The reasons for this situation are difficult to trace. The old prerevolutionary Tsarist army had an active and effective NCO class. It earned the resentment of many common soldiers and so was abolished. The Red Army also abolished many traditional aspects of officer distinctions, such as rank insignia and command prerogatives. But traditional officer practices returned in World War II to make the Red Army more combat effective. It is taking much longer to reconstitute the role of NCOs in the army.
The reasons why few soldiers remain in the Soviet Army as NCOs is simpler to explain: The pay is miserable and the life-style is grim. The pay is enough to buy cigarettes and snacks from the local canteen; it is not enough to support a family. There are no provisions for family housing for NCOs; there are simply no provisions for having a family. Life in the army is often brutal, the food is bad, and leave is infrequent. Until the 1970s, there was a single encouragement to stay in the army — the internal passport. All Soviet citizens must carry an identity card, which lists their hometown or city, and they are not allowed to travel freely about the country without an internal passport. Under the old system, a soldier was returned to his city of origin after army service. As a modest enticement to stay in the army for an additional three-year tour, sergeants received an internal passport, which allowed them to resettle away from their original homes. This may not seem like much, but for a farm boy from the rural regions of the USSR, this internal passport was a ticket to the big city, where industrial wages are far better than wages on a collective farm. An extra three years of drudgery in the army seemed like a reasonable price to many young soldiers. Only about 5 percent of the NCOs were long-term sergeants. This career was especially popular with rural Ukrainians, leading to the popular stereotype of the brutal Ukrainian sergeant major.
Since the war in Afghanistan, the NCO policy has been changing. The Soviet internal passport regulations were liberalized in the late 1970s to take into account the more mobile work force of the modern USSR. This reduced the main incentive for long-term sergeants. Afghanistan is probably the single greatest incentive within the military itself for change. The fighting there, even though on a much smaller scale than the U.S. commitment in Vietnam, revealed serious shortcomings in the command structure. It became clear that Soviet training and squad leadership was unsuitable to real combat conditions. The Soviet officer cannot handle all the assorted tasks that must be carried out on the modern battlefield. Some responsibility has to be given the NCOs.
The need for better-trained NCOs has also been prompted by changes in the technological level of equipment used by the modern Soviet Army. The situation faced by our fictional Sergeant Demchenko is a good example. Sergeants like Demchenko receive a special course, lasting about six months. At the end of it, they are given the rank of sergeant and posted to their unit. The course is more elaborate than that of the average recruit, and focuses on the typical tasks the sergeant will be expected to perform.
In contrast, the platoon officer, a lieutenant, receives about four years of training.
In the past, this system worked, because the lieutenant would always be around to direct his troops. But with new weapons like the BMP-2, this is no longer practical. The BMP-2 is complicated enough that the most senior member of the squad has to stay with it to direct its fire. The assistant squad leader, a man like Demchenko, is expected to lead the dismounted squad into battle. The experience in Afghanistan has shown that junior sergeants just do not have the experience or training for this demanding role.
The problem with draftee sergeants is that they have no military experience before they become sergeants. In NATO armies, sergeants generally rise through the ranks. They are given promotions on the basis of proven leadership abilities or other skills. By the time they reach the rank of sergeant, they have a clear understanding of the basic skills of soldiering. More importantly, they have a clear sense of what will be expected of them as leaders. Most Soviet draftee sergeants have no proven leadership skills beyond those judged by the draft board. Worst of all, they have no experience in the nature of army life. The Soviets have a system of rewarding outstanding enlisted men by giving them a rise in grade, but the majority of the sergeants remain one-term, draftee NCOs.
Furthermore, the Soviet Army is plagued with a tradition of hazing. Soldiers with two years of service bully soldiers with one and a half years, who bully those with only one year, and so on. Senior soldiers have the new recruits do the dirtiest jobs, and may even openly steal from them. This further dilutes the leadership role of sergeants. New sergeants are bullied by soldiers of lower rank who happen to have more service time. These hazing practices have been widely criticized in the Soviet press due to Gorbachev's policy of glasnost, but it will take years to end this tradition.
In a platoon like the one described in the fictional scenario, there is only a single professional soldier, the lieutenant. All of the sergeants are draftees. At the most, they will have almost two years of military service. In contrast, in a NATO platoon, several of the sergeants are likely to be long-term, professional soldiers. Because these sergeants have had experience and have shown proven leadership skills, the officers can entrust them with responsibilities far beyond those to which a Soviet sergeant would be assigned.
For example, in carrying out missions, Soviet combat leaders are much more explicit in their instructions than in NATO. The soldiers, including the NCOs, are expected to follow prescribed battle drill unless instructed otherwise. Soviet training does not encourage initiative on their part. In American and Western European society, there is an attitude that any actions not expressly forbidden are permissible. In Soviet society, due to the effects of Stalinism and police repression, the opposite is the case. What is not expressly permitted is forbidden. American society tends to be anarchic, with individuals taking it upon themselves to decide how they should act. Indeed, after World War II, a captured German officer is reported to have said: "War is chaos.
Americans are good at war since they practice chaos every day." Traditional Russian communalism, combined with the lingering effects of Stalinist repression, leads to more cautious behavior. There is an old Russian expression, 'The nail that sticks out will be hammered down." Soviet soldiers do not stick their necks out. They follow orders but go no further. If they lose their officers or leaders, or if an unusual situation crops up unexpectedly, they tend to lose momentum and wait for further instructions.
These traditions and attitudes lead to rigid command and control practices in the squad. For an NCO to pass his examinations, he has "tickets" to punch. These are tactical field exercises to determine whether the soldier has learned the basic NCO skills. The tests are very predictable, and the NCO cadet knows that many of the responses will be by rote learning. For example, one of the standard elements of the test is entitled "The Squad in the Offensive." There is a prescribed set of commands for the NCO to follow. These include the phrases "Squad, to the vehicle," "To your places," "Prepare for battle," "Start the engine," and "Move forward." This may seem remarkably elementary to most NATO soldiers. But to the Soviet Army, these basic drills are essential. It must be remembered that the cadet sergeant will probably be commanding a polyglot squad, several of whose members do not understand Russian very well. A limited number of key commands becomes familiar to the squad members, and they are expected to respond in a feshion every bit as rigid as the syllabus for cadet NCOs.
This is fine for a peacetime army. Everybody punches their tickets and displays the capability to perform their prescribed tasks. But real combat is chaos, and not reducible to simple training standards. Take, for example, fire discipline. Soviet troops are taught to fire their assault rifles from the hip during assaults. But the assaults in peacetime training cannot include the effects of fear and confusion on the part of the soldiers. As depicted in the scenario, the squads are likely to follow the training "by the book," with the result that by the end of the charge, they are running perilously low on ammunition without having really accomplished much by its expenditure. Soviet training norms assume that certain quantities of ammunition will be expended to eliminate certain types of targets, such as entrenched antitank missile launchers. But many of these norms are ridiculously low. The average Soviet soldier carries a very modest amount of ammunition. The tendency to follow rigid training procedures, combined with the uncertainties of real combat, can lead to disaster. This happened repeatedly in Afghanistan. There are numerous accounts in the Soviet press of squads being cornered by the mujihadeen after running low on, or running out of, ammunition and being forced to heroic extremes to escape.