The country is multinational, multi-confessional. There are enough of their own problems in any region, and, as the classic said, the unhappy are unhappy in their own way … While some enthusiastically cry for the indispensable transition to the contract basis of the Russian army with hope, which is most often associated with a personal unwillingness to fulfill their constitutional duty in terms of army service; others are advocating with all their might for an increase in draft quotas for those regions in which they themselves live.
A lot of noise was made by the appeal of 11 parliamentarians from the Republic of Dagestan, among whom was State Duma deputy Gadzhimet Safaraliev, to Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu with a request to increase draft quotas to increase the ability of Dagestani young people to serve in the army. The fact is that today no more than two hundred representatives of Dagestan are drafted into the Russian army for the autumn or spring campaign. In particular, the current autumn draft was designed to recruit 179 Dagestanis into the ranks of the RA (young representatives of various nationalities living in this North Caucasian republic). For some, this number seemed more than sufficient, based on the disciplinary characteristics of Dagestan youth, others think that 179 people is a completely unacceptable figure, which does not even make up 1% of all Dagestanis aged 18 to 27 who want to serve.
Dagestani deputies proposed to the Minister of Defense during the spring draft next year to increase the quotas for Dagestan to 4 thousand people. And, according to some sources, Sergei Shoigu is ready to meet the Dagestani deputies and, accordingly, the Dagestani youth who wish to serve in the Russian army.
This kind of message evokes quite conflicting emotions. Why? Yes, because the very multiple reduction in the quota for the conscription of Dagestanis into the ranks of the Russian army was due to the extremely low level of discipline of representatives of various nationalities called up from Dagestan and other republics of the North Caucasus. For some time, as often happens, they tried not to take the conflict dirty linen out of public, but over time the problem only grew in new and new volumes, and broke out by itself. For many years, they talked about how far the Dagestani servicemen serving on conscription are sometimes from the norms of statutory relations. Moreover, sometimes it came to very hard-hitting cases, when even the smallest group of soldiers drafted from the same Dagestan to the military unit of central Russia (the Urals, Siberia, the Far East or any other region) could build a system of relations in part in such a way that all the rest servicemen fell into a certain kind of dependence on the "Dagestan rules of the game." At the same time, dependence could concern not only conscripts representing other nationalities, but also officers of a military unit. At best, they tried to turn a blind eye to the problem, and at worst, a certain fear arose before the will of the Dagestanis, before their solidarity and an indispensable desire to defend their positions.
In the end, the Ministry of Defense had to sign its helplessness about establishing statutory contact with Dagestani conscripts.and a very controversial decision was made to reduce quotas for Dagestan from 10-20 thousand recruits a year to a couple of hundred (ten times less than the quotas that existed before 2010).
Someone saw in this a real panacea: they say, there are no Dagestanis - no problems. But in fact, the problem was simply transferred to another channel, which, whether the Ministry of Defense wanted it or not, gave food for thought on the topic of the unity of the legal field of the Russian Federation. Indeed, the law stipulates in black and white the constitutional obligation to undergo military service by conscription for all males between the ages of 18 and 27 who have no medical contraindications or have not expressed a desire to undergo alternative civilian service. The law does not say anything about the fact that the military department can conduct a kind of "competitive" selection based on ethnicity. The limitation of quotas here does not fit not only with the law, but also with the very state of affairs in the Russian army. Indeed, today problems with the implementation of draft standards are observed in many regions of Russia, and where young people openly express their desire to go to the conscript service, restrictions or a complete ban are suddenly imposed.
Opponents of the conscription of Caucasians into the Russian army may declare: why call into the army those who undermine discipline in it, often not only not remembering the fighting brotherhood, but also frankly promoting their chosenness. The words are reasonable to some extent, but there is another opinion on this score.
Says the retired lieutenant colonel of the Interior Ministry M. Fedorov:
The problem with conscripts from the Caucasus also existed in Soviet times, and not only in the Ministry of Defense, but also in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. In the late 1980s, I had to serve as a platoon commander in one of the units in the Far East. The total number of fighters in my subordination was in the first year of my "command" 24 people, of whom two were Avars, the rest were Russians and Ukrainians. So, I tell you, it was with these two Dagestanis that I had to take a sip at first.
It began with the fact that one of them stubbornly refused to participate in cleaning the barracks and to take a rag to wash the floor in his hands. Initially, I tried to put pressure on him with the provisions of the charter, but this did not bear fruit. I had to work first together with the political officer of the company, then - the battalion. A reaction close to zero - "I won't mess around in the mud, I'm not a pig" - and that's it … Seeing this, the second one began to pump the right. I'll be honest: after such disobedience on the part of two, sorry, suckers, everything boiled in me. Now I understand that maybe I was wrong, maybe I got excited, but then I decided to just show who is the boss in the platoon. In general, he summoned two to his place and, I will try to put it decently, smashed the faces of both with the words, clearly explaining that everyone should clean up their own shit by themselves, and that there are no nannies here, but pigs just don't clean anything. In general, some kind of applied psychology came out … My other fighters heard everything perfectly. After that, the squad leader approached the Avars, handed them rags, they took them … They washed the floor, looked from under their brows, but there was no more talk "pig - not pig". To be honest: at first at night I slept badly in my cubicle of the barracks - I was afraid to feel the knife in my back … But then we even got closer somehow, got used to it.
When I took the post of battalion commander (this was after the collapse of the USSR), I had to deal with the Dagestanis more than once, and from the experience of each new draft I was convinced that most of them are strong-willed, uncompromising, wayward guys, and the language of power is well understood and mastered. But you also need to be able to talk to them. But cohesion, so we ourselves should learn from them … They will never give their own in offense …
It turns out that here too it is necessary to show the so-called individual approach. To say that it is necessary to completely abandon the conscription of Chechens and Dagestanis, allegedly because they all can turn into future fighters of gang formations, is just an excuse for the fact that local commanders often do not want to solve the problem of discipline themselves. Naturally, all officers want to see in front of them extremely positive, educated, trained and certainly executive disciplined fighters. But so where can we get such … Army, because it is also an educational system. And tolerance, it must be admitted, is clearly not a winning option here. Breeding communities, national groups in a separate military unit is the main way to reduce efficiency, to non-regulation and other negative aspects.
One can argue for a long time that the Caucasians should not be called upon at all, since they are trying to live by their own laws. But this is almost the same as if the Ministry of Education and Science proposed not to take to school those whose older brothers behaved badly in Marivanna's lessons. But then another question arises: if the teacher does not have the ability to calm the naughty ones, then maybe the point is not in the naughty ones, but in Marivanna herself … After all, “paper pedagogy” is one thing, but real practice is quite another. In the army, such problems are manifested no less acutely, and therefore to blame everything solely on someone's indiscipline and the impossibility of correcting such behavior is an obvious complacency and an attempt to disguise one's own unprofessionalism.
If many admit that the whole thing is in the Caucasian mentality, then it means that officers should be properly trained to work with the same Dagestanis. In the end, it would be possible to develop a conscription system in which the Dagestani guys could well maintain security at the proper level in their own republic. After all, if everyone here is eager to end up in law enforcement agencies or units of the Ministry of Emergency Situations after military service (as the Dagestani deputies who turned to Shoigu say), then why not give the recruits such an opportunity initially. After all, Dagestan itself is far from the safest constituent entity of the Russian Federation, and additional units of local conscripts will obviously not interfere with the republic. As the saying goes, both security will increase and the desire to "go to the forest" will decrease.
In general, the decision to increase the quotas for Dagestan in terms of conscripts ultimately remains with the Ministry of Defense, but only in this case, the main military department, in the event of problems, should not follow the path "Caucasians are to blame for everything." The system of training officers today should be built, including on the basis of the use of tools in work with different groups of the population. After all, we do not have another (better) army by definition, but it is quite possible to make it such (more effective and efficient) without national differentiation.
