - Спецназ (engl)История >> История (наука и гипотезы) >> Суворов, Виктор Читать целиком бХЙРНП яСБНПНБ. яОЕЖМЮГ (engl)
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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
OCR: 28 Dec 2001 by MadMax
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
Chapter 1. Spades and Men
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.
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