Thread by @ChrisO_wiki

1/ In my earlier thread on 'officer slavery' in Russia, I highlighted the poor living conditions and mistreatment of many Russian junior officers. Not surprisingly, this drives many of them to quit. But Russia's military bureaucracy often deliberately makes this hard to do.

2/ For the first thread, see below. In this second and final thread, I'll highlight the experiences of officers who've tried to quit, and why those who chose to stay have done so.

https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1565080952203841538

3/ Like ordinary soldiers, Russian officers are employed on a contract basis, but their career path is quite different. They undergo up to 5 years of initial study at a military academy, following which they are appointed to the rank of lieutenant and are posted to a unit.

4/ Russian law allows a contracted serviceman to resign of his own free will, or to be dismissed if he violates the contract, but in either instance he must repay the amount spent by the state on his training. This can amount to hundreds of thousands of rubles.

5/ To quit, they have to follow a multi-stage bureaucratic process. First, they must write an explanation of why they want to leave, which must be endorsed by their own unit's commanding officer.

6/ Then the report passes through their division, the headquarters of their branch of the armed forces, and the main personnel department of the Ministry of Defense. As this suggests, there are many possible points where the request can be denied, delayed or 'lost' in the system.

7/ One officer I highlighted in the first thread, Andrei Ivanov, spent more than 14 months trying to resign from the army. At the 11 month point he published a video on YouTube of his experiences, which has been viewed more than 100,000 times.

8/ Ivanov's video prompted a harsh response from the army:

"A scandal erupted, threats began – they promised me that they would plant cartridges or drugs. I posted a new video in response about their threats."

9/ "I was sent on another 'business trip' for this: we lived in the fields, in plywood houses, in which all the military are constantly sick - they are terribly hot in summer, everyone freezes in winter."

10/ Ivanov's videos attracted interest from an indepedent Russian TV channel, which broadcast an interview with him. He was fired by the army a few days later. "Now I am a free happy person", he wrote on Instagram. He subsequently set up a group to protect soldiers' rights.

11/ In several other cases, officers seeking to quit were reportedly threatened with reprisals against them and their families. The Strategic Rocket Forces seem to have taken a particularly thuggish approach towards multiple would-be leavers.

12/ In one officer's case, "officers called his parents and threatened them with criminal prosecution for their son, threatened to make difficulties for his brother at the Strategic Rocket Forces Academy, ...

13/ ... called his wife's superior with a request to dismiss her, 'so that she could come to the city where I am serving in peace', and transferred him to another division, 'untouched by civilization'."

14/ Another officer wanted to transfer out of the rocket forces and move to another specialisation, but his commanders responded with threats and intimidation. "They even called my parents and said, 'Your son doesn't want to serve, and we'll put him in jail for it.'

15/ "Then they wrote an appeal to the administration of the municipality where I was born, and then the head of the faculty came to me with threats. Now he has my brother studying at the academy.

16/ "While we were talking, the boss came and wrote on a piece of paper: "If you don't stay, I will expel your brother," he showed it to me, then threw the piece of paper away. I told him that my decision would not change.

17/ "In another conversation a phrase slipped out: 'Bribery, blackmail and extortion - any means are good to keep you in the service.'"

Neither the military prosecutor's office nor the army headquarters would help him, despite the obvious illegality of the head's actions.

18/ Even very senior officers reportedly get personally involved in intimidating juniors. When Andrei Kozlov, a 23-year-old lieutenant serving with the 2nd motorized rifle battalion in Simferopol, was refused permission to leave the army, he was threatened by his superiors.

19/ “They tried to start a criminal case against me, they said that I was an evader and that I should be put in jail. I went to the investigator to testify", Kozlov said. He subsequently gave an interview to the same TV channel as Ivanov and, like Ivanov, was quickly fired.

20/ Before he was dismissed, Kozlov was telephoned by Major General Vladimir Zharov, the deputy commander for personnel management of the Southern Military District. "He said that your TV channel is the US State Department, and we are traitors to the motherland."

21/ What's the reason for their difficulties? Senior officers in charge of personnel have attributed it to rivalry between army divisions, "the usual race of commanders-in-chief of various types and branches of the armed forces [over] who has a better and more promising service."

22/ In other words, resignations and transfers make senior officers look bad. This can't be tolerated, so it's forcefully resisted, even at the cost of making junior officers serve against their will (and against the law).

23/ Thousands of junior officers are likely locked into contracts the army won't let them exit. One support group on VK (the Russian equivalent of Facebook) has around 3,000 members, some of whom have photographed themselves holding 'SOS' and 'I am not a slave' signs.

24/ That's not to say that all officers are discontent or want out. For many. especially from non-Russian ethnic groups, lower social strata or impoverished regions (these three things tend to go together), the army offers opportunities to improve their wealth and social status.

25/ For example, take this person, Colonel Azatbek Omurbekov. He's an ethnic Kyrgyz, born in Uzbekistan and educated in a small town in Siberia. Ordinarily, someone of his ethnic background and locality would not expect to have a great deal of upward mobility.

26/ However, Omurbekov's father was a colonel in the Soviet border guards, his grandfather was a Soviet WW2 veteran and he himself has risen to command the 64th Separate Motor Rifle Brigade, which has been blamed for the massacres in Bucha near Kyiv.

27/ If you're sufficiently dishonest, mid-ranking military positions can be very lucrative. For instance, Colonel Sergei Serkin abused his position as head of food procurement for the North Caucasus Military District to take bribes to purchase cattle food to feed to soldiers.

28/ In only two years in his position, Col Serkin acquired several apartments, a house and an Audi car with a total value of about $200,000. Another officer, Col Evgeny Pustovoy, stole more than $13 million by faking contracts for vehicle batteries between 2018 and 2020.

29/ In another instance, an 'officer gang' operating out of Malino military airfield about 88 km south-east of Moscow widely traded aircraft engines, equipment and air-to-air missiles, earning millions of dollars a year before being arrested.

30/ Local logistics officers were very likely involved in the theft of a 72-ton prefabricated Pantsir-2PU command bunker from a military base at Myaglovo, Leningrad Oblast in early 2020, probably for its value as scrap metal. The incident was never resolved.

31/ So what do you need to succeed as an officer in the Russian army? Obviously the will to endure the poor conditions and mistreatment you'll receive as a junior officer, but the most important factor seems to be a willingness to be loyal to your superiors and the regime.

32/ According to Pavel Petrakov, a former lieutenant with the Military Space Forces, "it would seem that only the loyal ones move up the career ladder, and those who sign any documents without looking, covering up the shortcomings of the superiors.

33/ "In general, loyalty has been 'inculcated' since the academy: before the elections they conduct 'work', explaining for whom one must vote - it is clear that it has always been [Vladimir Putin's party] United Russia, and if you disobey, they say, there will be dire problems."

34/ The former paratrooper Pavel Filatyev writes that "for twenty years. the military institutes have been entered through bribery and graft. Many ideological and worthy men who served in the army, have left it, realising that it was useless to fight the system.

35/ "That they would to do anything but real military training. Career advancement is only possible with connections and loyalty to the system. In today's army, in order not to get in trouble, you have to do as you're told, even if you've been told complete nonsense."

36/ "A man has to go to a military institute after school and join the army as a 21-year-old lieutenant, go through 100 circles of hell of bureaucracy, mess and humiliation to to become a company commander, then another round of hell for a deputy battalion commander, and so ...

37/ "... on and on. That's why a huge number of officers drop out of the service and leave. Those who do make it to higher ranks sit and keep their teeth clenched in their posts and don't fight back [because] they endured so much to get it."

38/ "The system doesn't [advance] the most promising, strongest and the smartest, but [rewards] those who can adapt to it, the higher up you go, the more you have to get dirty."

39/ In other words, the Russian officer system seems to not promote the best and brightest, but those most willing to endure bad conditions, show loyalty, cover up for their superiors, and make whatever moral and political compromises are necessary to advance their careers.

40/ Russia's officers are the product of a profoundly corrupt system "which eats itself", as Filatyev puts it. Brutality, inefficiency and corruption among the officer corps are the inevitable result of a system which effectively selects for such values. /end