Military reservations

Observers note a high increase in violence in the army, moreover, tinged with interethnic and interreligious strife. To combat this, according to Nezavisimaya Gazeta, the General Staff plans to create special units in which representatives of the same nationality or confession would serve. The newspaper writes, citing military expert Lieutenant General Yuri Netkachev, that in this way the army will try to adopt the experience of the so-called “wild divisions” that existed in the army of the Russian Empire, and then in the Soviet troops. True, Russian nobles also served in the “Wild Division” (Caucasian Native Cavalry Division), created during the First World War, 90% staffed by Muslim volunteers, natives of the Caucasus, who were not subject to conscription for military service, and was initially commanded by the Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich. The newspaper notes that the federal subordinate battalions “East” and “West” were staffed solely on ethnic grounds.

In a conversation with Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Doctor of Historical Sciences, specialist on the Caucasus, Colonel Vladimir Popov, said that now, when forming military units in Chechnya, an unspoken bar for recruiting contract soldiers from the Caucasus has been set at a ratio of one to twenty. “This was done based on the experience of past years, when in 2007–2008 every third there was a contract soldier from Dagestan. In some military units of the 42nd division, they, as they say, ruled the roost and actually refused to obey the commanders,” he explains. The colonel fears that units staffed only by Caucasians may “on the X-day” refuse to obey the leadership of the Ministry of Defense, “as happened in June 1941, when the war with Nazi Germany began.”

Another interlocutor of the newspaper, a member of the Association of Reserve Officers of the Armed Forces, Major General Vladimir Bogatyrev, believes that this is not the way to solve problems of discipline in the army. In his opinion, it is necessary to return educators and political officers to the army, who “have now been cut to the minimum.”