Lithuania, 1990

This is me after becoming an ensign of the Soviet Air Force at the age of 21, three weeks after arriving to a military airfield in Lithuania. I found a way to escape the mandatory service a couple days later. By that time, it was obvious to everyone that my continuous presence there wasn’t beneficial to the Soviet military (to put it mildly), so getting out was easy.

One thing that I always found remarkable in the Soviet military was the deep divide between soldiers and officers, rather striking for a relatively egalitarian society. Officers’ rations, and life in general, were relatively decent by away-from-Moscow Soviet standards. But drafted soldiers served their 2 years in conditions not that different from those in prison camps.

This extreme stratification wasn’t a Soviet invention. Russian army before the Bolshevik revolution was infamous for this, in part because its soldiers were forcibly recruited peasants while the officers were mostly aristocrats. When that army collapsed along the Eastern Front of WWI in 1917 and entire divisions deserted, nobody was surprised that hundreds of officers were shot by angry soldiers.

From what I’ve heard, things haven’t improved much in post-Soviet era, and might have gotten worse. But one thing has certainly changed since 1917. Even though Russian officers savagely beat the soldiers, sell their basic supplies, and charge them a lot of money for any chance to survive, killings of officers are now rare. I don’t know if it’s because during the last 100 years everyone capable of disobedience either has left the country or has been killed, or because there’s no hope anyway, or because centuries of heavy drinking have destroyed the cognitive abilities of the Russian population. But the fact is that modern Russians are much more obedient slaves than Tsars’ peasant serfs have ever been.