Russian thoughts on Russian failures

Remember that lightning campaign that was going to lead to the fall of Kyiv and give Russia control of Ukraine in three days? Well, we’re heading towards 300 days with no sign of victory yet. Indeed, the unstoppable Russian Army has been not just stopped – repeatedly – but pushed back again and again.

Extraordinary, isn’t it?

Deserted and captured Russian tanks
Russian 'special military operation' in Ukraine, 2022

It struck me that it would be interesting to find out what the poor benighted soldiers at the bottom of the Russian army think of their experiences. This blog is, of course, entirely dedicated to public service, and it’s in that spirit that I here record some perceptive remarks, by Russian soldiers, on their misfortunes in combat.

Let’s start with one soldier’s comments on how the ranks of the army behaved as they crossed into foreign territory during the offensive phase of an operation:

We did not think of anything, we knew nothing. We let our commanders think for us and did what they told us.

Just what we pictured, right? Individual soldiers had little idea of what they were doing. Or even of where they were. Let alone of why. 

When they were forced back onto the defensive, you won’t be surprised to learn that all sorts of questions about their supposedly powerful army came bubbling to the surface. Here’s another young officer’s remarks:

The 10th and 11th divisions attacked the enemy’s left flank … The enemy put forward 6,000 riflemen – only 6,000 against 30,000 – and we retreated, having lost about 6,000 brave men. And we had to retreat, because half our troops had no artillery owing to the roads being impassable, and – God knows why – there were no rifle battalions. Terrible slaughter! It will weigh heavy on the souls of many people! Lord, forgive them. The news of this action has produced a sensation. I’ve seen old men who wept aloud… Many political truths will emerge and evolve in the present difficult days for Russia. 

Impassable roads. Lack of appropriate weaponry. Soldiers unable to stand up to an enemy attack. Oh, yes. Just what the Western Press has been saying too.

And what about that reference to the political truths that will emerge? Doesn’t that sound like the kind of thing to set hearts trembling in the Kremlin? To shake the throne of tyrants?

That same officer later had the opportunity to meet some wounded enemy soldiers and was struck by the difference between their attitude and that of the Russians. In fact, he paints such a flattering picture of the other side that it’s hard not to think it’s a tad overstated. Still, these are his words, and he was there:

Every soldier is proud of his position and respects himself, for he feels himself to be an effective spring in the army machine. Good weapons and the skill to use them, youth, and general ideas about politics and the arts give them an awareness of their own worth. With us, stupid foot and arms drills, useless weapons, oppression, age, lack of education, and bad food and keep destroy the men’s last spark of pride, and even give them too high an opinion of the enemy.

He didn’t just write acerbic comments in articles or letters home, he also raised his concerns with the authorities back in Moscow:

My conscience and sense of justice forbid me to keep silent in the face of the evil being openly perpetrated before me, causing the deaths of millions and sapping our strength and undermining our country’s honour… We have no army, we have a horde of slaves cowed by discipline, ordered about by thieves and slave traders. This horde is not an army because it possesses neither any real loyalty to faith, tsar and fatherland – words that have been so much misused! – nor valour, nor military dignity. All it possesses are, on the one hand, passive patience and repressed discontent, and on the other, cruelty, servitude and corruption.

“Hold on!” you may be saying now, “what’s that reference to the Tsar?”

Well, of course, he might have been referring to Tsar Vladimir III, which would be a far more appropriate title for the man who likes to impersonate the President of a Republic, Vladimir Putin. But I’ll come clean and admit my subterfuge. I’m not really an intrepid war correspondent who’s been out amongst Russian troops in Ukraine, collecting their views.

No, the tsar in question was Nicholas I. The comments I’ve been quoting don’t come from Putin’s wittily named ‘special military operation’ of 2022, but from the Crimean War of 1853-1856. I found them in a highly useful study, the historian Orlando Figes’s Crimea. 

The first quotation was from Teofil Klemm who served with the Russian army as it invaded, not Ukraine, but the Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, in the area where the Danube reaches the Black Sea, in what is now Romania. 

A Turkish counter-attack forcing back Russian troops
Russian siege of Silistria, 1854

The remaining quotations are from a Second Lieutenant, a rank from which he was never promoted, doubtless because he was so outspoken in his criticisms of the Russian Army. Not that he or we ought to complain about his lack of a military career. He had far greater and more valuable success, as one of the world’s outstanding novelists, penning in particular War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

He was Leo Tolstoy.

What makes these criticisms striking is that they apply so powerfully to the current Russian Army, as well as that army nearly 170 years ago. It is run by incompetent, brutal and dishonest officers, commanding poorly educated men, cowed by pitiless discipline and oppressed into silencing any thought about what they are doing. Together they form an unsurprisingly mediocre fighting force, serving a cause about which they know little and understand less.

That’s not all. Tolstoy talks about the useless armaments. The Russian infantryman of his day was armed with a long-outdated weapon, the musket. His French or British enemy used a rifle instead of a musket, giving him several times the range, accuracy and effectiveness. Thousands of Russians would be mowed down long before they were close enough to have any hope of doing the enemy any harm at all. 

Today, the imbalance of weaponry is once again a key factor in Russian failure.

The most striking parallel between the two wars is, however, that in 1812, just over three decades before the Crimean War, the Russian Army had destroyed the colossal Grande Armée with which Napoleon had marched on Moscow. That had made the defeat of Napoleonic France inevitable. Curiously, though unsurprisingly, the Western powers had been immensely grateful to the Russians for using their huge force that way, while at the same time more than a little terrified that they had such force available to them.

Less than seventy years ago, Russia, in the form of the Soviet Union, had crushed Hitler’s attempt to overrun its territory. That made the Nazis’ eventual defeat inevitable. And, once more, the Western powers were both immensely grateful to the Russians for that use of their force and a lot more than a little terrified that they had such force available to them.

Doesn’t history repeat itself?

There is, however, another lesson to learn from that parallel. Russia’s military power is massive and impressive when it’s used to save its homeland. It showed that when it fought Napoleon and when it fought Hitler.

When it launches its own invasion, however, whether in Moldavia and Wallachia, or in Ukraine, and finds itself fighting well-armed opposition, it’s woefully inadequate.

If anyone ever learned any lessons from history, that, I suggest, is one that whichever Tsar is occupying the Kremlin at any time would do well to learn. He'd be doing himself one hell of a favour. And the rest of the world too.