Military Code of Dishonor

The Defense Ministry issued two apparently unrelated statements last week. The first announced that Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov had ordered the military to create a code of honor for officers — something Russia’s armed forces never had. The second announced that staffing changes had been made among top generals at Serdyukov’s initiative.

Three members of the top brass were sacked on the same day: General Vladimir Boldyrev, head of the ground forces, Colonel General Sergei Makarov, chief of the North Caucasus Military District, and Major General Sergei Surovkin, chief of the main operations directorate of the General Staff. The first explanation offered by Defense Ministry representatives, that the men have passed retirement age, was not entirely true. Although Boldyrev is 61 and Makarov 57, Surovkin is only 43. The second explanation, that the dismissals were part of Serdyukov’s mandatory staff rotations, does not bear scrutiny either. Surovkin had been at his post for only two months prior to his removal.

We can only guess at the real reason behind this campaign against the generals. As for Boldyrev and Makarov, the move might have been punishment for their subpar performances during the Russia-Georgia war. Commanders lost control of their troops during the five-day war, soldiers communicated among themselves and with their officers using their personal cell phones, armored personnel carriers broke down on their way to South Ossetia, and Russia’s ground forces couldn’t determine whether planes in the air were Russian or Georgian. Moreover, according to Nikolai Makarov, head of the General Staff, several commanders refused to participate in the conflict, justifying their decision by claiming that they lacked combat experience and training.

But the Kremlin’s attitude toward the generals wasn’t always so stern. In the immediate weeks and months after the war, there was no way that they could fire the generals while at the same time boast to the public about Russia’s great military victory. To support the highly embellished version of the war, Boldyrev and Sergei Makarov were given Russia’s highest military honor, the Order of St. George “for carrying out military operations in defense of the Motherland, routing the enemy and representing the model of the art of war — feats that will serve as examples of valor and bravery.”

The officers’ subpar performance underscores the importance of defining the code of honor according to which they need to be evaluated. It is no secret that the Defense Ministry is seriously concerned about officers’ moral conduct. Nikolai Makarov has publicly stated the need to “shake up” the officer corps and expel those who have lost all interest in their military service.

Such a code could play an important role — that is, of course, if it became more than just an empty call and established firm rules of corporate behavior. In any effective army, generals need to earn the right to command their subordinates. That is precisely why it is so important for the person in uniform to acquire and live by the standards of military excellence. They need to truly earn the medals and stars on their epaulets.

Unfortunately, Russia’s military leadership is ridden with Orwellian newspeak. They never tire of waxing eloquent about recruits who selflessly defend the Motherland, but in reality it is an army in which officers often treat recruits like serfs. Unfortunately, even the most brilliantly conceived and accurately worded honor code cannot change this environment. It begins to change very gradually only when all the participants in the system decide that they need to obey the same rules.

In the same way that it is wrong to award the military’s highest decoration to a general who clearly has not earned it, it is also wrong to summarily fire a general without reason. If the military wants its officers to serve the country with a deep sense of honor, it cannot dismiss people who have served for 15 years and then refuse to pay them the retirement benefits due to them. By laying off thousands of people through so-called “voluntary retirement programs,” the morale of its officer corps will drop even more. Such “effective management techniques” will only infect the next generation of officers with a deep-seated cynicism that no code of honor will be capable of overcoming.

Alexander Golts is deputy editor of the online newspaper Yezhednevny Zhurnal.