Conscription remission

The Ministry of Defense freezes the contract until the election of the Supreme Commander. Young men of military age will be responsible for this

At the end of March, Colonel-General Vasily Smirnov will receive a golden sledgehammer as a gift. Such an anti-award for him was invented by the human rights coalition Citizen and Army. A sledgehammer will be awarded to the general "for the failure of the program for the transition to contract staffing of the army in 2004-2007." Even then, General Smirnov was one of the leaders of the General Staff under Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov. One could give up on human rights activists, but at the end of February, Chief of the General Staff Nikolai Makarov already spoke about the failure of the transition to a contract army. This fact was acknowledged by Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov.

They started talking about changing the military course and returning to the draft army. This is despite the fact that since the 90s the general line has not changed: the future of Russia is contract service. In fact, the course makes a sharp and very long squiggle. There will be no complete cancellation of the contract. Moreover, according to the plan of the contract servicemen, there will someday be more. But for the time being, there will be fewer and fewer of them every day, and conscripts will take their place in the ranks. This means that the government will again have to reduce the list of grounds for deferment or raise the upper bar for military age.

According to Newsweek, the leadership of the military department has already prepared new approaches to recruiting army units. These proposals were submitted to Dmitry Medvedev. The plan is this: to reduce the number of contractors by at least one and a half times, from 200,000 to 130,000-150,000, while doubling their allowances. Cut and revise the set of military posts that contract soldiers can hold. Their preliminary list is at the disposal of Newsweek. The point is that only highly qualified military specialists will remain on the contract.

But the expansion of the contract service will be frozen only for a while. Since 2012, their salaries should increase, and if there is no new economic crisis, the number of contractors will begin to increase again. "It's time to return to the slogans of a new contract army during the presidential election campaign," explains a government source. The new commander-in-chief, obviously, will have to finally decide on the "new look" of the Russian army.

ADVENTURE AND PROFANATION

Now the Ministry of Defense is simply forced to admit the obvious thing - the methods of attracting contractors did not work. “The program was a gamble and profanity,” says military expert Vitaly Shlykov. Almost 140 billion rubles were spent on an ambitious target program for the transition to a contract, and as a result, every fifth contract soldier left the army. They just ran.

In the American army, one of the main bonuses of a contract soldier is tuition fees at a prestigious university. That is, a good start and a guarantee of a career breakthrough - in the army or in civilian life. In Russia, an amendment was also made to the law on education - a serviceman who served the first term under the contract could count on entering the institute out of competition, and after the second term - on participation in the Housing Certificate program. But few dared to wait for the right to free education or an apartment from the state.

There are several reasons. The first is low wages. “The average salary of a contractor was 6,000–7,000 rubles. Not at all the money for which a person will agree to die, ”the government official cites the main argument.

The second is housing. Arriving at the unit, contract soldiers found that they only had at their disposal multi-bed rooms in dormitories or even beds in the barracks. No one thought about everyday details either, Alexander Vladimirov, vice-president of the college of military experts, is indignant: “In Pskov, for example, they recruited a crowd of contract servicemen, but no one even thought where they would put the cars.”

The third is social infrastructure. The developers of the program did not take into account that contract soldiers would come to the garrisons with their wives and children. And this means that kindergartens, schools, clubs will be needed. And the contractors simply had nowhere to put their families. “They themselves ran wild in the barracks,” continues Vladimirov. “They drank, and then they began to roam the streets and rowdy.”

The quality of the contingent is the main problem, the Ministry of Defense admits. For example, an employee of the cantonment service recalls, an entire Voronezh collective farm moved to Kamchatka, where a contract worker receives more due to northern allowances: “My brother called his uncle, the son called his father.”

Respectable, albeit not very ready for service peasants - this is one thing. The other is those who run into the army because of problems with the law. "Contractors were recruited from those who have nothing to lose," - says the source Newsweek. This problem became especially acute during the second Chechen war, where contract soldiers were sent first of all.

The Chief Military Prosecutor's Office (GVP) did not miss an opportunity to poke its nose into the statistics of the Ministry of Defense - in Russia as a whole, contract servicemen accounted for almost a third of offenses in the army. And they are in the army - the sixth part. The peak of crimes committed by contractors occurred in 2005-2006, Alexander Nikitin, head of the Main Military Prosecutor's Office, tells Newsweek: "People went to contract service expecting privileges that they did not receive in the end."

OBEYABLE AND CONTROLLED

Many contractors are the same conscripts who signed a contract at the suggestion of their commanders. “Someone was pressured, someone was simply persuaded,” says a military official. The middle management received an order from the leadership to "provide control figures" and rushed to fulfill it in the same way as they fulfilled the draft plan.

Until 2007, says an employee of the Ministry of Defense, conscripts who served two years, after the first year of service, with their consent, were simply transferred to serve on a contract - with a promise that in a year it would be possible to quit. Those who did not want to be blackmailed if a soldier committed some minor offense: either a contract or a severe army punishment. Many were fused to a contract within six months after the start of service. These facts are recognized in the GWP. The ministry objected. “These are special cases. On the whole, they walked on their own,” Vasily Smirnov, head of the Main Organizational and Mobilization Directorate, told Newsweek.

Many generals do not accept the contract philosophy itself. “It is customary for us to treat the service as a service. And the contract is, whatever one may say, paid work, ”says the ex-official of the Ministry of Defense apparatus. “Conscripts are, of course, more comfortable,” explains Shlykov. “They are obedient and manageable.”

Human rights activists argue with this statement. They believe that in the Russian army, a contract soldier quickly became as disenfranchised as a conscript. The head of the Union of Committees of Soldiers' Mothers, Valentina Melnikova, says that she has in her archive the story of a contract soldier from Orenburg - he endured bullying by officers for a year and eventually left the army.

Human rights activist Sergei Krivenko is convinced that the main mistake of the reform is that it did not define the status of a contract soldier. In Western armies, the concept of "Citizen in Uniform" is in effect. “This is not money, but the preservation of rights, as in civilian life,” explains Krivenko. “For life, defense, litigation, health.” And in Russia, according to Krivenko, 80% of contract servicemen who retired from the army explain this by the fact that they were treated "like conscripts, that is, like cattle."

30 PERSONS PER PLACE

The war in Georgia has shown that the army is in a very poor condition - in all respects. “The contractors have not shown the required efficiency,” says a source in the government. But it was not the war that played the main role in revising the strategy for the transition to a contract army. It became clear that there was a catastrophic lack of money to create a contract soldier who could become the basis of a real professional army.

The last time the transition program to the contract was adopted in August 2008. But she never made any money. The money was needed for something else. It was decided to start layoffs, primarily officers, and they had to be urgently provided with housing.

The logic of the reform is to lay off some and raise the wages of others. It was decided to do the same with contractors, with the difference that they do not even need to be fired. With the current staff turnover, if you do not recruit new ones, they will become less and less anyway. There is a successful experience: in the border troops of the FSB, they reduced staff and increased allowances. As a result, the competition for contract positions among border guards has reached 30 people per place. The Ministry of Defense also expects to achieve the same effect over time.

The Ministry of Defense promises that contract servicemen will be paid more at the expense of the funds that are already included in the military budget for the salary of contract servicemen. Reducing the number of contractors, Anatoly Serdyukov plans to get big salaries - about 35,000 rubles a month for ordinary contractors.

At the same time, the Ministry of Defense notes, an experienced contract soldier with a long professional record will receive bonuses and, as a result, earn more than novice officers - under 50,000 rubles. In addition, they say in the Ministry of Defense, contract servicemen will be provided with living conditions at the level of officers.

So far, all parts will be formed according to a mixed principle. The General Staff says that only the submarine forces of the Navy will be fully staffed with contract soldiers. In other parts, specialized specialists will remain on the contract. Newsweek knows who they are: command posts, snipers, miners, divers, parachute handlers. The basis of the future contract army should be sergeants - they have already begun to be trained on the basis of the Ryazan Airborne Forces School. True, only 239 people were recruited.

100,000 EXTRA CONSCIENTS

It remains to be seen how this threatens young men of military age. The arithmetic is very simple. The size of the army has already been practically brought up to a million people. Of these, 150,000 officers. So many of them will remain after the reduction started by Anatoly Serdyukov. Another 150,000 people are contract soldiers who will remain in place. We need to get 700,000 soldiers. This is the control figure for conscription since 2011.

The military commissariats are in a very difficult position. Today they have to provide 600,000 conscripts a year, and this is a huge problem for them - the Ministry of Defense does not hide the fact that recruitment is on the verge of possibilities. This autumn, Vasily Smirnov even abandoned the traditional press conference. On it, he usually spoke about the success of the draft campaign.

Now the Ministry of Defense is thinking about where to get 100,000 extra conscripts every year. There are few options - to raise the maximum draft age or to reduce delays, which have already become much smaller. You can also relax medical restrictions. For example, contract soldiers have fewer of them than conscripts.

There is an opinion among the rectors that the hunt for university graduates will begin very soon. To cancel the deferment for students is too risky, but the military has long had a desire to replenish the army with an “educated contingent”. The idea of ​​returning to a two-year term of service is dismissed by both military officials and experts. This would be a political defeat not only for the military department, but also for the next president, no matter who he becomes - Vladimir Putin or Dmitry Medvedev.