How the Iron was tempered

What I didn’t like most was the «political information» sessions, because they put it right after forced foot marches, and we had to sit down, listening and drying out slowly.

Meals… I’d hardly call that food.

Most days it was «wallpaper paste». I don’t know how to explain what it was, but believe me, it was some inedible shit.

At least we had bread to eat our fill. There were state holidays, of course, when we were allowed to go to the store and buy crackers and candy.

The most delicious food was a «sandwich»: two crackers put together and a candy in between.

And it could only be eaten at night, and if you don’t get caught by the sergeants. In this case they’d take all the sweets, and you had to wash the toilets until morning.

All recruits have lost a lot of weight from that poor nutrition. Generally, when you arrive to the boot camp, everyone would know everything about you, and senior soldiers would know the most.

Boxing helped me out here again.

I was respected, never been beaten and even showed the highest degree of respect: they called me to work out with them at night.

The rest were less lucky: be a wimp, and the seniors would harass the shit out of you.

At that time dedovshchina hazing practices were still present in the army.

They were too afraid to beat me, but doing what our superiors tell us to do was an inviolable. So they trained me by giving me extra duty.

As I was a soldier with an attitude and not particularly pliable, I was given extra duty assignments over and over again.

Duty assignments was a whole separate matter.

Sometimes you got a daily detail, or a kitchen duty. At daily detail, you were supposed to stay up all night and clean your daily detail post in the barracks until it shines, and doing kitchen duty meant peeling about five buckets of potatoes (not alone, though) for about three hours, and then washing the dishes after breakfast, lunch and dinner, and also scrubbing the floors.

As we were assigned to communications, we had to master Morse code.

I’ll tell you that was some hell to learn.

For a long time, I wasn’t able to learn it at all, and I actually thought I would be transferred to another unit, but I was kept in the communications because of my general physical fitness.

As the saying goes, diligence is the mother of success, and the Soviet military had another saying, “if you can’t do it, we’ll teach you, if you don’t want to, we’ll force you”. In the end, they made a decent comms man out of me.

The funny thing is, Morse code never came in handy for me afterwards.

After a long nine months of training I got my deployment to an outpost, and not an ordinary one but bearing some famous name.

It was very honorable.

The outpost was named after a border guard hero.

The outpost was an entirely different world. It was like a close-knit family, though a very strict one.

At first, they try you for strength.

Put it that way, you are put to the test with cold, difficulties, work and insomnia. One big improvement that I immediately felt was food. It was a huge, dramatic difference. It was like coming home. Village bread, milk fresh from the cow, meat, sour cream, etc. But first things first.

I was deployed to the outpost in winter. The weather in Russia’s Far East is hardcore.

It’s as cold -40°, and the wind’s so strong it’s able to knock you off your feet. Naturally, I was wearing the same field dress that was given to me in the boot camp.

It was only afterwards that they sent me warm socks, underpants, mittens, etc.

But at that time, I didn’t even have a winter uniform yet.

I had only summer uniform and summer footwraps (the boot camp did not have time to switch to winter uniform).

I was brought in, introduced to the outpost commander and immediately assigned to sentry duty for 8 hours! I was shocked and did not know what to do not to freeze.

True, I was given a sheepskin coat, winter felt boots (valenki), and I found some warmer footwraps. I put everything on, and my senior and I, together with a dog (a huge black shepherd dog), went to the sentry duty.

The worst thing was that being unable to warm yourself up by moving, because, firstly, you can’t make noise as a sentry, and secondly, with the slightest hint of jogging, this huge dog charges and tries to bite you.

I can’t remember how I was able to endure it.

I remember when I got back from sentry duty, I was sitting on the heating pipes for two hours.

What’s strange is, I’ve never been sick at the boot camp or at the outpost. Apparently, my body realized that there nobody would have any pity for it, and it get its stuff together.

Because our seniors had the same cure for all ills, as the saying goes, fight fire with fire. If someone got sick, they were assigned to sentry duty for 8 hours in the cold, and the sickness, apparently, froze and retreated.

I had another misadventure with the canine.

All rookie soldiers had to play the role an intruder in a drill at least once, acting as bait for the guard dog. And I wasn’t spared by this tradition.

What was it look like?

There was a special thick suit that covers your body almost completely and protects you from bites.

As it happens, the suit was in use for years, it was pretty worn out and wasn’t thick enough.

And I wasn’t very lucky with the dog either. It had a very peculiar manner of restraining intruders.

An ordinary dog would snap the intruder and hold him with a dead grip. And that dog used to loose its grip and snap over and over again, resulting in many bites instead of one.

From the point of view of detaining a real intruder, this would be even better, probably, but it wasn’t for me.

In general, I was successfully caught, successfully for the squad with the dog. When I came back and removed my clothes, all my legs and back were in blue bruises.

Being extremely distressed and disturbed, with a bit of indignation, I went to the outpost commander and showed him my bruises, for which I immediately got another twenty-four-hour service duty and three hours of exercising on the drill ground.

There were, of course, positive aspects, as I had been thinking at first, before it turned against me.

I’m talking about food. After all the training, I munched on village food so much that my friends at home stopped recognizing me in photos.

But the worst thing was different. We had a lot of physical training, pretty much being running.

There was a lot of running, and a lot of different types of it. It wasn’t enough that all the running was done in heavy kirzaboots, there were different variations of it.

Cross-country running in the morning with us wearing only breeches and boots, then the midday march in so-called full service marching order, namely: fully clothed, complete with a cap, with backpack, assault rifle, ammo, OZK (chemical protective gear) and, nearly forgot to mention, the entrenching tool.

The last one is a pain. No matter how reliably you fasten it, the tool starts hitting you in between your legs after a ten steps. There could be another cross-country running in the evening, if the outpost commander was in a bad mood.

When the outpost commander was in a very bad mood, we had to wear OZK protective gear during the entire midday march.

For someone who doesn’t know it, it’s a rubber hazmat suit that covers you from head to toe, plus a gas mask.

It feels like you’re running in a steam bath. There have been times when some guys have passed out for a while.

This was in summer, and it was the same in winter, but on skis. The skis, though, were not of the modern types what we are used to see now, with boots, fastenings, etc.

It was wooden planks with front ends bending upwards and bindings for winter felt boots.

So, that’s how we had our fun and games. And since I gained a lot of weight, judging by my face, running was not that hard, but just unbearable, and each time I was feeling like throwing out.

I realized that I was close to breaking down. I had to take it seriously.

I started getting up at 5:00 in the morning and went to a run. In the evening, or rather, at night, I went to work out.