Brian Moynahan - The Claws of the Bear: A History of the Soviet Armed Forces from 1917 To The Present

The Claws of the Bear

A History of the Soviet Armed Forces from 1917 to the Present

Brian Moynahan

Copyright Brian Moynahan 1989

The right of Brian Moynahan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

First published in the United Kingdom in 1989 by Hutchinson Press Ltd.

This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

For my father

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Greatest Show on Earth

The Red army, the worlds most powerful institution, is on view in Moscow. It looks accessible and reassuring.

Troops from show divisions parade in Red Square, gloved, helmets suspended motionless as boots hit the cobblestones outside the waxen body of Lenin in his mausoleum. By St Basils Cathedral, an officer with staff tabs parks his car and carefully puts its windscreen wipers in his issue briefcase as an insurance against theft. Under the Kremlin Wall, a bride in a thin white dress throws her posy of roses on the granite blocks at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

The defence ministry lies a short distance downstream on the Moscow River along the Frunskaya Embankment. It is a four-rouble ride from the Kremlin by cab, a few seconds in the little Cessna in which a teenage German pilot came calling and so ensured that an obscure general named Dmitry Yazov became its minister.

It has fine views to Gorky Park and the Lenin Hills. A ferris wheel, edge on, revolves in blue and red and cream. Summer queues in check shirts wait for beer and ice cream. A gingerbread church upstream reminds of past loyalties to Tsar and Christ. In winter, a plume of steam rises from the open-air bath.

Yazov, the controller of the Red army, orders the daily rounds of 5,096,000 servicemen, a figure that he can swell to 11,313,000 in a fortnight with the call-up of active reserves. In the Soviet Union itself, they are scattered through eleven time zones and behind ten borders from Norway to North Korea.

As the Red flag is lowered at dusk at the divisional headquarters in Kaliningrad, in former German East Prussia, the sun is already rising from out of Alaska over the garrisons of Kamchatka.

Others of his units are stationed in Eastern Europe, in Vietnam, Mongolia, Cuba, Angola, Libya, Mozambique, Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia, Laos, in nuclear bombardment submarines off the American seaboards, in long-range reconnaissance aircraft in international airspace.

From here is decided the targeting of 1,386 intercontinental ballistic missiles and 978 sea-launched missiles. A rocket from a boomer, one of the four or so bombardment submarines on permanent station off the US east coast, could vaporize Washington within five minutes of the order being sent from the Frunskaya Embankment. The ICBMs would take a further twenty-five minutes to arrive.

Add in the 53,000 tanks, the four surface Fleets, the fighters with their curious Western codenames, Foxbats, Floggers, Flagons, Fiddlers, Firebars, the satellites, and the factories that feed it, and this is a colossus. Against Yazov, the Americans have 2.1 million men and 1.6 million active reserves.

Seen in Moscow, it appears bound to its desks and its parade grounds. A giant, in terms of size, but a being with recognizably the same temperament and tastes as its Western counterparts. It fits a familiar pattern that is made comforting by the fact that Gorbachev and glasnost now rule and that arms cuts seem the order of the day.

*

Only the slightest of ruffles, of names, play at its bloody memories and remind how fraught is Yazovs office how perilous the search for glasnost .

Mikhail Frunze, doctors son turned Bolshevik revolutionary and commissar for defence, has a city and the main military academy named for him as well as the embankment. He died under an operation in 1925.

The operation was not ordered by a surgeon. It was decided on by the Politburo, the supreme political body whose anonymous black limousines and bulky figures are on view within the Kremlin. The prompting came from a predecessor of Gorbachev as party general secretary, Joseph Stalin. Frunzes death under the knife was almost certainly state-instructed murder. His predecessor as defence commissar, Leon Trotsky, the founder of the Red army, died with an ice-pick in his brain in exile in Mexico in 1940.

That, too, was murder ordered by the general secretary whose authority is now enjoyed in unbroken line of succession by Mikhail Gorbachev.

Spend an evening wrapped in the athletic sensuality of the Kirov ballet, and the nagging doubts of Frunze are lanced. The officers in the audience seem abnormal only in their unmilitary and laudable passion for the dance. Millions of Red army men seem to stand easy, seventy-seven boomers submerge beneath distant icecaps, covers slam over 1,951 missile silos, orders go out to ground five Air Armies.

But Sergei Kirov was murdered, too, by a system that then honoured him with three major cities, countless lakes and factories, a 23,000-ton cruiser class, and the ballet. His death unleashed on the Red army and the blocks along the Frunskaya a terror that glasnost has not fully dispersed. Khrushchev alone of Lenins heirs, not Gorbachev, not the vain Brezhnev, not the secret policeman Andropov, complained of the inhumanity of his inheritance.

Beneath the style, away from the Moscow parade grounds and the known terrain of the general secretary and the stars and bit-part players of disarmament talks, there is a different substance. Little is truly familiar in the modern power of the Red army and in the awesome and often ghastly sweep of its history.

At its birth, within living memory, it fought and won a civil war and created the worlds first communist state. Its leadership then subjected it to a terror which, like the scale of the German invasion that swiftly followed, was on a scale unknown to any previous army.

Engulfing Eastern Europe, it underpinned Russia as it turned into a superpower with an ideology that raced into the poor parts of the world. The Soviet Union is not a superpower because of its trade, its economic strength or the cultural dynamic of its people. There are no worldwide Chicken Kiev franchises, no Ro-Ro ships packed with export Zils and Zims. Its best-known writer lives in exile.

It maintains its empire and its superpower status thanks to military power alone.

*

To the long burden of history, which contains so much of this violent century within it, Yazov must add the present. What responsibility this man bears!

The Soviet Union has 22.3 million square kilometres of territory, half of Eurasia and one sixth of the land surface of the planet. It traverses most of the meridians of the eastern hemisphere. On the Chukotka peninsula and Wrangel Island, it scrapes over the edge of the western.

Yazovs men must guard it from 19 degrees 38 minutes east on the Polish border to 169 degrees 59 minutes west at Cape Dezhnev across the strait from Alaska. He knows it well enough. His last posting before Moscow was 8,333 kilometres away at Khabarovsk in the Far East, a westward journey of six days on the Rossiya express. He also has the advantage of having accurate military maps. The head of the Soviet Cartography Administration admitted in 1988 that all maps for public use had been deliberately distorted on secret police orders for more than fifty years. Almost everything was changed, roads and rivers moved, streets tilted.

In latitude, the most southerly town is dusty Kushka with its peeling yellow buildings and dirt roads on the Afghan border at 35 degrees north, below Gibraltar in European terms, at a level with Memphis in American. The frozen rock of Cape Chelyuskin huddles at the extremity of the landmass at 77 degrees 4 minutes north in Siberia. The archipelagos extend further north, to the 82nd parallel at Cape Fligeli in Franz Josef Land.