Information leaked to the masses, allegedly from very competent and trustworthy sources, that soon the entire appeal drawn from the regions of the North Caucasus will be assembled closer to each other to create units consisting entirely of people of Caucasian nationality. All this will be carried out in order to avoid the formation in the main detachments of military units of criminal groups organized on the basis of the usual, already considered an inevitable phenomenon in the army, hazing from persons who are cousins to each other, brothers in the seventh generation and similar relatives. True, the top leadership of the armed forces of the Russian Federation categorically rejects such a development of the situation with conscripts. But information from separate sources, coming from servicemen of different ranks and ranks, again makes the public in bewilderment reach for the head to massage the well-known part of the cranium. Some of the military claims that people of Caucasian nationality will be called up for service in the Russian army many times less, some say exactly the opposite that the number of Caucasian guys in the Russian army will be increased.
The endless rumors around the issues related to the recruitment of new military personnel from the Caucasus, tried to dispel the General Staff of the Russian Federation. Vasily Smirnov - Deputy Chief of the General Staff, Colonel General - made an official statement in which he said that young people of Caucasian nationality, as before, will be called up for military service in accordance with the current legislation. According to him, no one spoke about the creation of mono-ethnic formations and did not intend to create such units. Also, the colonel-general noted that soldiers who have families, who are guardians of children or have elderly parents under the care of the house, are serving, and even then not always.
All this "opacity" in the situation with the Caucasian recruits has become even more clouded by the fact that the number of conscripts from this region has really decreased. Therefore, the media immediately linked this fact with numerous recent cases of violation of the charter, which occurred on the basis of interethnic conflicts, which often happened through the fault of military personnel of Caucasian nationality. The fact that there were indeed many such situations was reported more than once by the military departments themselves and the media from the regions.
In order not to be unfounded, I would like to remind you that at the end of March of this year, or rather, on the 25th, at a meeting of the board of the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation, Chief Prosecutor S. Fridinsky announced that in some districts "national gangs" are being formed among the ranks of the Russian military. In addition, it has been noticed that the majority of Caucasian conscripts are formed by certain individuals into clans with their own hierarchy even before they arrive at the place where they should do military service.
The following month, Nikolai Zakharov, a representative of the Chelyabinsk Military District, "clarified" the situation around the Caucasian conscripts by declaring that now young Caucasian recruits who have reached the age of conscripts living throughout the Russian Federation will not be conscripted at all. He tried to confirm his words with the existing order, allegedly issued by the General Staff of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. The Ministry of Defense responded by saying that Zakharov had misinterpreted the orders of his superiors.
True, for the media, Zakharov's statement was enough for the masses to actively get information that the Dagestan commissariat received an order to massively reduce the number of young recruits from this country. Specific figures were also indicated: out of the planned several thousand Dagestani recruits, the military registration and enlistment offices were supposed to call in only four hundred people.
When the Ministry of Defense denied this information and "made happy" the Daghestani guys by the fact that, in principle, no one was going to cancel the mass conscription of recruits in Dagestan, and besides, instead of the planned several thousand conscripts fifteen times more would be recruited, the media exploded with a stream of words. Now the mass media "revealed" the secret plans of the RF Ministry of Defense to create "legions" with an absolute Caucasian composition.
Of course, turning to the historical literature for help, we will find confirmation of the existence of military detachments, specific in their composition, formed from the military, originally originating only from the Caucasian region. This practice was observed in the troops both during the reign of the Tsar-Father and during the Soviet times, and such units also carried out their service, I must say, specifically. The combat capability of such units has always been at a high level, but the discipline in them was not very good. In addition, there are numerous facts that in the times that followed after 17 years, for a long time such units fought both with the "white" detachments and with the "red" only for their own interests.
However, in fairness, it is necessary to mention the mass desertions of detachments formed only from persons of Baltic origin. During the Great Patriotic War, several such cases were recorded when entire military corps went over to the side of the Nazis. For this, apparently, the Baltic peoples suffered from Stalin, when, in revenge for the betrayal and desertion of several military groups, he staged massive repressions to ordinary civilians of these nationalities.
Whoever forgets the most important historical lessons, fate forces them to go through them again, but this time on their own skin. Therefore, having a "bitter" experience with military units formed entirely from persons of the same, "unstable" nationality, one should not step on the same rake again. Moreover, all of a sudden one of the military officials will again misinterpret the order received from above and send such units to serve in one of the geographic points where clashes are guaranteed between the local population and persons in service. The outcome of such a “smart” decision can be bloody, and the possibility of mutinies among personnel in such units has a significant positive coefficient.
Last year, something similar was observed in one of the military units of the Perm Territory. More than a hundred people, Caucasians by nationality, refused to obey their command. The commander of the unit, Dmitry Kuznetsov, decided to seek help from the Spiritual Directorate of Muslims of the Kama region in order to resolve the conflict as painlessly as possible. The case was so unprecedented, but illustrative.
Several cases that occurred in the summer of 2009 and 2010 in the Baltic Fleet also speak of the unacceptable manifestation of community and hazing in the Russian troops.
In each of the situations, it is disheartening that the discovery of such flagrant violations of the charter and of human norms of behavior was completely accidental. Do not leave as a memento one of the "quick-witted" servicemen a photo with the image of the word "KAVKAZ", made of the bodies of beaten colleagues, or do not post one of the same clever guys a video on the Web, in which a major brawl between Caucasians from Dagestan and servicemen of other nationalities was filmed, the leadership of these military units would remain in the dark. It turns out that commanders, political officers and people with similar positions do not fulfill their direct duties - to know what each soldier is breathing and what is the general situation in the unit - and they are not able to control relations in the units.
In conclusion, the thought naturally suggests itself that in order to avoid such situations in the future, it is necessary to form parts so that they consist of persons of different nationalities, without the predominance of any one. In order to know well the situation inside a separate unit, an increase in sergeants is urgently needed, which can significantly help in recognizing such sores as interethnic strife among junior military personnel. To hope that all representatives, in whose veins well, very hot blood flows, can be sent to serve far away, in garrisons specially created for them, where they can easily turn into another movement of terrorists fighting for the rights of the "enslaved", to put it mildly, dangerous.
