Translated material
Military uniform separated from content
Alexander Golts
It makes no sense to reduce the Russian security agencies; they should be decisively demilitarized
It makes no sense to reduce the Russian security agencies; they should be decisively demilitarized
(Photo: Vasily Dyachkov )
Having met on September 27 with Security Council Secretary Sergei Ivanov and Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, the president decided to postpone the Security Council meeting on military reform scheduled for that day to the first half of November. Instead of this event, a “working meeting” was held, during which the heads of law enforcement agencies “exchanged views” with the Supreme Commander-in-Chief on various issues. Putin motivated his decision by saying that “not everything is ready for the meeting and it will take time to work out the wording and decisions.”
In fact, the president, and with him the apparatus of the government and the Security Council, unexpectedly encountered united resistance from the heads of law enforcement agencies, who opposed the decisions that were planned to be made. And they were forced to retreat. Meanwhile, even the day before there was no sign of a thunderstorm. The document, which was supposed to be discussed at the Security Council meeting, does not even concern the troops subordinate to the Ministry of Defense. It is dedicated to reform, or more precisely, to plans to reduce the remaining 11 law enforcement agencies - the FSB, FAPSI, Internal Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, etc. And it did not appear suddenly. According to sources in the Security Council apparatus, its preparation was carried out for about two months by an expert commission headed by Security Council Secretary Sergei Ivanov, which includes Alexei Kudrin, Ilya Klebanov and Valentina Matvienko, as well as high-ranking representatives of a number of ministries and departments.
Either everyone or no one
After the leaders of the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff, weakened by internal strife and awaiting an order of dismissal from minute to minute, practically without a fight, accepted the proposal of the Security Council apparatus to reduce the size of the Armed Forces by more than 400 thousand people (350-365 thousand military personnel and 120 thousand civilian specialists) , Sergei Ivanov’s department had no choice but to take on other security officials. Otherwise, the military could justifiably say: why are we, who rightfully wear a military uniform, being laid off, while these guys, I don’t understand who, are left alone.
Young people are drafted into the army so that they defend their homeland, and not build, pave roads and work in subsidiary farms. They could do all this without putting on a uniform, without losing two years of normal life, and for a normal salary. And it would be much more profitable for the country. (Photo: Leonid Yakutin )
On the eve of the meeting, Security Council experts quite confidently told journalists the numbers of proposed cuts. Internal troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs - by 20 thousand soldiers and officers (total strength is about 200 thousand); railway troops - by 10 thousand (no data on the number), Border Guard Service - by 5 (number - 100 thousand); The FSB, FAPSI, Federal Road Construction Administration, Main Military Operational Directorate of the Ministry of Communications, Directorate of Military Construction Units of Minatom, Directorate of Military Construction Units of Gosstroy, Federal Directorate of Special Construction must together lose 20 thousand military personnel and 60 thousand civilian employees.
It is also proposed (the General Staff has long insisted on this) to create a unified system of logistics and logistics support for the security forces, and a common system of military education. And everything is under the leadership and control of the Ministry of Defense.
It must be said that over the past ten years this is at least the third attempt to reduce the number of law enforcement agencies. When they were secretaries of the Security Council, both Yuri Baturin and Andrei Kokoshin took steps in this direction. The experience of those failures teaches us: under no circumstances should reductions be made in all departments at once. “Otherwise they will immediately unite, and there’s nothing you can do about them,” one of the experts shared with an Itogi correspondent, “and if one at a time, then they vote for cuts from their neighbor in the hope that it won’t come to their attention.” . However, the commission was so confident that they would not dare to contradict it (after all, its head, Sergei Ivanov, is the president’s closest friend and adviser) that it risked bringing to the Security Council meeting proposals to reduce all law enforcement agencies at once.
The security forces acted exactly according to the script - they immediately united. Moreover, they did not immediately raise a scandal, but spoke on the eve of the meeting, when the Kremlin no longer had time to maneuver. They threatened that everyone would vote against it. Vladimir Putin could not enter into an open conflict with all the security forces at once. The only thing the Supreme Commander-in-Chief allowed himself was to notice to the security forces that the country spends over 35 percent of the state budget on their maintenance and he has no confidence that this money is spent effectively.
However, the hope that the security forces will be ashamed and agree in November to what they flatly refused to agree to in September is very weak. For the future meeting of the Security Council, everyone will probably prepare the most convincing calculations proving that their agency should not be reduced, but, on the contrary, expanded. And it is very likely that the authorities, as has happened more than once, will prefer to retreat.
Unfit for repair
And all because the Kremlin is persistently trying to repair a mechanism that has long been in the landfill.
Neither the Supreme Commander-in-Chief nor the General Staff even ask the question: does Russia, in addition to the army, need to have 11 more departments where the law provides for military service? Moreover, almost as many people serve in these departments as in the Armed Forces - about a million people. No other democratic country has so many paramilitary organizations.
At one time, speaking about the army, one British military theorist remarked: “Democracy, in order to survive and protect itself, is forced to tolerate an absolutely undemocratic institution.”
It is not customary to talk about this, but service in the army differs from any other public service in that the country has the right to demand that a soldier and officer commit actions that are contrary to human nature: he must kill and expose his life to mortal danger. Over the centuries, specific principles of this service have been developed: unity of command, unconditional execution of any order, a strict hierarchy of ranks. The extension of these principles to other social institutions is a sure sign of an unhealthy society. Therefore, in countries with a democratic system, the scope of use of people in uniform is very strictly limited - only and exclusively to the Armed Forces. Totalitarian regimes, on the contrary, strive to militarize everything and everyone. This is exactly how the communist government acted in the USSR, and Russia inherited numerous “other” troops from the Soviet Union, and some have existed since the times of autocracy.
The transition to a contract basis will automatically solve the problem of “other” armies. The security forces will lose all desire to keep people in uniform in their department as soon as they cease to be free labor. (Photo: Igor Gavrilov )
Pseudo-military
Departments where some of the employees are military personnel can be divided into two groups. The first is law enforcement agencies. During the Soviet era, the KGB (now this department is divided into the FSB, SVR, FAPSI and Border Guard Service) and to a certain extent the Ministry of Internal Affairs were punitive bodies, and there, as you know, orders are not discussed. It is not surprising that they were built on the principle of military organizations. Most of us cannot even imagine that an intelligence officer or, in general, a special services employee can be a civilian official. Meanwhile, in Western countries this is common practice. There are no "CIA colonels" so beloved by Russian spy novelists. A US Central Intelligence Agency employee can hold a military rank, but only if he came into intelligence from the military, which is quite rare.
If even a reduction, and a very insignificant one, caused such a rebuff from the security forces, then what can we say about demilitarization. They are ready to defend their stars to the last. After all, military service is associated not only with hardships, but also with certain privileges: early pension (it is a certain percentage of the salary and grows as the salaries of the corresponding category of active officers increase), an apartment upon dismissal, etc. For this reason, not only among the security forces, but also in the Armed Forces, again according to the Soviet tradition, there is a complete proliferation of officer positions that actually have nothing to do with military affairs. At one time, the current Minister of Defense was very surprised when he learned that the chief gynecologist of the Armed Forces was a general's position. It is not very clear why the ranks of general and officer should be held by artists of the Red Banner Song and Dance Ensemble of the Russian Army, CSKA athletes, and employees of the Museum of the Armed Forces. However, no one has yet been able to break this vicious system.
It will be even more difficult for the current president to do this than the previous one. After all, he himself comes from the FSB and is unlikely to want to deprive his former colleagues in the security forces of their usual privileges.
The second group of pseudo-military departments are those whose activities are actually based on the slave labor of conscripts. These are road construction troops, construction troops of the State Construction Committee, as well as construction troops of the Ministry of Atomic Energy and special construction troops, which construct government facilities. In Soviet times, the existence of all these departments was at least somehow justified. The normal functioning of a huge army required gigantic amounts of construction work, and the conduct of the then planned operations involving millions of military personnel was unthinkable without the prompt construction and restoration of highways and railways.
However, now, when the ground forces are expected to be increased to a dozen divisions, it is not at all necessary to have special railway and road construction troops to ensure their transfer. But the heads of these departments do not want and do not know how to reorganize their work in accordance with the laws of the market. It’s easier for them to prove to their superiors, foaming at the mouth: “If we are demilitarized and we lose the free labor of conscripts, all work will stop.” It must be said that these arguments have always worked flawlessly on the Kremlin. When in 1997 a presidential decree was issued allowing the conscription of conscript soldiers only to the troops of the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, FAPSI and the Federal Border Guard Service, high-ranking commanders began to besiege the president with requests to “make an exception.” As a result, the decree, which no one has canceled, is actually not in effect.
Without a decisive demilitarization of the majority of departments where people in uniform serve, it is pointless to talk about military reform. Cuts will not give anything - all these structures tend to be reborn.
It is interesting that the leadership of the General Staff, which has long advocated a decisive reduction of “other” troops, is objectively doing everything to preserve them. After all, if the army were formed on a contract basis - and the General Staff resolutely resists this - we would have to forget about free labor, and the security forces would lose any desire to fight for conscripts.
In an effort to prove that the country could not afford the contract system, the leaders of the military department finally began calculating the cost of such an army. The head of the main organizational and mobilization department, Vladislav Putilin, recently cited the following figure: the maintenance of contract soldiers will require an annual increase in the military budget by 18.6 billion rubles. This amount, according to the general, is so large that the idea of a professional army can be given up for now. But considering that next year military spending will be increased by at least 60 billion, the figure given by Putilin does not seem astronomical at all.
The General Staff cannot but understand this, but the desire to maintain conscription is so great that for the first time in the last few years, the military even started an exercise in the Leningrad Military District with the conscription of two thousand “reserves”, from which it is planned to form a motorized rifle brigade. The goal is to prove the unprovable: that from a citizen who has completed military service, if necessary, in a short period of time, one can turn into a full-fledged soldier who meets the requirements of a modern army.
The General Staff generals do not want to face the truth - as long as conscription continues, a second, parallel army will remain, the funds for which will be directly or indirectly taken away from the Armed Forces.
(Photo: Leonid Yakutin )