Paul
Goble
Staunton, August 28 – Yesterday,
Deputy Defense Minister Andrey Kaptapolov said that Moscow has completely rooted
out “dedovshchina” in the Russian military, the practice in which officers,
more senior soldiers, or members of ethnic groups repress and exploit others by
means of illegal force.
But soldiers in the military and
expert observers say that this plague has not so much ended as changed its
form. Because soldiers serve only a year in the ranks, there is less time for
the division of soldiers into junior and senior than there was, and commanders
do what they can to ensure that non-Russians do not form large groups in any
unit.
However, that has not ended the use
of illegal measures by some soldiers and officers to exploit others. Instead,
as Mikhail Karpov of the Lenta news agency sums up, it simply means that these
practices are adopted more by individuals than by groups but can be as awful as
those in the past (lenta.ru/articles/2020/08/27/dedovshina/).
In
his article, the journalist traces the history of “dedovshchina” in the Soviet
and Russian militaries from 1919 to the present, a history that has
occasionally led to tragedies, frequently been ignored or denied, and over
which officials like now have declared victory without in fact achieving that.
As Viktor Sokirko, another Moscow
commentator puts it, the nature of military life means that “an army without ‘dedovshchina’
isn’t an army” because relations among those in uniform are “always arranged by
special principles” sometimes based on rank, sometimes on service, and sometimes
on background (svpressa.ru/war21/article/274403/).
Commanders and politicians will
always be claiming victory over it, but periodic examples of brutal treatment by
individual soldiers or groups of soldiers over others will periodically
surface. The government and the high command will recommit themselves to
combating it. But in the end, they are likely to fail just as they have failed
up to now.
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