I have a colleague who has recent first-person experience of life in Russia and has, or had, Russian and Ukrainian friends and colleagues. I asked them for their thoughts on the recent Daily Kos story "More about Why the Russian Army Sucks Kleptocracy Abuse Murder" (https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2022/3/23/2087585/-More-about-Why-the-Russian-Army-Sucks-Kleptocracy-Abuse-Murder).
They replied with the following, which they agreed I could reproduce here. (Their English is much better than my German, but they had to rush their reply as they were working at the time, so I've edited away some typos and tidied up a few sentences. I've also made a few additions of my own [in square brackets]).
The army's first problem is rampant depredation by the "Thieves-in-law" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thief_in_law] which is a popular ideology among the marginal class of Russian society. And that class, made up of the poor and the desperate, is enormous: 30 million people even before the current war.
Russians from 1990 onward are well aware of the TILs “values” and the damage that they cause across society, and especially to the military, where the pickings are easy. The Thieves-in-Law steal from the military on the ground, while the Oligarchs steal from it in the boardroom. The result is an impoverished and broken military machine that is little more than a shell.
The army's second problem is that it is riven by significant ethnic divisions. Soldiers from national republics such as Chechnya, Dagestan, Tatarstan, are mostly Muslim, but there are nationalists as well. These groups often dominate over Russian soldiers on army bases because they are unified by a strong sense of national identity. These ethnic groups are organized hierarchically in many army bases, based on relative strength and cohesion. (ie Chechen rookies may unite to dominate over other nationalities in their barracks). The result is an army that lacks cohesion, and instead has lots of competing and conflicting unofficial allegiances and chains of command.
The third problem lies with the so-called officers. I knew people who were “called up” to serve in the military, and I can confirm that many officers see those under them as their source of resources, sometimes even as slaves, with cases of heavy beatings, expropriation of money, and even forcing soldiers into gay prostitution. I can also confirm that sadism and abuse of conscripts by other, longer-serving, soldiers is so widespread that it goes by its own name, Dedovshchina. [https://www.hrw.org/report/2004/10/19/wrongs-passage/inhuman-and-degrading-treatment-new-recruits-russian-armed-forces] The result of all this is an almost incomprehensible amount of chronic grinding human misery, and with it the destruction of army morale.
I can also confirm the occurrence of suicides: both actual suicides due to unbearable conditions, and murders framed as suicides. These happen almost every month and in nearly every region. There were “suicides” in the region in which I lived, where soldiers were found with their hands tied and plastic bags over their heads. This problem is not limited to the army, it can be found in the police, the prison system, and elsewhere. There are so many cases, you can even find them described online.
In recent years the prison system has included a 'special' jail, controlled by the FSB [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Security_Service], where they rape prisoners and film it. They have produced humiliating and degrading material on thousands of victims. (Almost everyone who sheds light on these cases has been pursued by the government and special agencies.) This is one of the reasons why people are afraid to go to meetings or protests; they risk not only losing everything - money, property, employment, career, and even their basic human dignity - but also risk a lifetime burdened by humiliation, nightmares, and PTSD. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_2Vy9B8hic)
As for the effectiveness of the army on the ground: The army does have well-trained, battle-hardened veterans with experience gained in the local conflicts over the last decade or so. Those have been kept in reserve, however, and rookies sent in instead. Some of those troops were sent to Ukraine without proper military training. The mortality rate in such platoons appears to be as high as 96%. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p-0t34iKzM for an analysis of this. (This has English subtitles that can be enabled. Some of the other YouTube links here do, too.)
The experienced troops could be deployed in future, but even their effectiveness is likely to be crippled by the flawed chain of command, the lack of cohesion, the abysmal morale and the lousy equipment - all resulting from the causes described above.
After saying all that, I should also say that while the Russian army may be a miserable thing - it is still a dangerous thing, and one with a lot of anger boiling inside it. It may have no realistic prospect against NATO, but that doesn't really matter as long as Russia has nukes. It is, however, a blunt instrument that is capable of inflicting great indiscriminate harm, especially on civilian targets, as we have seen in the artillery attacks upon Ukrainian cities.
The Russian people struggled desperately through the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s to stop the rise of the current awful kleptocratic regime. Their opposition and protests were always harshly suppressed, but from 2019 onward that suppression was redoubled and made especially cruel. These "special" methods have been applied to activists across the spectrum, even to some ultra-right street leaders (a group much hated by most other activists), and activists have been murdered in jail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfAgiKTVDZo&t=241s.
The effect of that suppression has been like a harsh course of political antibiotics - the political landscape is now sterile. There is no left, no right, no political life, nobody - just misery, repression, hate and fear. Alexei Navalny, for example, has been sentenced to nine years in a jail known for its harsh regime - that is effectively a death sentence, and everyone knows it. And everyone also knows that anyone receiving the new fifteen-year sentence for saying anything even remotely negative about the current debacle will likely be facing the same fate. It's hard for we in the west to comprehend how brave the Russian protestors and dissidents are. We really have no concept of how bad, how frightening, the situation is.
Links.
- Rape in Russian jails. The original source was a Belarus citizen who served terms in a "special jail" : https://gulagu-net.ru/Torture_in_Russia, overview on the Sun on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnwGPhenA1M
- Example of a man found dead in the Voronezh region with his hands tied and a plastic bag over his head: https://riavrn.ru/districts/bogucharsky/eksperty-rasskazali-mog-li-voronezhskiy-soldat-svyazat-sebe-ruki-i-nadet-paket-na-golovu/ and https://riavrn.ru/districts/bogucharsky/sledovateli-vozbudili-delo-ob-ubiystve-posle-gibeli-srochnika-na-poligone-pod-voronezhem/
- Torture in the Russian Army: 6 years ago - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhXmPc0Pmxo, and more recently - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7eInSX2aFo. Other hazing from Chechnya soldiers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xXsbcBBmeE
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I can only add that I am very glad that my colleague is now back in the west.
