The paradox is that the higher the rank of the interviewed servicemen, the more difficult it is for them to give an honest, impartial answer.
There is no awareness of a united Russia
The oath, regulations, as well as banners and colorful posters hung in any military unit, in every information and leisure room, are aimed at faithfully fulfilling their military duty to the Motherland. And when the commanders on behalf of the state encourage their subordinates, they briefly say: "I serve the Russian Federation!"
Meanwhile, in private conversations, many officers often say that they do not understand what kind of Russia they are talking about. Obviously, a splitting of the single image of the Fatherland took place in their minds. After all, today the country is divided not only by federal districts and subjects of the Russian Federation, but also more and more clearly by national and social characteristics.
In my opinion, from the point of view of psychological self-perceptions for a soldier, it is important in which team he is. Who are his colleagues and commanders in terms of worldview and nationality? Do they have a single concept of the community of the Fatherland, do the goals and objectives of the ministry coincide? Interethnic conflicts arise very often because of this. Well, some natives of the North Caucasian republics, for example, do not want to obey not "their" commanders and fulfill the requirements of common military regulations for all (except for them). Why? Because they are sure that they have the full moral right to do so: they were brought up in this way and that is why their worldview of the Motherland, with all the ensuing consequences, is different from others.
However, many soldiers and sergeants, sailors and foremen, officers - representatives of the state-forming people, do not have an awareness of a united Russia. The real split of society on the basis of property, often making itself felt social injustice, does not contribute to the consolidation of the Russian nation in any way. Similar sentiments are manifested in the army environment. It is unlikely that there will be those among the servicemen who do not have an internal protest when Russia, to which they have sworn allegiance, which they are called upon to defend with arms in their hands, is associated with home-grown oligarchs. Or, on the contrary, with homeless people, beggars, alcoholics, degraded people who have reached the bottom of life, who are found on the streets of megalopolises. But this is precisely what anti-state elements, including members of extremist bandit formations, are increasingly pushing against.
Even the officers do not quite understand: what are they, in fact, called upon to protect? People, power, democracy, or just a piece of land, a territory called the Russian Federation, with a tricolor developing over it? After all, it is obvious that these are not the same thing at all.
Deprived of their former Fatherland
Most accurately, the idea of serving the Motherland, taking into account the Orthodox attitude of the majority of the soldiers of that time, was perhaps expressed by the author of the 1861 manifesto on the abolition of serfdom, Metropolitan Filaret (Drozdov) of Moscow. In the military catechism he wrote - an explanatory guide for believers, he deduced a brilliant formula: "Love your enemies, disdain God's enemies, crush the enemies of the Fatherland."
The German officer Heino von Basedow, who spent about ten years in our country, noted in his "Traveling impressions of military Russia", published in our country exactly one hundred years ago, that the Russian army is distinguished by a high religious feeling, strong monarchical and even patriarchal traditions. For the same reason, cases of voluntary surrender and betrayal of the Motherland were extremely rare in the tsarist troops. At least until the "fighters for freedom and people's happiness" - revolutionaries of all stripes - got down to business. As a result, the Bolsheviks who came to power by force abolished God, the emperor and his family were shot, and the Fatherland was plunged into a fratricidal war.
The rest is known. I will not sprinkle salt on the wound, cite statistics on the repressions in the Red Army and the RKKF, the number of Soviet citizens who voluntarily went over to the side of the Wehrmacht. These numbers are now widely published in a variety of sources. I will only add that the state at that time showed unremitting attention to the Armed Forces, and all existing problems were attributed to enemies and objective circumstances (hostile encirclement, war, crop failure, etc.). I deliberately simplify somewhat the model of the formation of the Soviet ideological system, trying to show only its essence.
After the collapse of the USSR and the abolition of the CPSU, the Russian army found itself in an extremely difficult situation. I think there is no point in retelling the latest history of our country here. I will only note the absence of any state ideology as an extremely unfavorable fact. Instead, a liberal, very vague idea of universal freedom was proposed, which eventually degenerated into vulgar consumerism. Having lost the former socialist Fatherland, and with it the usual party dictatorship and a number of benefits, many Soviet officers never became conscious citizens of the new, finally declared "free" Russia. People in uniform did not receive a clear answer: how and why should they continue to live and serve? I had to figure it out on the go.
In fact, the country returned to the principles of the liberal February revolution without a tsar and Soviets, when Russia for a short period acquired the status of "the freest state in the world." It’s true, it didn’t end well in 1917, nor in the 90s. And it was necessary to somehow explain to the people the reasons for the difficulties and problems that had arisen. After all, now you cannot blame everything on Nicholas the Bloody or the German fascist invaders. Attempts to make the scapegoats, the culprits of all troubles, first the red-brown (in 1993), and then the Chechens, led by the former Soviet general Dudayev (in 1994), ended in failure. Boomerang returned to Moscow, to the Kremlin. The people more and more often called the authorities, and therefore the state, the true culprits of the collapse in the country. My head was spinning from such thoughts. And not only among the common man in the street.
… Someone is smeared with blood and earth
The discontent of people in uniform, in my opinion, was most clearly manifested in the first Chechen campaign provoked by anti-state, anti-Russian / anti-Russian forces. I will share my personal observations.
Some commanders demonstratively hung the flags of the USSR on their combat vehicles as a symbol of a single, just socialist state in opposition to the democratic Yeltsin bourgeois Russia. The rating of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief was then very low in the army. Alas, he himself contributed to this. I remember how during the radio exchange of courtesies and "conversations for life" with the militants at the negotiations, the Chechens called Yeltsin an alcoholic, and the sovereign two-headed eagle - a symbol of the mutation of the Russian people. One of them presented me with a cockade with an Ichkerian wolf, explaining that they made it at one of the factories in Central Russia that were idle due to lack of orders. (Then this fact just drove me into a stupor.)
The songs that were composed and sung right there in the trenches will also say a lot. In spite of everything, the anonymous authors argued that the soldiers were ready to die, but not for the money of Bank Menatep, but for the fact that Russia-Russia was called great. They asked: “Lord, how is that? You share the fate of people. Someone walks dressed in a tailcoat, someone is smeared with blood and earth."
Among the servicemen of the grouping of federal troops in Chechnya, not excluding officers, there was frank talk that in the rebellious republic it was mainly the children of workers and peasants who were fighting the separatists. A common thought for all was then expressed in his characteristic frank manner by Lieutenant General A. I. Lebed: "Let a battalion, formed from the children of State Duma deputies and members of the government, be given command, and I will stop the war within 24 hours." As you know, no such unit was created in our army, therefore, after being appointed to the post of secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, Alexander Ivanovich had a chance to stop the confrontation in a slightly different way, having concluded the Khasavyurt Treaty with ex-colonel of the Soviet Army Aslan Maskhadov.
The course of hostilities of that campaign has already been well studied and described in the memoir literature. Many facts of betrayal of the interests of Russia, its people and the Armed Forces at the highest level have been revealed. Currently, someone from that oligarchic government moved to another world, someone had to hastily leave for London, but none of them, including those who are currently alive and at large, have still not been charged with treason.
Neither the commanders themselves, nor their deputies for educational work, either then or in the post-war period, could not and did not try to smooth out the discontent in the military collectives. The legitimate opportunity to qualify and separate the concepts of Russia, the Motherland and the state, to outline the boundaries of responsibility, authorities and people, for example, in social and state training classes, turned out to be, as a rule, unused. More often than not, there was no one to talk to people about this delicate topic.
As a result, it turned out that the resentment against the state, that is, the authorities and the government, which for many years openly did not favor their army, was transformed in the minds of some officers into an insult to Russia itself: forgetting about them, useless, uncivilized, wild, drunk, etc. etc.
This dissatisfaction with one's own state, Fatherland, fragmentation, erosion of a single image of the mother-homeland undermines the moral basis of service, in the most deplorable way affects the combat readiness of the army. Military scientists who have studied this issue - Colonels Associate Professor V. Batalov and Candidate of Sociological Sciences A. Kravets warn: “The processes of stratification and polarization occurring in civil society penetrate into the military environment, and there is every reason to believe that the semantic basis of the mission of officers is being lost. - to be morally, mentally and physically prepared to fulfill the highest duty - the duty to sacrifice oneself in the defense of the Fatherland. " And then they state: "The dissatisfaction of this social group is transformed into various forms of social behavior that do not correspond to the interests of both the power structures and society as a whole."
At the heart of justice
Obviously, when servicemen find it difficult to answer the question of what they are serving for, there is a lack of a coherent state ideology that should unite all national and social groups and strata of the population of a single country. It is important that this happens on the basis of traditional national-historical and general spiritual and moral values, which are based on justice. Any people, and Russian in particular, gravitate towards a just world order. Here is what they write, for example, in the article "Where are you rushing Rus Troika?" Russian historian P. Multatulli and Ph. D. A. Fedoseev: “For the successful development of the state, the moral foundations of the nation must be the moral foundations of power, and, conversely, the people must perceive the existing ideology of power as their own. If this is not the case, then a catastrophe occurs in the country”.
Is a state structure possible in Russia on such principles? The Soviet government tried to create a socially just society in the USSR, in which, it must be admitted, it succeeded a lot, especially in the post-war period. However, it collapsed overnight, without standing even 80 years. There are many reasons for this, but, perhaps, the list of the main ones is the utopianism of the communist ideology, which was imposed by self-proclaimed "benefactors" on the people, who paid millions in victims for an experiment on one-sixth of the land.
But we also had a different model of building a just society. Almost 400 years ago, the Zemsky Sobor in the person of the best representatives of the Russian people, after 10 years of turmoil, elected a tsar-autocrat. The restoration of the monarchy, in contrast to the republican February and Bolshevik October coups, was precisely the manifestation of the will of the entire people. The Russian people themselves chose the power, the ideology that they considered most capable of expressing their interests. This is a stubborn, irrefutable historical fact.
Law-based justice and justice-based law can remove many of the issues that have accumulated in our society and the army. For this, it is absolutely not necessary to make new revolutions or to convene the next Zemsky Sobor in order to call the tsar to the throne. It's just that the authorities must finally hear the voice of the people. Then the defenders of the Fatherland will be able to answer the question with a clear conscience: "Whom do you serve, what do you defend?" Of course, we serve Russia and its people, the state and our native land, watered with sweat and the blood of our ancestors. Of course, we will defend all this to the last breath.
