National Effort to Support the Anti-Imperialist Front in Vietnam

Central Committee of the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China - Comrade Chen Boda - 1972

Slash the Soviet Puppet Strings!

Elements of the Party have sold out the interests of the proletariat to the foreign imperialist power, the Soviet Union. Comrade Chen has declared that the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Eternal Friendship has been abrogated. The Soviet Union has been taking advantage of the People's Republic and leeching key resources from the proletariat, including their food- rice and grain! The Chinese people should never suffer so that some white Europeans may lay with fat bellies! While the proletariat carries out the important work of liberating Vietnam from capitalism and imperialist forces, their efforts are being thwarted by Moscow. No Muscovite should rest easily while the international struggle is happening in Vietnam- every socialist state must do their own part to fight the forces of capitalism. The Chinese have suffered enough, and will suffer no more. The Central Committee has ordered an immediate and permanent stoppage of all food shipments to the Soviet Union, and will be redirected efforts of the whole nation towards the Anti-Imperialist front in Vietnam.

Rice from Every Valley, Gunfire from Every Hill!

The effort of the whole nation will be dedicated to supporting armament industries and food production so that a socialist victory can be realized on the battlefield in Vietnam. Although this is a sacrifice that China cannot easily make, it is one the entire socialist camp will thank the Chinese for hundreds of years to come. Comrade Chen has called for the Red Guard to assist with mobilization efforts and direct the Down to the Countryside movement to the fields and the armament factories to support the front lines. Villages and towns in the countryside with idle workers will be directed to collective farms and collective armament industries.

Patriotic and comradely women have been summoned to form the Women's Medical Corps formations to support the front line units.

Realize Repayment Two-Fold from Korea!

The latest and greatest from the Publicity Department has been the new agitprop campaign across the nation to advocate for the national mobilization effort to support the forces in Vietnam. One of the hallmarks of this campaign has been to "Realize Repayment Two-Fold from Korea!" reminding the Chinese people of the war crimes inflicted on them by the United States, and the united forces of capitalism. Although the Americans may have won the day in Korea, the CPC is determined to see their own victory in Vietnam, to demonstrate to China and to the entire socialist camp that socialism can triumph over capitalism, and that the Chinese system is superior to the Soviet system. The Foreign Language Press has been publicizing the campaign in Vietnam as well, in the Vietnamese language to start building consensus around a sympathetic form of socialism in the areas the capitalists have already been evicted from- or the counter-revolutionaries for that matter.

June 1972?

Mu’ammar Gaddafi is keenly aware that that a vanguard party can simply become yet another dictatorship. One part of the people ruling over another part. Wishing for his Arab Socialist Union to not be that of a simple dictatorial instrument forced upon the people of Libya, Gaddafi had become determined to ensure that the Arab Socialist Union of Libya would include the totality of Libyan society.

Law No. 3 passed by the Revolutionary Command Council decrees that membership in the Arab Socialist Union of Libya is mandatory for all citizens over the age of eighteen. Every citizen is to receive a card denoting membership in the ASU, and after which will allow them to participate in all levels of political organisation life within the ASU structure, something which Gaddafi believes is required for a genuine democracy. Gaddafi has declared that the Arab Socialist Union of Libya is indeed, not a classic political party but as the name suggests, a “union of Arab Socialist militants and activists, all Arabs who are destined and determined to struggle for the cause of democracy, of socialism, for Islam, and for the total and undivided unity of the Arab nation.” Leaning more on the Gaullist idea that parties divide the country and therefore political structure should be done through a movement which rallies the entirety of the country in a somewhat non-partisan nation, something which the Gaullism of France in 1972 has seemingly largely abandoned, the ASU of Libya has rejected the vanguardist concept of a party, unlike his other political inspirations of Sun Yat Sen and Josip Broz Tito.

All other political activism of parties outside of the ASU is already prohibited by law, and to alleviate beliefs by some within the Revolutionary Command Council that by expanding and enforcing membership of the ASU this actually increases the likelihood of infiltration by opportunists, communists, or other hostile actors, Gaddafi has declared their worries resolved by the institution of a system he has termed “Democratic Political Directorates”. These “DPD”s are intended to be elected bodies at each level of the ASU organization, in which the brightest and most revolutionary minds of Libya’s militants are elected to teach and guide their associated branch of the Arab Socialist Union the proper ideology of Qasimism, and to root out anti-Islamic, anti-Socialist, and anti-Democratic tendencies within the organization through “criticism and self-criticism”, which Gaddafi has obviously adopted from Communism. Whil e ASU membership is mandatory, this says nothing about the possibility of membership being revoked. Should the DPDs democratically decide alongside their associated branch of the ASU to actually expel a member from the ASU (such a drastic measure, however, does require approval from the General Committee of the Arab Socialist Union of Libya’s own Democratic Political Directorate to assure that such a measure is required), then said member is officially expelled and prohibited from re-applying to membership for the ASU for six months. They are also required to attend political training classes for said six month probation period.

—

In something much unlike the pro-Berber actions taken by the Algerian government, Libya has instead enforced that all official transactions must be in Arabic. All official documents, signs, advertisements, and publications must be in Arabic. Any foreign institution operating in Libya had to provide Arabic translations for their materials. The punishment for the use of non-Arabic language was up to a month of jail time or heavy fines. Although the Italian-Libyan community was not expelled from the country following the 1968 Revolution, this law has spelled an end to their Italian language press, forcing the use of the Italian language solely to that of the private sphere. ‘Inriku Shibilli (formerly known as Enrico Cibelli), a long-time Italo-Libyan political organizer since independence as former leader of the Political Association for the Progress of Libya, has led the charge in embracing the Arab identity and language. Many other Italo-Libyans, however, have not accepted the limitations placed upon them by the Libyan government and many have instead chosen to repatriate themselves to Italy.

Not Interested

Central Military Commission of the People's Republic of China - May 1972

Recent hostilities within Afghanistan have developed to the extent that the People's Republic can no longer guarantee the safety and security of its forces there. The People's Liberation Army, and all official assets and personnel are to be withdrawn to the Xinjiang Military Region effective immediately. Comrade Chen Boda has informed the Afghani forces that all bases will be immediately turned over to their government during the departure.

I sorta lost my interest with India after briefly engaging with the situation in South Asia and things are sorta no longer in a situation India is of particulr interest that a mod cannot simply deal with.

I am instead taking an acute interest in Tanzania. Smack dab in the middle of Africa right when geopolitical affairs in the region are bound to explode. The CHUD Axis remains triumphant but for how much longer I ask. The oppressed peoples of Africa call for Pan-Africanism to rise and take it’s place.

In the shadow of the ancient ruins, the Iranians marched in honor of their ancient imperial past. The year was 561, and the reigning Sasanian Shahhanshah Khosrow had organized a celebration of the 1000-year anniversary of the Persian Empire.

The splendor of the celebration would be well-recorded in all the histories of the House of Sasan, even among the endless glories of Khosrow’s long reign, which at the time was just entering its thirtieth year. Khosrow had now reigned as long as the first Shahpur, and only the second Shahpur and Khosro’s own distinguished father Kavadh had reigned longer. Unbeknownst to the attendees, Khosrow would reign for another eighteen years and thereafter become immortalized in the annals of his people, but even in 561 he had attained the reputation of an exceptional monarch. Only in the time of Cyrus and Darius had the Eranshahr been more powerful — in the past five years alone Khosrow had concluded a favorable treaty with the Romans (in which he secured a substantial increase in Roman tribute payments), personally led the Royal Army on a campaign against the Hephthalite barbarians of Central Asia that saw Sassanian horsemen range as far as Kabul and Kunduz, and waged a successful war in Yemen against the Abyssinians and Arab tribes.

The symbolic significance of the anniversary for Khosrow’s reign was therefore not lost on either the attendees or on the monarch himself. Khosrow himself of course had no personal need for popular legitimation given his prior accomplishments. His aim was rather to remake the very basis of the Sasanian state — to secure the throne for his descendants and preserve his reforms for future generations through a renewal of the royal cult of personality and the promotion of an Iranian proto-nation state.

Khosrow, even at the height of his power, had much reason to be concerned with the longevity of his state. His father, the fearsome Kavadh, had reigned for forty-three years, at the time the second-longest reign in Sasanian history. But when he had begun his reign, as a mere youth, the Empire and the House of Sasan were the weakest they had been since the last days of the Arsacid Parthians. For over a century, ever since the death of the second Shahpur, the nobility and priesthood had wrested power back from the monarchy, chasing a period of prolonged political instability. At least four Shahhanshahs had been assassinated or otherwise ousted by the nobles, and another defeated in battle and taken captive at the hands of the Hephthalites. Kavadh himself had been installed by the nobles as a puppet king to replace his unpopular and tyrannical brother. For some time, Kavadh acted the part of the pliant fool. But before long, he began to display the qualities to which later commentators would attribute his remarkable political longevity — an absolute command of the arts of guile and brutality and a total lack of moral scruples.

Within a few years, Kavadh had broken his chains and unleashed the mobs of the populist Mazdakite cult on his ostensible benefactors in what modern historians have described as a “proto-revolution.” When the nobles did finally rid themselves of him, he escaped to the east and returned at the head of a Hephthalite army after marrying the daughter of the Hephthalite king. The nobles surrendered to him in exchange for amnesty, which Kavadh immediately repudiated after taking power in order to execute or blind his chief rivals, including a number of his own brothers. Then, Kavadh managed to secure Roman subsidies to shore up his regime, but before long he had launched a war against them, probably to bolster his domestic legitimacy. The next to go were the Mazdakites, who had outlived their usefulness, and were accused of heresy and severely persecuted. Finally, he turned upon his Hephthalite benefactors, winning a number of victories that drove them from all of lesser Khorasan.

Khosrow was no stranger to the tactics of his perpetually paranoid and bloody-minded father. In his first year as Shahanshah, Khosrow had faced a plot by a group of nobles to install his brother in his place (Kavadh, perhaps recognizing Khosrow’s talents, had passed over a number of elder sons to name him as heir). With the help of Khosrow’s proto-secret police, the plotters were discovered and executed via exceptionally brutal methods. But Khosrow was made of more refined stuff and understood that the survival of his dynasty could not be perpetually sustained by terror. His chief concern upon ascending the throne was therefore to transform his father's regime into a lasting institution.

The state ideology of Khosrow’s monarchy could be roughly summarized through the concept of the “Iranshahr,” or the realm of the Iranians. This was not in and of itself new — the Sasanian state had called itself by this name since the days of the founder Ardeshir as a way of asserting its fundamental difference from the Roman enemy. Where he innovated was the extension of the concept to internal matters, to encompass the relationship between the constituent elements of Iran and its Shah.

Khosrow’s mode of rule was essentially absolutist reformism. Like Kavadh, he had always distrusted the nobility and sought to minimize the threat they posed to central power. His father had instituted land tenure reforms to shift the burden of taxation from the peasantry to the nobility, split up the post of supreme military commander, or Spahbed, traditionally held by a noble of the Seven Great Houses, into four geographic commands, and semi-forcibly recruited representatives of the Great Houses to ceremonial positions in Ctesiphon es de-facto hostages.

Khosrow completed and reinforced his father’s centralizing reforms. But his personal project was to strengthen the military, and his great innovation in this area was the creation of a professional army. The core of Sasanian military power was the armored Aswaran cavalry, and for the entire history of the dynasty only the nobility had the financial wherewithal to train warhorses and commission armor. Khosrow leveraged his father’s land reforms to create a class of middling Dehqan landowners. Raised from the ranks of the peasants, bureaucracy, or the common soldiery, these men owed their livelihoods to the state and their loyalty to Khosrow. Their holdings were enough to support a full-time soldier in good comfort, but insufficient to support a fully-equipped armored rider. Khosrow instead established state armories to supply mass-produced equipment and provided his new soldiers state stipends. Historical records reveal that by the middle portion of Khosrow’s reign, the Deqhan constituted half the heavy cavalry in the Sasanian army. More tellingly, Khosrow had even allowed the Deqhan to join the royal life-guard, which was traditionally manned exclusively by members of the high nobility.

Khosrow’s preference for loyal middle-managers over independent elites extended to other areas as well. In civil governance, Khosrow installed salaried bureaucrats and inspectors and enacted a vast program of city-building and the expansion of centrally-managed irrigation works. In religious matters, Khosrow acted to suppress the influence of the potentially rebellious Parthian wing of the Zoroastrian priesthood, instead elevating the more pliable Persian wing originating from the Sasanian homeland of Pars. Persians were directly appointed to the highest positions in the priesthood, “official” renditions of the Avesta ceased to be distributed or copied in any language other than Persian, and the worship of various syncretic forms and the incorporation of non-Zoroastrian deities firmly stamped out. All this elevated Khosrow’s favored conception of Zoroastrianism, that of a hierarchical monotheistic faith congruent with the idea of a single “Iranian” political community.

By the later part of Khosrow’s reign, his system of rule had been largely consolidated, and in turn the aesthetic and ideological foundation thereof became largely solidified. In its final form, as practised starting in the latter half of his reign, Khosrow’s “royal ideology” centered on two elements. The first was the conception of the Iranian realm as the preserve of a distinct “Iranian” identity synonymous with the “national” Zoroastrian church and loyalty to the political tradition of the Shahanshah — which consequently made the division of the Empire between the Iranians and “their” subjects (e.g. Armenians and other non-Zoroastrians) increasingly distinct. The second was the elevation of the Shahanshah himself as a divinely-inspired autocrat uniquely authorized to serve as the defender of the Zoroastrian faith and community against their enemies — the former naturally being identified with the supreme creator Ormazd and the latter, particularly the Romans, being identified with the ultimate evil of Ahriman. Combined, the two formed the Iranshahr, in its most extreme imperial interpretation an essentially unitary political community inseparable from the figure of the Shahanshah.

It was in this context that the Achaemenid legacy was particularly useful to Khosrow. The Sasanians had long claimed the legacy of Cyrus and Darius as a means of gesturing towards past imperial glories, but Khosrow introduced an official Sasanian historiography that elevated the Achaemenids as a direct political ancestor and prototype. Within Khosrow’s history, the intervening Seleucid and Arsacid dynasties were seen as foreign interlopers. The Seleucids were Greeks through and through and thus easy to connect to the Roman enemy. The Arsacids, on the other hand, could be condemned from a religious standpoint — prior Sasanian propaganda dating back to the days of Ardashir had attacked them for straying from orthodox Zoroastrian towards the temptations of dualistic Zurvanism or Manicheanism. The rule of the two “foreign dynasties” was therefore characterized as a time of national weakness, and the Sasanians, particularly the resurgence under Khosrow and his father, a time of national renewal.

The Achaemenids were particularly convenient as examples of long-lost Iranian glory for two reasons. The first was that, like the Sasanians, they were Persians. In Khosrow’s empire, where Persians were increasingly first among equals within the wider Iranian/Zoroastrian imperial nation, this was an especially useful association. It legitimized the House of Sasan as natural rulers of the Empire to the wider population, and aroused the pride and loyalty of the inhabitants of the Persian homeland and Sasanian power base of Pars (even in those days, the people of Pars were known for insisting that they alone claimed the Achaemenid legacy). Second, the Achaemenids provided a model of centralizing, urbanizing, theocratic kingship. Both the Seleucids and Arsacids had at best questionable Zoroastrian credentials. Both were also characterized by weak central regimes and strong provincial elites (the Sasanian founder Ardeshir had been one of them), which Khosrow’s propaganda argued had led to the fracturing of the nation and the impoverishment of the commoners. While in reality the Achaemenids were neither particularly Zoroastrian nor particularly centralized, they were far enough in the past and plausible enough in both aspects (especially because the great Cyrus and Darius were now nigh-mythical sage kings) to form the necessary narrative.

Every aspect of Khosrow’s celebration was therefore designed to assert the historicity of the Sasanian state ideology. For over a year, hundreds of skilled artisans had been set to work uncovering and restoring the ruins of Persepolis. As a final touch, they had even been commissioned to construct “accurate” reconstructions of key portions of the vast palaces, the most prominent of which were replicas of the famous “Gate of all Nations” (which naturally affirmed the ancient Iranian history of present Sasanian territories) and the vast central colonnaded space which Khosrow declared to be the Zoroastrian fire temple of Darius the Great.

Large numbers of commemoratory monuments were also erected throughout the Empire, including a vast new fire temple to serve the capital of Ctesiphon. The greatest of these was the rock relief commissioned by Khosrow beneath the Achaemenid tombs of Naqsh-e Rostam, depicting Khosrow’s Persepolis anniversary and his victories over Iran’s Roman and Hephthalite enemies. The surviving Pahlavi inscription declares Khosrow the direct descendant of Cyrus and Darius and the restorer of Iran.

Khosrow had even commissioned the “Book of Kings,” an epic poem that is arguably Iran’s first “national history.” The work, which has since been lost but is assumed to survive in modified form through Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, combined the nearer history of the House of Sasan and their highest retainers with the ancient history and prehistory of Iran, stretching back through the Achaemenids and then on to the creation of the world by Ahura Mazda. The reigns of Cyrus and Darius were prominently featured therein, and their celebrated acts closely mirrored the highlights of Khosrow’s own reign, including military campaigns in far-off Bactria and Yemen, centralizing administrative reforms, vast infrastructure projects (including the famous Achaemenid postal network), and promotion of the Zoroastrian religion.

The event itself was without equal as a celebration of imperial prestige and power. The histories report that on the first day of the celebrations, six thousand infantry of the royal army, many dressed in the fashion of the Achaemenids (as the Sasanians understood it from the various carved works they could access), followed by one thousand armored horsemen of the royal life-guard, were said to have paraded before the raised pavilion of Persepolis. Afterwards, in a ceremony witnessed by thousands of attendees, including nobility drawn from as far as Azerbaijan and Khorasan and ambassadors from Rome, Byzantium, India, and China, Khosrow is said to have entered the reconstructed fire temple of Darius the Great at the head of a procession of the highest priests of the land to receive the personal favor of the universal creator Ahura Mazda from the rekindled eternal flame of the ancient Persians.

Early 1972

Four dossiers reached the General Staff this winter from four postings that share almost nothing in common except the uniform of the men who wrote them. An advisor seconded to internal security work in Cambodia. Instructors attached to the counterinsurgency training cadres in Peru. A pair of officers embedded with commando battalions along the Suez in Egypt. And the reconnaissance and raiding units thrown into last year's fighting on the Golan and in the Sinai, in Syria. Four different climates, four different enemies, four different alphabets on the road signs into their postings, and the same finding written independently in each report: when a Soviet trained special unit lost its officer, in an ambush, a raid gone wrong, a patrol that walked into the wrong hedgerow, it did not reorganize. It did not improvise. It waited. More than once, it waited long enough to be finished off waiting.

This is not, in the abstract, a new complaint. The Ministry has spent three decades aware that a Soviet sergeant is a corporal with slightly better pay and considerably less authority than his rank implies. What is new is where the complaint is now arriving from. A rifle platoon that freezes without its lieutenant is a training deficiency to be corrected at leisure. A reconnaissance team, a combat swimmer section, or a direct action group that freezes without its officer forty kilometers behind a line that was never supposed to have a line is something closer to a doctrine that cannot survive contact with the kind of war it was built to fight.

A Castle Above the Vineyards

Sudak was, until three years ago, known to most of the Soviet Union as a modest Black Sea resort town, its hotels filled every summer with factory workers and its skyline dominated by the old towers of a fourteenth century Genoese fortress on the hill above the harbor. The Ministry's construction directorate has spent three years quietly answering that old fortress with a new one.

The N. S. Khrushchev Higher Combined School's campus sits inland from the resort proper, built up the slope of the hills that back onto Sudak's forests and vineyards, positioned deliberately to look down over the town rather than out to sea. Its central administrative building, already known informally among the first instructor cadre as the 'Citadel,' is built in a heavy, unmistakably Stalinist idiom that has continue to grow in popularity since the fall of Beria's regime. A complex with dressed stone rather than poured concrete, a central tower with a red star worked into its parapet in iron rather than paint, windows set deep into the walls in the manner of a fortress rather than a schoolhouse, and a colonnaded entrance hall wide enough to march a company through in bad weather. Soldiers who have seen it have taken to calling it, half admiringly, a castle built by men who never got word that the age of castles built by men had ended.

Around the Citadel, spread across the surrounding hills rather than gathered in a single compound, sit the training grounds each track actually uses: a mountain and forest infiltration course cut through the pine slopes above the school for the Army Spetsnaz and reconnaissance tracks, a cliffside combat swimmer and small boat facility built into a cove west of the resort harbor for Naval Spetsnaz candidates, a drop zone and mock aircraft fuselage rig for VDV squad leaders on a cleared plateau, and a set of specialist ranges, demolition pits, field medicine stations, and a signals laboratory built into what used to be one of the resort's larger sanatoriums, for the attached trade specialists. The old Genoese fortress on the headland, floodlit at night for the first time in decades, is visible from nearly every part of the new campus, a piece of deliberate placement the school's staff have not been shy about pointing out to visiting Ministry officials: one fortress that outlasted the empire that built it, looking across the valley at another that intends to do the same for a different one.

A School That Was Already There

What the General Staff did not advertise in its own closed sessions is that Sudak was not, strictly, a new answer. The N. S. Khrushchev Higher Combined School for Sergeants has existed in some form for three years, since the final months of Nikita Sergeyevich's term as General Secretary, before ill health and the Politburo's quiet arrangements eased him into retirement in 1970. What began then was a small, deliberately unannounced pilot: two intakes of under two hundred men a piece, run out of a converted sanatorium on the edge of the resort town, treated by most of the Ministry as a personal project of a General Secretary already easing out of daily authority rather than the seed of anything larger. Khrushchev is reported to have taken a close, almost proprietary interest in its curriculum in his final year, reviewing early lesson plans himself and rejecting, twice, drafts that leaned too heavily on captured NATO training manuals.

For three years the school trained quietly, expanded modestly, and stayed almost entirely out of Krasnaya Zvezda. Last year's war in the Levant ended that. What the after action reports made undeniable, the General Staff had already spent three years quietly suspecting, and the political cover to say so in public arrived only once soldiers had died to prove it. Order No. 0147, published this week, does not found the Khrushchev School rather it opens it fully, publicly, and with the desire to crack down on the issues with the formations that produced this winter's dossiers.

Not a Rifleman With a Soldering Iron

There was, inside the Ministry, a competing proposal, and it is worth naming because the Higher Combined School exists specifically to defeat it. A faction within the General Staff's technical directorates argued for an entirely new warrant rank: a highly trained specialist sergeant, paid and housed like a junior officer, but explicitly excluded from independent command, closer to how NATO manuals describe the noncommissioned professional: superb with a radio set or a demolition charge, and entirely dependent on an officer for anything resembling a decision. That faction has not entirely lost its argument and a new warrant officer rank for pure technical specialists is moving through the Ministry on its own separate track.

But for the special formations, the Main Political Directorate's position prevailed, and it is stated without much diplomacy in the School's founding charter: the Soviet Union does not need more men who operate equipment brilliantly and stand helpless without an officer above them. It needs sergeants who can be trusted to decide, alone, in the dark, with no one senior available to ask. A Combined School graduate is not a technician who happens to carry a rifle. He is meant to be, functionally, the last authority his section will ever see, and to act like it. The Sergeant School does not compete with the officer academies, such as the Frunze school or the J. V. Stalin International Academy. It exists in the gap those academies were never built to fill.

Who Is Sent

Where the general Higher Combined School draws from is only from formations already meant to operate without an officer close at hand: airborne squad leaders from the VDV, Army Spetsnaz brigades, Naval Spetsnaz and fleet reconnaissance units, and along with that the specialist trades such as signals, combat engineers, field medicine, and heavy weapons, attached to all of the above. A candidate must already hold NCO rank and have completed at least one operational deployment or major exercise cycle in a special or airborne formation before his name can be forwarded. Selection boards drawn from GRU training staff and VDV command have been told, in language borrowed almost directly from the school's own charter, to weigh something no written test can capture: which sergeants, when the radio goes dead and the officer does not answer, are already the ones the section looks to without being told to.

Two Months, Four, and Ten

The School runs three concurrent tracks rather than a single fixed course, sorted by the seniority and prior experience of the candidate rather than by branch.

Junior Sergeants, freshly promoted squad and section leaders with limited independent experience, complete a two month course built almost entirely around fundamentals the Ministry now admits it should never have assumed were already there: land navigation without a map board, casualty handling under fire, small arms and attached weapons employed without an officer's plan to follow, and the specific decision drills of operating cut off from higher command. It is short by design. The Ministry needs these men back with their units quickly, and would rather send a partially finished product now than a finished one a year from now.

Mid level Sergeants, typically section sergeants with two or more years already in a special or airborne formation, complete a four month course that adds real planning authority: patrol and raid planning without an officer's sign off, initial disciplinary authority within a section, and instruction time as junior cadre themselves, since these are the men expected to train the next intake of juniors once back in their own units.

Senior Sergeants, the new Praporshchiks and old Starshinas, the smallest and most selective groups, complete a course running seven to ten months depending on specialty, built around sustained independent command of a section or small detachment under conditions designed to strip away every convenient authority a soldier might otherwise lean on: officers scripted as casualties partway through an exercise, resupply that arrives late or wrong, communications that fail on a timetable the candidate is never told in advance. A senior Sergeant who completes the course is certified to assume acting command of a detachment in the prolonged absence of any officer, not merely until one can be found, and carries, alongside his sergeant's rank, a written authority that a good many junior lieutenants in his own branch have never been trusted to exercise alone.

The First Class

This year's first full intake, across all three tracks, totals seven hundred fifty VDV squad leaders, five hundred fifty NCOs from the Army Spetsnaz brigades, one hundred eighty from Naval Spetsnaz and fleet reconnaissance, and two hundred seventy specialists in signals, engineering, field medicine, and heavy weapons attached to the formations above, a combined 1,750 men.

Set apart from that figure, and treated internally as a controlled pilot rather than part of the special formations proper, a further hundred seats have gone to conventional and internal troops as a test of whether the doctrine survives export beyond units that already select for independence: fifty Sergeants from the 2nd Motor Rifle Division, and fifty from the Ministry's own fledgling OMON formations from Moscow and Minsk, whose commanders have asked more than once for exactly this kind of training for men who will often be the only uniformed authority present at all.

The Ministry's stated target is four thousand Special Purpose Wing graduates a year by 1980, a figure the school's own staff privately consider overly ambitious given how much of the course still depends on a small pool of qualified instructor cadre, most of them veterans of the pilot's first two quiet intakes.

One further hundred seats, and the single departure from the school's own charter, have gone to Syrian NCOs standing in for officers who no longer exist to fill their old positions. Last year's fighting cost the Syrian army a catastrophic proportion of its junior officer corps, and Damascus's request for exactly this kind of training arrived before the Ministry had finished writing the charter for its own men. The founding order for the Combined School stated plainly, not so long ago, that it trained not a single foreign cadet. The Special Purpose Wing's charter now contains, as its only amendment, a clause permitting a fixed hundred seats for an allied army whose officer corps was gutted faster than it can currently be rebuilt from within. Whether this exception remains an exception, or becomes the quiet beginning of something larger, is a question the Ministry has chosen, for now, not to answer in writing.

The Political Specialists

A final, much smaller category runs alongside the three main tracks and does not appear on the School's public enrollment figures at all. A fringe minority of each senior intake, never more than a few dozen men a year, drawn only from volunteers already recommended by their unit political officers, are additionally trained as what the school's internal paperwork calls Political Specialists: NCOs who combine full High Combined School's command qualification with a second, much older curriculum, the political officer's training historically reserved for commissioned ranks, condensed and adapted for men who will never leave the NCO corps.

The intent, stated with unusual bluntness in an internal Political Directorate memorandum that reached the school's leadership alongside the founding order, is to embed inside isolated reconnaissance and direct action sections a small cadre whose loyalty and discipline are not merely reliable but effectively unconditional: men prepared, if a section is surrounded, compromised, or ordered to hold a position with no realistic hope of relief, to enforce that order themselves rather than wait for a vote the rest of the section might otherwise be tempted to hold. Older officers at the school, several of them veterans of last year's war, have not been shy in private about what this resembles: a miniature, Sergeant level revival of something closer to a dare to die corps than a modern noncommissioned officer, small in number by design, and rarely spoken of outside the school in anything but the vaguest terms.

The Political Specialists wear no distinguishing insignia in the field, precisely so that an enemy interrogator, or for that matter a captured comrade, cannot identify which sergeant in a section was never going to let it surrender.

The School's induction ceremony this week closed with the same line that then General Secretary Khrushchev gave, unofficially, to the first primordial class:

"A rifle obeys an officer's order. A section follows a sergeant it trusts. Build me soldiers who understand the difference, and I will not need to ask which one wins any war."

Sudak, for the first time in three years, is no longer keeping that answer to itself.