Who serves and what protects our army?
The paradox is that the higher the rank of the respondents, the more difficult it is for them to give an honest, impartial answer.
No awareness of a united Russia
In order to faithfully fulfill military duty to the Motherland, oath, regulations, as well as banners and colorful posters hung in every military unit, in each room for information and leisure, are aimed. And when commanders on behalf of the state encourage subordinates, they briefly say: “I serve the Russian Federation!”.
Meanwhile, in private conversations, many officers often say that they do not understand which Russia they are talking about. Obviously: in their minds there was a splitting of a single image of the Fatherland. 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 grounds.
In my opinion, from the point of view of psychological self-perceptions for a soldier, it is important which team he is in. Who are his colleagues and commanders of worldview and nationality? Do they have a single notion of the generality of the Fatherland, do the goals and objectives of ministry coincide? Interethnic conflicts arise because very often because of this. Well, they do not want to obey not "their" commanders and fulfill the requirements of common for all (except them) general military regulations, for example, some natives of the North Caucasian republics. Why? Because we are sure that they have a full moral right to this: they were brought up in this way, and this is why their worldview is different from others with all the ensuing consequences.
However, there is no awareness of a united Russia among many soldiers and sergeants, sailors and petty officers, officers representing state-forming people. The real split of society according to property, which often gives itself to know social injustice does not contribute to the consolidation of the Russian nation. There are similar moods in the military environment. It is unlikely that among the military there will be those who do not have an internal protest, when Russia, whom they swore, which they are called upon to defend with weapons in hands, associated with homegrown oligarchs. Or, on the contrary, with homeless people, beggars, alcoholics, descend, people who have reached the bottom of life, who are found on the streets of megalopolises. But it is precisely this that anti-state elements, including members of extremist gangs, are increasingly pressing.
Even the officers do not fully 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 this is not the same thing.
Deprived of the former homeland
Most precisely, the author of the 1861 manifesto on the abolition of serfdom, Metropolitan of Moscow Filaret (Drozdov), expressed the idea of serving the Motherland most of the soldiers of that time, taking into account the Orthodox attitude of the majority of soldiers of that time. In the military catechism he wrote, an explanatory guide for believers, he derived a brilliant formula: "Love your enemies, abhor the enemies of God, crush the enemies of the Fatherland."
The German officer Geino von Bazedov, who spent about ten years in our country, noted in his Traveling Impressions of Military Russia, published a hundred years ago, that the Russian army had a high religious feeling, strong monarchical and even patriarchal traditions. For the same reason, cases of voluntary surrender and treason to the Motherland were extremely rare in the tsarist troops. At least until the “fighters for freedom and popular happiness” —the revolutionaries of all stripes — took the matter. As a result, the Bolsheviks of God, who came violently to power, abolished, the emperor and his family were shot, and the Fatherland plunged into a fratricidal war.
Further known. I will not rub salt on the wound, give the statistics of repression in the Red Army and the Red Army, the number of Soviet citizens who voluntarily went over to the side of the Wehrmacht. These figures are now widely published in various sources. I will add only that the state at that time rendered unabated attention to the Armed Forces, and all the existing problems were blamed on enemies and objective circumstances (hostile environment, war, crop failure, etc.). I consciously 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 was in an extremely difficult situation. Retell here the newest history I think there’s no point in our country. I note only as a very unfavorable fact the absence of any state ideology. 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 get a clear answer: how and for what they continue to live and serve? I had to understand on the go.
In fact, the country returned to the principles of the liberal February revolution without the tsar and the Soviets, when Russia for a short period acquired the status of "the freest state of the world." Good is, however, as then in 1917-m, and in 90-th is not over. And it was necessary to somehow explain to the people the causes of the difficulties and problems that arose. After all, now you cannot blame everything on Nicholas the Bloody or the Nazi occupiers. Attempts to make the scapegoats, the culprits of all misfortunes, first red-brown (in 1993), and then Chechens, led by former Soviet General Dudayev (in 1994), ended in failure. Boomerang returned to Moscow, to the Kremlin. The true culprits of the collapse in the country, the people are increasingly naming the authorities, and therefore the state. The head from such thoughts went round. And not just a simple man in the street.
"... Someone smeared with blood to the ground"
The discontent of people in uniform, in my opinion, was most vividly manifested in the first Chechen campaign, provoked by anti-state, anti-Russian / anti-Russian forces. I will share personal observations.
Some commanders defiantly hung out the flags of the USSR on their combat vehicles as a symbol of a single, just socialist state at the peak of democratic Yeltsin's bourgeois Russia. The rating of the Supreme Commander was then very low in the army. This was facilitated, alas, by himself. I remember how during the radio exchange courtesies and "conversations for life" with the militants at the talks, the Chechens called Yeltsin an alcoholic, and the sovereign double-headed eagle - a symbol of the mutation of the Russian people. One of them gave me a Cockade with an Ichkerian wolf, explaining that they were doing it at one of the plants in idle in the absence of orders in Central Russia. (Then this fact simply 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 nameless authors claimed that the soldiers were ready to die, but not for the money of Menatep Bank, but for the great name Russia-Russia. Voproshali: "Lord, how is that? You share the fate of people. Someone walks dressed in a coat, someone smeared with blood to the ground. "
Among the servicemen of the federal forces in Chechnya, not excluding officers, there were frank conversations that in the rebellious republic, mostly children of workers and peasants are fighting with separatists. A common for all idea was expressed then in his frank manner inherent to him, Lieutenant-General A. I. Lebed: "Let me give the command a battalion made up of children of State Duma deputies and members of the government, and I will stop the war within 24 hours." Such a unit, as you know, was not created in our army, so the confrontation between Alexander Ivanovich and the appointment of Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation was halted somewhat differently, having concluded the Hasavurtovsky Treaty with the former Colonel of the Soviet Army.
The course of the military campaign of that campaign is already well studied and described in memoirs. Revealed many facts of betrayal of the interests of Russia, its people and the Armed Forces at the highest level. Currently, someone from that oligarchic government moved to another world, someone had to hurry to go to London, but none of them, including those who still live and are 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 even smooth out dissatisfaction in military teams. The legal opportunity to qualify and dissolve the concepts of Russia, the Motherland and the state, to delineate the boundaries of responsibility, the authorities and the people, for example, in classes on public-state training was, as a rule, unused. There was no one to talk with people about this delicate subject.
In the end, it turned out that the insult to the state, that is, the authorities and the government, for many years frankly did not complain about their army, was transformed in the minds of some officers into an insult to Russia itself: forgotten about them, useless, uncivilized, wild, drunk, and so on. d.
This dissatisfaction with their state, Fatherland, fragmentation, erosion of a single image of the mother-motherland undermines the moral basis of service, the most pitiable effect on the combat readiness of the army. Military scientists who studied this issue are Colonels Associate Professor V. Batalov and Candidate of Sociological Sciences A. Kravets warn: “The processes of separation and polarization occurring in civil society penetrate into the military environment, and there is every reason to believe that the meaningful basis of the officer cadre is lost - to be morally, mentally and physically prepared to fulfill the highest duty - the duty to sacrifice yourself in defense of the Fatherland. ” And then they state: “The dissatisfaction of a given social group is transformed into various forms of social behavior that are inconsistent with the interests of both power structures and society as a whole.”
At the core is justice
Obviously, when servicemen find it difficult to answer the question for what they serve, there is a lack of a coherent state ideology that should unite all national and social groups and segments of the population of a single country. It is important that this happens on the basis of traditional national-historical and common spiritual and moral values, which are based on justice. Any people, and Russian in particular, to a fair world order. For example, the Russian historian P. Multatulli and the doctor of philosophy A. Fedoseyev write, for example, in the article “Where are you rushing for Russia-three?”: “For the successful development of a state, the moral principles of a nation must be moral principles of power and, on the contrary, people should perceive the existing ideology power as your own. If this is not the case, then a catastrophe occurs in the country. ”
Is it possible in Russia a state system based on such principles? The Soviet authorities tried to create a socially just society in the USSR, which I must admit, especially in the post-war period, it succeeded a lot. However, it collapsed overnight, not having stood 80 years. There are many reasons for this, but perhaps the list of the main ones is the utopianism of the communist ideology that was imposed by self-proclaimed "benefactors" on the people who paid millions of victims for the experiment on one sixth of the land.
But we also had a different model for building a just society. Almost 400 years ago, the Zemsky Sobor, represented by the best representatives of the Russian people after the 10-year-old troubles, chose an autocratic king. The restoration of the monarchy, in contrast to the February Republican and Bolshevik October revolutions, was a manifestation of the will of the whole people. The Russian people themselves chose that power, that ideology, which they considered most capable of expressing their interests. This is a stubborn, irrefutable historical fact.
Justice based on the law, and a law based on justice, can remove many questions that have accumulated in our society and the army. To do this, it is not necessary to make new revolutions or convene the next Zemsky Sobor to summon the king to the throne. Simply, the government must finally hear the voice of the people. Then the defenders of the Fatherland will have the opportunity with a clear conscience to answer the question: “To whom do you serve, what are you protecting?”. Of course, we serve Russia and its people, the state and native land, poured with sweat and blood of the ancestors. Of course, we will protect all this until the last breath.
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