Last week, recruits from the North Caucasus rebelled in the barracks of the Bolshoye Savino airbase in the Urals. As the commander of the unit, Colonel Dmitry Kuznetsov, told reporters, 120 armed soldiers terrorized fellow Slavs, taking money, food, valuables from them and forcing them to do all the work in the barracks. “Caucasians” represent one fourth of the garrison in “Bolshoe Savino”.
Since the officers were not able to cope with the rioters who were establishing their own order, they turned to the local mufti for help to calm down their fellow believers.
Conflicts like this happen often. A year ago, seven conscripts from Dagestan serving in the Baltic Fleet severely beat 15 Russians, forcing them to lie on the ground with the inscription: KAVKAZ. The incident became known when photographs of the staging appeared on the Internet. Dagestanis were convicted for this.
Draftees from Slavic families are afraid to serve together with the inhabitants of the Caucasus. Highlanders are physically stronger, unite in groups in barracks and they are very cruel.
At the same time, the number of indigenous Russians in the army is decreasing. If they can afford a bribe or have the right contacts, they avoid being drafted. Young people from the Caucasus, on the contrary, happily join the army, and as experts predict, soon half of the conscripts in the Russian army will be representatives of the peoples of the Caucasus, and this means that the brutal hazing directed against ethnic Russians will rise even higher.
According to Nezavisimaya Gazeta, citing sources in the General Staff, the commanders propose to form military units from conscripts originating from only one region and professing one religion. Officers of the same nationality and religion should also be commanded.
This would mean a return to the traditions of the so-called "Wild Division" formed in August 1914 exclusively from volunteers from the North Caucasus, which fought with the army of Austria-Hungary with extraordinary courage.
Viktor Litovkin, editor-in-chief of the weekly Nezavisimoye Voennoye Obozreniye, a supplement to Nezavisimaya Gazeta, and one of the most respected Russian military experts, argues that the initiative to rebuild the Wild Division must be taken seriously. “You can no longer look helplessly at what is happening in the barracks,” he tells Gazeta.
In his opinion, there is no risk that military units consisting of conscripts from one region will turn out to be disloyal to the leadership and become the military force of their people. After all, it is possible, for example, to locate a brigade of Dagestanis far from home, say, in Siberia. But there is a problem with the officers. - Since the war in Chechnya, the Russian military no longer trust officers from the Caucasus and the army got rid of them. It would be necessary to train new people, - says Litovkin.
Another expert, Professor Aleksey Malashenko, considers the idea of creating one-ethnic units to be crazy. “Will we have brigades under the prophet's green banner, well trained and equipped for our money? Such ideas can only testify to one thing - the state no longer has power over anything, and even in the barracks it cannot provide elementary security for the soldiers. Russia should fight against bullying, and not split the armed forces into the armies of Dagestan, Ingushetia, Adygea,”he says.
Valentina Melnikova, secretary of the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers, which protects conscripts from hazing, has a similar view. “These 'wild divisions' could only have been thought up by some idiots from the command, who cannot imagine an army without conscription,” she says. They do not understand that hazing will continue until we have a fully professional army. In military units with conscription, consisting both entirely of Russians and entirely of Caucasians - in the same way, some soldiers will torture others, and officers will pursue privates, since our conscript is a slave. He has no rights, his health and life do not matter. The contract soldier is something else. You cannot drive a professional to work on the construction of a general's villa, and you cannot make a slave out of him. And many of our commanders really don't like it,”Melnikova adds.
