CONTENTS INTRODUCTION THE BOLSHEVIK LEGACY Special Purpose Units and “diversionary troops” • Spain and Finland • Airborne troops THE GREAT PATRIOTIC WAR The Partisans • The OMSBON and OGBM • Naval Infantry 181st Special Detachment COLD WARRIORS GRU Independent Spetsnaz Recon Companies • 1950: the first Naval Spetsnaz brigades • 1957: the first GRU Spetsnaz battalions • Imperial enforcers: Hungary, 1956, and Czechoslovakia, 1968 • The Spetsnaz mystique • Spetsnaz units, 1982 COMING OF AGE: AFGHANISTAN, 1979–89 The “Moslem Battalion” – Operation “Storm-333” • Later deployments • The Spetsnaz war – hunters and raiders • After Afghanistan: Georgia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijan SPETSNAZ SINCE THE END OF THE USSR Uncertainties and reductions • Chechnya: First Chechen War, 1994–96 – Second Chechen War, 1999–2002 • The Kadyrovtsy – the Vostok Battalion THE MODERN SPETSNAZ Georgia, 2008 • Special Operations Command • The GRU embattled, 2010–13 • Organization, 2014 – recruitment and training • Crimea and Ukraine, 2014 • The “other Spetsnaz” • The future WEAPONS & EQUIPMENT Small arms – support weapons – personal kit – close combat • Underwater equipment GLOSSARY SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY SPETSNAZ: RUSSIA’S SPECIAL FORCES INTRODUCTION The Spetsnaz, Russia’s military special forces, have earned an extraordinary reputation for effectiveness, ferocity, and skill. At the same time they are little understood, and are often mythologized both in Russia and the West. There is an assumption that they are a force of soldiers to rival Britain’s SAS or the US Delta Force (some of them are; most are not). There are tales of covert assassinations and macho heroics, feeding a belief that they are simultaneously soldiers, spies, and saboteurs (a few do perform in all three roles, but most are best considered simply as well-trained intervention forces). The Spetsnaz are, to be sure, an effective force, whose soldiers were the best the former Soviet military could field, and who maintain those standards in today’s Russian Federation forces. They have been the “tip of the spear” in Moscow’s military interventions and operations for many decades, from early Bolshevik units sent to fight insurgency in Central Asia in the 1920s, through covert deployments in the Spanish Civil War, to running partisans during World War II, and leading the invasions of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 they have fought in Chechnya, in Central Asia and, most recently, in Ukraine. (In another sense, they have also faced “turf wars” launched by other agencies resentful of their control by the GRU military intelligence directorate.) Increasingly, the Spetsnaz are at the heart of a new Russian way of war that emphasizes speed, surprise, and deception over massive conventional force, and their skills ensure that they will maintain their special status into the future. Indeed, in many ways the Spetsnaz concept is a counterpoint to the traditional strengths and weaknesses of the Russian Army: large, determined, but also lumbering, and lacking in initiative and élan. As Stephen Zaloga notes in his book Inside the Blue Berets, the visionary 17th-century Tsar Peter the Great had written of his dream of a “flying corps… a force so constituted that it can act without encumbrance in every direction, and send back reliable information of the enemy’s doings… at the disposal of the general, whether to cut off the enemy, deprive him of a pass, attack his rear, or fall on his territory and make a diversion.” In the Spetsnaz the Soviets and Russians acquired just such a force. Their name comes from a contraction of spetsialnoye naznacheniya, “of special designation” or “of special purpose.” In a sense, this is quite a significant detail. They are not “special forces” as such in the Western sense, which places the emphasis on the specialness of the operators themselves. Instead, what is distinctive is the special role that is assigned to these troops. After all, for the whole history of the Spetsnaz many or most have been conscripts, and by the rarefied selection standards of Western elite forces most do not really compare. They were and are substantially more dedicated and specialized, and better trained and disciplined, than the bulk of the armed forces – but that has not always been a particularly high bar to surmount. For example, in Chechnya in the 1990s they were essentially used (and wasted) as regular infantry, often for the simple reason that so few regular Army units were in any shape to fight. However, as was demonstrated by their part in the near-bloodless seizure of Crimea in 2014, the Spetsnaz are certainly effective in much more supple roles. The seizure of the Crimea in 2014 was spearheaded by the so-called “little green men” – Russian Naval Infantry and Naval Spetsnaz deployed without insignia but, tellingly, with the most modern Russian uniforms and kit. These men marching into the Ukrainian naval base at Perevalne are carrying AK-74 rifles fitted with grenade-launchers, and wear the new “Ratnik” model field dress. (© Anton Holoborodko) Traditionally, they were primarily concerned with battlefield reconnaissance, shattering enemy chains of command and lines of supply, and targeting NATO tactical nuclear weapons. As such, they filled a gap between regular military reconnaissance forces and the intelligence-gathering assets and units of the intelligence and security agencies1. Today, however, the Spetsnaz, which are again expanding in size, have a much wider role as the Kremlin’s politico- military instrument of choice. As the prospect of mass wars recedes, Russia looks to a future of small-scale counterinsurgencies and military interventions in the so-called “Near Abroad” of post-Soviet Eurasia. It sees in the Spetsnaz a flexible (and even sometimes deniable) instrument which it can use as easily to fight guerrillas here as to support an insurgency there. In the scrappy, messy security environment of the 21st century, a hundred well-trained Spetsnaz can prove more usable and effective than a whole armored brigade. Finally, it is worth asking how we can know what we think we know? Any studies of deliberately secretive services must grapple with this challenge, and in the case of the Spetsnaz the waters have been muddied not just by Soviet and then Russian maskirovka – strategic deception – but also by mythology. A heavy contribution to that mythology has been made by a Soviet defector, Vladimir Rezun, who wrote a series of exposés about the Soviet military under the pseudonym “Viktor Suvorov.” Entertaining and racy, they also contain much that has since been demonstrated to be exaggerated or downright wrong, especially when he moves into the worlds of military intelligence and the Spetsnaz. However, since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 there has been a growing body of studies, especially in Russian, which have contributed invaluably to our understanding of them as neither 10ft-tall supermen, nor bumbling imitations of the SAS or Green Berets, but as a distinctive type of special forces all their own. THE BOLSHEVIK LEGACY Although the Spetsnaz were formally established only in 1950, there was already a strong tradition of special forces to build upon, from elite elements of the original Bolshevik Red Guard through to behind-the-lines commando forces in World War II. The Spetsnaz certainly regard themselves as the inheritors of the long, proud tradition of the razvedchik, the military scout; but they are also a product of the rise of the political police – an integral element of the Soviet regime from its earliest days, and a force with its own substantial military assets. Aktivki – “active reconnaissance” operations carried out behind enemy lines, often by covert means – quickly became a staple of the Red Workers’ and Peasants’ Army (generally known simply as the Red Army) after its creation in January 1918 following the Bolshevik coup of November 1917. The Red Army found itself facing complex and confusing opposition. The Civil War of 1918–22 was actually a parallel series of separate conflicts – against White counterrevolutionary forces at home; against nationalists seeking independence from the former Tsarist empire; against rival radicals such as the Social Revolutionaries; against neighboring countries; and against anti-Bolshevik intervention forces from Britain, the United States, France, and Japan2. The Bolsheviks had a small but highly motivated and often capable core of supporters, and had seized control over the main cities and hubs of industry and communications. On the other hand, they were fighting numerous enemies on widely separate fronts. Soldiers who have joined the Red Guard level their rifles at a police post during the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The first Bolshevik “special forces” were drawn from among the most ideologically motivated of such recruits. Commander Alexander Yegorov and Bolshevik Commissar for War Leon Trotsky review Red Cavalry