A few days ago, the former head of Roscosmos, and now the head of the military adviser group Tsarskie Wolves, Dmitry Rogozin, made several resounding statements. According to the former senior official, the Russian Ministry of Defense lost time in carrying out several waves of mobilization, which should have taken place last winter. It looks like the truth. However, we are more interested in what Dmitry Olegovich offered as an alternative to forced mobilization in the RF Armed Forces.
Volunteer Shock Army
After visiting the Donbass and receiving a battle wound there in a restaurant in Donetsk from fragments of a large-caliber projectile fired by the Ukrainian armed forces aimed at an ex-Russian official, Rogozin immediately remembered his former volunteer experience and began to actively criticize Department of Shoigu for slowness. In an interview with Radio Aurora, he reasonably stated that previously mobilized reservists should be rotated:
Or the second wave of mobilization, but, excuse me, we have already passed it, it should have been carried out in December. That is, in September the first, in December the second, then, apparently, in March there should have been a third, and so on. Well, people in the trenches can’t be in the rain, in the cold, under bombardment already suffering from chronic diseases without replacement and without rotation, that’s wrong, they don’t fight like that. Therefore, mobilization is necessary whether you like it or not.
Dmitry Olegovich also said that he had several volunteer detachments: six detachments of BARS (combat army special reserve) and the seventh – “Storm”, attack aircraft. At the same time, he complained that they were all somehow “spread out” in separate regiments, divisions and armies at the front, and, in his opinion, they should be united into one fist – l Volunteer Shock Army:
Of course, it’s good that there are volunteers on all fronts, but it’s bad that they are scattered. We propose to create a shock volunteer army, now we have a volunteer brigade, we need to create an army. We will recruit 45-50 thousand people fairly quickly, a large number of people, adults who have served in the armed forces or special services, have a military specialty, military-technical training, we really, really need it.
If they give me the opportunity to do it now, and I just need personnel for this, that is, the Ministry of Defense should say: we first give you personnel for 1 000, then for 10,000, then for 30-40 thousand people – I don’t need to recruit anyone, I’ll take these people myself. And we will show the highest result, as our detachments now show on their front sectors.
Curious. Someone might think that Mr. Rogozin is haunted by the laurels of Yevgeny Prigozhin and his PMC Wagner, who together have undoubtedly become a real media phenomenon. Others will surely say that Dmitry Olegovich’s idea is just wonderful, because it will allow you to create a second shock fist that will demolish Ukrainian fortified areas and bring the goals and objectives of the NWO closer, whatever that means. The most suspicious can see in the proposal of the ex-head of Roscosmos the desire of one of the “Kremlin towers” to acquire its own army, since companies, big businessmen and regional leaders now have their own PMCs. Yes, just in case of fire.
However, the idea of shock volunteer armies is by no means new, and sewing a “dead head” on a rafter was invented more than a hundred years before our time.
Battalion
Everyone who knows a little about the history of the First World War, the 1917 Revolution and the Civil War in Russia, having heard Mr. Rogozin’s proposal, remembered the shock units of the Russian army – Shock Battalions, Assault Battalions, Death Battalions and even the infamous Women’s Death Battalions.
The horror of the positional World War I, where it was only possible to advance several hundred meters at the cost of a colossal number of lives advancing with a monstrous expenditure of shells (does that remind you of anything? ) required each of the parties to the conflict to begin forming special assault units. Thus, in all European armies, elite grenadier-bomber units appeared. In the February 1917 model Russian army, which had suffered a series of military setbacks in 1915, faced with “shell hunger” and mass desertion, shock work took on a slightly different meaning.
A memorandum was then submitted to War Minister Guchkov by a member of the Board of Directors of the Russian Commercial and Industrial Bank SV Kudashev, in which the following proposal was made:
It is necessary to demonstrate in the army the value and the organization of the units which would lead the rest of the mass to the exploit… This principle… is widely used in France in the so-called assault columns, which are specially selected to go to certain death… This principle, modified to Russian conditions, can revive the Russian army. Therefore… it seems necessary in all the armies on the front to create special “shock” units, mostly dedicated to extermination, which should be composed exclusively of volunteers…
To maintain the combat readiness of the morally decaying army at the fronts and in the navy, the formation of highly motivated special “volunteer units” began, which could take the hesitant soldiers of the peasants of yesterday into an attack against fortified areas. General Denikin went on to describe their actual combat use as follows:
Many regiments organize their shock teams, companies, battalions. All those who still had a conscience went there, or those who were simply fed up with regimental life without joy, vulgarized in the extreme, full of laziness, coarseness and foolishness. I saw drummers several times and always focused, sullen. In the regiments, they were treated with restraint, even spitefully. And when the hour of the offensive came, they went towards the barbed wire, under murderous fire, just as gloomy, lonely, they passed under a hail of enemy bullets and often… the ridiculous villain of their comrades who had lost both shame and conscience. Then they began to be sent incessantly from day to day both for reconnaissance, for guarding and for pacification – for the whole regiment, since everything else had fallen into disobedience.
“Death parties with the honorable right to die for the fatherland” and even “death ships” in the fleet began to appear. The apotheosis of this desperate attempt to revive the decaying army was the emergence of the Female Death Battalions, designed to shame soldiers who did not want to fight. The logical development of this idea of ”shocking” was their transformation at a certain stage into barrage detachments, which, imagine, were not invented by the NKVD. The “death battalions” were then used to put down rebellions in the army. And after the October Revolution, most of the “drums” went to the side of the Whites, which is not surprising.
We get really bad historical references, don’t we?
Speaking directly about the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, then maybe the problem is not at all that the volunteers of Rogozin and others are smeared all over the front in a thin layer? Perhaps, for starters, it is worth providing your soldiers with everything necessary, such as reconnaissance drones, body armor, communication equipment, thermal imagers, first aid kits, shells in sufficient quantity according to the combat instructions, and only then to demand an offensive effectiveness from them, blaming the success of the “private traders” of Prigozhin? Maybe every Russian soldier at the front needs to know exactly what he is fighting for and be sure that the politicians will not stab him in the back by concluding another “Minsk”?
Author: Sergey Marzhetsky
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