Spetsnaz
Spetsnaz are special forces in the former Soviet Union and Russia. Historically, this term referred to the Soviet Union's Spetsnaz GRU, special operations units of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet General Staff. Today it refers to special forces branches and task forces subordinate to ministries including defence, internal affairs, or emergency situations in countries that have inherited their special purpose units from the now-defunct Soviet security agencies.
Etymology
The Russian abbreviations spetsnaz and osnaz are syllabic abbreviations of Soviet era Russian, for spetsialnogo naznacheniya and osobogo naznacheniya, both of which may be interpreted as "special purpose". As syllabic acronyms they are not normally capitalized.In Ukrainian they are known as spetspryz, an abbreviation of viiska spetsiialnoho pryznachennia.
They are general terms that were used for a variety of Soviet special operations units. In addition, many Cheka and Internal Troops units also included osobovo naznacheniya in their full names. Regular forces assigned to special tasks were sometimes also referred to by terms such as Spetsnaz and osnaz.
Spetsnaz later referred specifically to special purpose or special operations forces, and the word's widespread use is a relatively recent, post-perestroika development in Russian language. The Soviet public used to know very little about their country's special forces until many state secrets were disclosed under the glasnost policy of Mikhail Gorbachev during the late 1980s. Since then, stories about spetsnaz and their purportedly incredible prowess, from the serious to the highly questionable, have captivated the imagination of Russians. A number of books about the Soviet military special forces, such as 1987's Spetsnaz: The Story Behind the Soviet SAS by defected GRU agent Viktor Suvorov, helped introduce the term to the Western public.
History and known operations
The Imperial Russian Army had hunter-commando units, formed by a decree of Emperor Alexander III in 1886, which saw action in World War I prior to the Russian Revolution of 1917. Also, during World War I, General Aleksei Brusilov became one of the first senior commanders to use the tactics of fast action shock troops for assaults following concentrated accurate artillery fire in what would later be known as the Brusilov Offensive of 1916. Such tactics, considered revolutionary at the time, would later inspire people like Prussian Captain Willy Rohr in the development of the Prussian Stormtroopers.Early Soviet Union
The origins of the Spetsnaz can be found in the Russian Civil War. To act against anti-Communist workers and farmers, the Soviet regime set up so called Tschasti Osobogo Nasatschenia in 1918. In the next year they were expanded to the so-called Cheka, fighting counterrevolution and sabotage. They took part in the Kronstadt rebellion 1921, setting up machine guns behind units of the Red Army, to "increase their motivation". The GRU and NKVD descended from the Cheka. Since 1927 Russians were experimenting with parachutes. Airborne units were used against central Asian and Afghan insurgents.Second World War and Spanish Civil War
and NKVD derived from the Cheka and participated in the Spanish Civil War fighting fascists behind their lines using guerilla strategies. Fighting Germany, Japan, Poland and Finland in the Second World War, new units of storm pioneers, parachuters, NKVD and GRU were set up. Thereby the soviets merged existing experiences and started to unify different military branches.Navy
The Soviet leadership had an urgent need for intelligence on German land forces in northern Norway and Finland. On 5 July 1941 Admiral Arseniy Golovko of the Northern Fleet authorized the formation of a ground reconnaissance detachment. This unit, the 4th Special Volunteer Detachment, was to be recruited from the fleet's athletes and have an initial size of 65 to 70 personnel. Later the unit was renamed the 181st Special Reconnaissance Detachment. They were trained as frogmen. The most prominent of these new recruits was Viktor Leonov, who joined the Soviet Navy in 1937. He was assigned to a submarine training detachment and then transferred to a repair station in the Northern Fleet at Polyarnyy. Leonov had trained as a scuba diver, after which he joined 4th Special Volunteer Detachment, where he proved his daring and leadership skills conducting numerous clandestine operations and twice being awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.Initially the unit was confined to performing small scale reconnaissance missions, platoon sized insertions by sea and on occasion on land into Finland and later Norway. They began conducting sabotage missions and raids to snatch prisoners for interrogation. They would also destroy German ammunition and supply depots, communication centers, and harass enemy troop concentrations along the Finnish and Russian coasts. When the European conflict ended, the Naval Scouts were sent to fight the Japanese. Leonov along with Capt. Kulebyakin and 140 men, landed on a Japanese airfield at Port Vonsan, unaware that they were opposed by over 3,500 enemy soldiers. A tense standoff ensued, until the commanding officers of the unit managed to bluff the Japanese forces into surrendering.
Army
Each Soviet front/army up to 1942 had their own independent guard-battalion, OGBM, so called miners, for reconnaissance and commando missions. The soldiers had to be younger than 30, were mostly athletes or hunters and had to identify 100% with their mission. Many exhausted and wounded soldiers were, even in training, left to their own devices. The selection methods qualified the troops as elite but caused high numbers of casualties. The "miners" infiltrated foreign-occupied areas by air and land, and cooperated with, and trained, local partisans.Immediately before the major Russian offensive at Smolesk in 1943, 316 OGBM'' were dropped by parachute in nine groups. Up to 300 km behind the enemy lines, they blew up 700 km of railways in cooperation with local partisans, using 3,500 explosive charges.
Cold War
By the end of the Second World War the Soviet Union dissolved most of the special units. At the end of the 1950s the KGB and GRU set new special forces units up. The 3rd guard special-reconnaissance-brigade was founded in 1966, being stationed with the Soviet forces in East Germany in Fürstenberg/Havel.The Crabb Affair
was a British Royal Navy frogman and MI6 diver who vanished during a reconnaissance mission around a Soviet cruiser berthed at Portsmouth Dockyard in 1956. In November 2007 the BBC and the Daily Mirror reported that Eduard Koltsov, a former Soviet frogman, claimed to have caught Crabb placing a mine on the Ordzhonikidze hull near the ammunition depot and cut his throat. In an interview for a Russian documentary film, Koltsov showed the dagger he allegedly used, as well as an Order of the Red Star medal that Koltsov claimed to have been awarded for the deed. Koltsov, 74 at the time of the interview, stated that he wanted to clear his conscience and uncover what exactly had happened to Crabb. Peter Mercer of the Special Boat Service describes this incident in his autobiography: "The cruiser was carrying the two Soviet leaders, Khrushchev and Bulganin, on a goodwill visit to Britain. His task was to measure the cruiser's propeller and to discover how the ship managed to travel at twice the speed originally estimated by British naval intelligence."Prague Spring
The Warsaw pact invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 to stop the "Socialism with a Human Face" movement. Spetsnaz units secured key points in the capital, Prague, seizing the airport, bridges, radio stations and the president's palace.Spetsnaz in Vietnam and Laos
Some 3,300 Soviet military experts, among them spetsnaz, were sent to Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Within South Vietnam, rumors persisted for years that men with blue eyes were reportedly spotted doing recon missions and testing their new SVD Dragunov sniper rifles. John Stryker Meyer was with Studies and Observation Group RT Idaho and had two encounters with what they believed were spetsnaz units operating in Laos in 1968.Their mission was twofold: first of all, to help a communist nation defeat an American ally, and secondly, test and evaluate their most sophisticated radars and missiles directly against the best aircraft America could deploy. Soviets recovered at least two very important pieces of American equipment, a cryptographic code machine, and an F-111A escape capsule, which now sits in a Moscow Museum.
Soviet–Afghan War
Soviet Spetsnaz forces took part in the Soviet–Afghan War of 1979–1989 in Afghanistan, usually fighting fast insertion/extraction-type warfare with helicopters. Their most famous operation, Operation Storm-333, was executed on 27 December 1979 which saw Soviet special forces storming the Tajbeg Palace in Afghanistan and killing Afghan President Hafizullah Amin, his son and over 300 of his personal guards in 40 minutes. The Soviets then installed Babrak Karmal as Amin's successor.The operation involved approximately 660 Soviet operators dressed in Afghan uniforms, including ca. 50 KGB and GRU officers from the Alpha Group and Zenith Group. The Soviet forces occupied major governmental, military and media buildings in Kabul, including their primary target – the Tajbeg Palace.
In the first one and a half years of the war, Spetsnaz units in the form of the 459th special forces company, were exclusively responsible for reconnaissance missions and intelligence gathering for the 40th Army. Aside from reconnaissance, the 459th was also tasked with capturing prisoners, kidnapping enemy agents, and targeted assassination of leaders and field commanders of the Mujahideen.