all modern militaries are hierarchical in structure, the Soviet military
was particularly so. Where this surfaced most painfully was in the
phenomenon of dedovshchina, or savage abuse of first-year recruits
by second-year recruits (see Holloway, 1989–90: 14–15; Brown,
1992; Odom, 1998: 286–9), which may have been a contributing
factor in the 800-odd suicides each year amongst servicemen (cited
in Solnick, 1998: 185). Yet paradoxically, this also corrupted the
authority of officers, since many officers were reluctant to confront
the practice lest they be held to account for an unusually large num-
ber of disciplinary offences amongst their subordinates. This was a
deep structural sickness which a conflict such as the Afghan could
only aggravate, and helps explain the abominable behaviour and rou-
tine violation of the laws of armed conflict on the part of the Soviet
occupation force. If the conscripts represented the lowest order of
the Soviet military, the military elite came in two forms. On the one
hand was the High Command, which derived its elite status from
hierarchical location. On the other were the Special Purpose Forces
(Voiska spetsial’nogo naznacheniia) or Spetsnaz, which derived their
status from the nature of their tasks, and their connection with the
Soviet military intelligence service (Glavnoe razvedyvatel’noe
upravlenieor GRU). They were to play a number of significant roles
in Afghanistan (Gromov, 1994: 198–205).
Ethnicity was to prove the source of a different array of ten-
sions. Given the multiethnic character of the Soviet Union itself, it
was inevitable that the Soviet armed forces would also be ethnical-
ly diverse. The ‘high technology’ services were dominated by
Slavs, with non-Slavic groups concentrated in the ground forces,
many of them in construction battalions (Wimbush, 1985: 232–3).
In the ground forces, problems could arise because of language:
non-Russian conscripts might speak Russian only poorly, if at all.
This certainly fuelled anti-minority sentiment from members of the
Slavic majority; Slav soldiers commonly used racist epithets to
describe their Central Asian colleagues, and in Afghanistan, these
tensions became acute (Daugherty, 1995). Furthermore, the rela-
tively high birthrate amongst Central Asian Muslims was argued
by some to confront the Soviet armed forces with two intercon-
40 The Afghanistan Wars