Galeotti Mark - Spetsnaz: Russias Special Forces

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AUTHORS NOTE

Translating out of Cyrillic always poses challenges. I have chosen to transliterate names as they are pronounced, and I have also ignored the diacritical soft and hard signs found in the original. The only exceptions are names that have acquired common forms in English for example, I use the spelling Gorbachev rather than the phonetically correct Gorbachov.

REFERENCES

See Elite 197, Russian Security and Paramilitary Forces since 1991

See Essential Histories 69, The Russian Civil War, 191822

See Men-at-Arms 497, Armies of the Russo-Polish War 191921

See Warrior 171, Soviet Partisan 194144

See Elite 148, The Hungarian Revolution 1956

See Essential Histories 78, Russias Wars in Chechnya 19942009

GLOSSARY

Glossary of acronyms used in this text:

CONTENTS

Special Purpose Units and diversionary troops Spain and Finland

GRU Independent Spetsnaz Recon Companies 1950: the first Naval Spetsnaz brigades 1957: the first GRU Spetsnaz battalions Spetsnaz units, 1982

Uncertainties and reductions

SPETSNAZ : RUSSIAS SPECIAL FORCES

INTRODUCTION

The Spetsnaz, Russias 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 Britains 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 todays Russian Federation forces. They have been the tip of the spear in Moscows 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 lan. 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 enemys 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.