One of the most effective military forces in human history was the Soviet Army 1943-45 . After being instrumental in the defeat of Nazism the Soviets moved hundreds of thousands of troops to its Eastern border with China and wiped out a Japanese force numbering a million men in the space of days . By the 1960s due to a manpower shortage the Soviets started conscripting those with criminal records in to the military . As the years passed standards got lower and Dedovshchina " The rule of the grandfathers " became part of the Soviet military culture . This in practice meant that a newly conscripted in the first 6 month phase of his military service was basically a slave to those who had done their initial six months . After that six months the recruit would still be a slave to those who had done twelve to eighteen months but those newly recruited soldiers conscripted in to the army now became that soldiers slaves
One of my all time favourite documentaries is a Russian one called SOLDAT that goes in to detail about Dedovshchina . It's a gut wrenching , shocking expose of what life was like in the post communist Russian army where this brutal hierarchy has got worse for a new generation of Russian conscript . There's also a very good by Arkady Babchenko called One Soldier's War where he goes in to detail about Dedovsschina and his experiences fighting again the Chechens . Again it's something that makes nice bed time reading but makes you thankful you weren't born a Russian
And it was for the reason of finding out what life must be like in the Russian army that I tracked down Roman Kachanov's film DEMOBBED hoping to find out something about modern day Russian culture . It's something of a bitter disappointment as a trio of young Russians find themselves in a series of episodic escapades most of which involve a character being drunk . There's no plot as such and by the second half of the film I found myself with little interest in what was happening on screen . I don't know if there's a cultural barrier but a series of absurdest blackly comical scenes left me none the wiser about contemporary Russian life in the military
One of my all time favourite documentaries is a Russian one called SOLDAT that goes in to detail about Dedovshchina . It's a gut wrenching , shocking expose of what life was like in the post communist Russian army where this brutal hierarchy has got worse for a new generation of Russian conscript . There's also a very good by Arkady Babchenko called One Soldier's War where he goes in to detail about Dedovsschina and his experiences fighting again the Chechens . Again it's something that makes nice bed time reading but makes you thankful you weren't born a Russian
And it was for the reason of finding out what life must be like in the Russian army that I tracked down Roman Kachanov's film DEMOBBED hoping to find out something about modern day Russian culture . It's something of a bitter disappointment as a trio of young Russians find themselves in a series of episodic escapades most of which involve a character being drunk . There's no plot as such and by the second half of the film I found myself with little interest in what was happening on screen . I don't know if there's a cultural barrier but a series of absurdest blackly comical scenes left me none the wiser about contemporary Russian life in the military