TRAINING IN THE SOVIET UNION

 (An edited version of this article was first carried in the Indian Naval Despatch --Summer 2021)

FLASHBACK TO 1969

WHAT OUR SYNCRETIC TRAINING TRADITIONS CAN LEARN FROM EXPOSURE TO THE SOVIET UNION.

1.   PERHAPS THE MOST DIFFICULT decade for our Armed forces was the 60’s. 1962 Sino-Indian war exposed our chinks on the land border, without testing the Airforce and the Navy. 1965 Indo-Pak war was a stalemate; until 1971 placed us right on top. Not often is one blessed to see a new Nation born in a short war of under two weeks. The army had to handle 93000 prisoners of war and oversee their repatriation to Pakistan. Having been posted in Islamabad in 1985, I can personally vouch for the goodwill that our Army earned while looking after the wellbeing of Pakistani prisoners in make-shift camps. The Geneva convention was followed in letter and spirit.

 

2.   But this is not about the war. This story is about how the USSR trained us to be effective in combat. In fact, they could not have believed that we would use their platforms as well and at times, better than they could. Quite by default, they had created just the environment to make our crew bond as never before. This captures the gist of what happened on a remote island off the secret city of Vladivostok in 1969.

 

3.   So secret was our training mission that little was known about the very Missile boats that we were to acquire. Need-to-know communication and the absence of reference material on both the city and the platform merely helped to accentuate the mystery.

4.   In our early 20’s, unlike the senior officers with families, we didn’t really care much about our destination. Not many of this generation may know that in the the1950s and 60s an average Indian had to struggle for any comfort that is taken for granted today. Naxalism and Maoism had begun to make an impact on our way of life, although peripheral at that time. Getting a phone or a vehicle meant waiting for years.

5.   We lived in non-airconditioned ships infested with giant bandicoots. Cabins below upper decks were uninhabitable to sleep at night. Most of us would carry our beds to the open decks just to sleep. Poverty and total lack of infrastructure meant that an average Indian could sleep on any hard surface despite air and noise pollution.  We were content with our lives since we were better off than many of our countrymen. Going to the Soviet Union we thought, was a leap from the third world to the First World.

6. And so, in August 1969 when we were dumped on an island 8kms from the nearest land which was accessible only by tightly controlled boat services, in a secret city called Vladivostok, it did not worry us. Our navy had been training there for the Foxtrot class submarines and the Petya class frigates. When we landed with over a hundred officers and men, the Island hosted the largest Indian naval contingent in the USSR.

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7. The Soviet Union and its Warsaw-pact allies were in direct conflict with the USA and its NATO and other allies, in a bipolar contest. India was seen as an ally of the West despite our “non-aligned” profile. Paradoxically, until then, we were trained, manned, and taught to fight by the West. Our training, doctrines, traditions, logistics, and thinking were aligned to the West. Due to the Iron curtain and the non-availability of the opportunity to understand Marxism and Leninism, we were ill-equipped to even understand Soviet philosophy. This included the social and economic underpinning that formed the very basis of their ideology and existence. Most of our Officer Corps was not exposed to university education, where conflicts of Eastern and Western ideologies were a way of life. Given the abhorrence of the West to Socialism and Communism, “liberals” often clashed with the rest.

8. Here was an apolitical Military with little knowledge of what the word Socialism meant (the word “socialist” had not been inserted into our constitution at that time) was suddenly thrown into the lap of Marxism/Leninism. None in India or none in the USSR was able to foresee a conflict of interest encompassing all activities of Military life. Let us examine a few examples and what transpired.

9. The Soviet Union was a powerful country that had adopted a Command Economy of highly centralized planning. To meet its ideological and singular focus on beating the West, it invested heavily in education, science and technology, child welfare, and the Military. Given the natural resources spread over almost a continent and tight control over human resources and central planning, it made rapid strides in missile and space technologies in particular. But just then USSR was also in conflict with China on its eastern border. It was ironic that two powerful Communist powers could not see eye to eye.  The Sino-soviet clash gave the opportunistic USA, to establish contacts with the Chinese with the assistance of their ally, Pakistan (the Kissinger -Zhou in lai meeting occurred in Aug 1970) By then the USSR had extended political, economic, and military support to Egypt, Iraq, Syria, India, and Cuba among the non-Warsaw pact countries.

10. The point relevant to my story is that until the mid-1960s the Soviets did not have to deal with the Military of a free, democratic, and highly diverse country like ours. Dealing with us was an episode by itself. For us, this was completely uncharted territory.

11. Here were some unforeseen problems. The Indians stumped them with their dietary preferences. We had vegetarians, non-vegetarians, chickenatarians (no red meat) fishetarians (fish= vegetable) eggetarian and so on. Neither were they equipped to prepare a multi-cuisine meal nor were they able to procure vegetables of choice in a neglected part of the Soviet Union. A single middle-aged lady could serve food to a large contingent of Indians and keep the dining area clean. An unimaginable proposition in an overpopulated India. In an underpopulated country that took pride in bestowing the highest award to a Mother who could deliver 12 children to meet the demographic profile of the Govt, the human resource was a strategic shortcoming.

12. The USSR had conscripts at the lower rung on compulsory military training for 3 years as opposed to our voluntary force for 20 years.  They relied on JCO s and Officers to fight the ship. The whole- ship knowledge rested with them. The conscripts were used for mundane tasks with training adequate to man a single system during their limited service. They did not have a logistic cadre for cooking, cleaning, stores, and financial management, etc.

13. Our manning pattern had to adapt to their system. Excessive reliance on the officer corps meant that they adopted a variant of a user-maintainer concept which relied on the technical competence of the officer to repair and/or maintain sensors and weapons as also propulsion and power generation systems.  We had a separate electrical and engineering branch to handle technical matters. The manning pattern of ships had to undergo subtle and not-so-subtle changes. Some compromise solutions were made to save costs by not sending personnel from the non-combatant duties until return to India. But the philosophy of the user-maintainer concept could not be resolved by our navy for decades to follow. The recently embraced Technicalisation of the Officer corps was based on perceptions- not necessarily facts, and hence would need to be re-evaluated sooner than later.

14. The Soviets soon realized that the Indian sailor had to be periodically introduced to the greatness of communism as an ideology. All Soviet military establishments were overseen by a political commissar whose primary task was to uphold and propagate the virtues of their ideology.  Subtle indoctrination through a Soviet model was supplanted with the training curriculum for sailors. Lectures on the socialistic, egalitarian pattern of society were introduced succinctly. That most of it failed to succeed was because our officers and men lived in close- proximity shared the same vagaries of weather and was equally inadequately clothed to face 32 degrees below zero -while also experiencing the surreal sight of the sea freezing. That the only language spoken was Russian, turned out to be a blessing, in that subtle suggestions and innuendos to fight for egalitarianism fell on deaf years. Strong religious beliefs and multi-cultural diversities did not yield to the most sophisticated attempts to convert the average Indian.

15. Our sailors also witnessed very harsh and inhuman punishments awarded to the defaulting Russian sailors who were often chained for the duration of punishment. The lesson “Free people are not equal and equal people are not free” was brought home to our men during our stay.

16. There was a social cost that our senior officers had to bear. Most of them had to share rooms with two or three others depending on the size of the room. Bear in mind that a Commander was a senior officer of a small navy like ours. There were common bathing and toilet facilities for all. The sight of very senior officers in the queue for morning ablutions alongside the junior-most was not a pleasant one. The gesture “Après Vous” was impractical given the physiological pressures and the need to be on time for training. The next embarrassment was washing clothes. The Soviets did not provide a washing machine for nearly half our one-year tenure on the island. The Juniors avoided washing their clothes in the afternoon thus preventing undue embarrassment to the senior ones.

17. Toothpaste and toiletry were a rarity in town. They were just not available and when a consignment arrived people queued up to buy mere toiletries. Consequently, most Soviets suffered from issues related to oral hygiene. Ergo, the naval detachment managed to convince the Naval headquarters to send canteen goods to Vladivostok through the Indian naval canteen services. Colgate toothpaste was a luxury that an average “Vostokian” could not afford. Banned Jeans and Japanese watches along with chewing gum were many sought-after items on the streets of many deprived cities, not just confined to the East of the Soviet Union. Desperate youth deprived of the freedom to access the quality of life readily available to his Western counterpart was a common sight. They were desperate enough to beg our personnel to trade what we wore. Here is the underlying irony. While showpieces of modernity in the form of cities like Moscow were open to visitors, the closed parts were tightly shut, much like China today.

18. Lack of avenues for entertainment was the root cause of hard-working Russian men taking to vodka drinking on an unimaginable scale. Over weekends It was a common sight to see drunken citizens along the road-sides of almost all cities. Alcoholism was a national health issue.  Not much was done to address this addiction as it was seen to be a pressure release mechanism for the lack of social amenities so freely available in Western Europe.

19. Briefly put, the communist Soviet Union was far from being an egalitarian society. The quality of life in Moscow or Leningrad was a chimera in comparison to the interior and most neglected parts of the Union. Little did we know that the Soviet empire with all its glory would collapse like a pack of cards in two decades.

20. On the training front we couldn’t have asked for any better facilities and expertise from them. They had a process-driven programme that was meticulous, and it facilitated the identification of weak links in the chain. Given their human resource limitations they had no option but to evolve fool-proof processes.  

21. The ecosystem prevailing on the island left us with little options but to improvise activities to focus on our tasks. We soon discovered means to form groups to interpret and convert Russian documentation into English. We discussed technical details of the boat and the missile in particular. There were discussions on how to deviate from the recommended operational and tactical deployment of the Missile boats. The Indian jugad philosophy started a whole new approach.

22. This could not have happened had we remained in India or in a city in Russia which offered off-duty social opportunities. If the crew bonded, it was the extreme climate, restricted living space, conflicts with the hosts on ideological and administrative issues, graduating from rudimentary knowledge of the Russian language to technical language to assimilate the nuanced operational philosophy and a host of such activities. These were perforce collaborative and complementary efforts within our teams for which burning of mid-night oil was a necessity. Inventions followed.

23. In the process we discovered quite to our surprise that technical subjects which appeared to be beyond the grasp of a non-technical seaman could also be mastered with a bit of guidance and assistance. A revelation which was not proliferated, for the training of Indian crews, as we watered down the Russian training methodology to meet career requirements and inter-branch rivalries within the navy. The whole concept of keeping the entire crew together during training was allowed to dissipate, ostensibly to meet exigencies of service. This in turn has led to sub-optimal ship knowledge and assigning disproportionate importance to technical education at the cost of management of violence through the art of warfighting.

24. As a result of extreme pressure on limited manpower resources, NHQ had to perforce juggle with crisis management as opposed to viewing a systematic long-term perspective plan. Not surprisingly when I finally reached the seat of the Naval training command, in 2004, the dilution of training philosophy hit me like a ton of bricks. That we had structured the whole training edifice on the Western philosophy of training young officers for specific purposes at the early and middle levels of their careers was not sufficiently reconciled with the Soviet approach. It was inevitable that a hybrid approach would be necessary to audit and verify various methodologies to suit our very special mix of platforms and weapons. This is an endless process, the study of which ought to be invested in an independent Commission on a periodic basis.

25. Quite simply put the Soviet training module was an input so fortuitously timed to enable us to streamline and develop the one that suits us. If we have top-line ships today and they are being manned by a competent crew, the exposure to UK and USSR played a vital role in perpetuating a mixed model. The question is, have we found the most suitable system to restructure not only the ab-initio training academies but also the professional courses? Education and training are two complementary aspects leading to optimum use of personnel. They are not mutually exclusive.

26. We must deeply introspect on the assessment methodology practiced in our educational institutions that promote rote system vis a vis the assessment that promotes creativity, imagination, and innovation needed to win wars.

27. Our basic profession is Management of Violence-and that must not be lost sight of.