THE ""LIBERATORS"": My Life in the Soviet Army

by Viktor Suvorov ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 19, 1983

The pseudonymous author is a former Red Army tank officer, with a penchant for satire, now living in the West; his story centers on the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which led to his escape (by means unknown to us) to tell the tale of his army life. Suvorov headed for the army, he says, as a result of typical Soviet stupidity. He was a truck driver with a small personal plot on a collective farm. One day he was sent to fetch his farm's 150-ton share of fertilizer at a regional chemical combine--part of an extra day's output that the combine had no place to store and its 50 affiliated collective farms had no immediate use for. The other drivers, Suvorov discovered, were loading up and then dumping the fertilizer in the Dnieper River--a solution that satisfied everyone. Only he returned with a full truck and wound up being told to put it on his own plot, which promptly ruined it. Faced with no food, ""the choice was not great' I could land up in jail, where the food is free, or I could become an officer, where the food is also free."" Then, without any explanation, Suvorov reappears as an officer cadet who is also thrown in jail (the victim, he says, of an officer who routinely arrests the entire guard detail whenever he enters a base, and then arrests their replacements on his way out). There, he is made to do a back-flip onto a plank bed at lights-out and is assigned to a detail that empties out a cesspool for the Soviet elite on a Shangri-la-like spread outside Kiev. Later, the petty brutality of jail is replaced by the stupidity of his peers, who joke about how easy it will be for the Arab troops, with Soviet weapons, to defeat the Israelis (it is 1967); the extent of the Arab disaster can only be guessed from the sudden silence of the official radio. Suvorov thinks the T-64 tank, a new model just introduced when he graduated to the officer class, was unreliable; he also confirms other reports that, for big show exercises, the Soviets use officers in ordinary soldiers' uniforms. In fact, during the mobilization for the Czech invasion, Suvorov and his comrades spent all of their training time getting reservists in and out of personnel carriers. The invasion itself took place with soldiers who couldn't understand each other (most of the Soviet troops came from ""beyond the clouds, from mountainous kishlaks and distant reindeer-breeding farms,"" and only understood ten commands, including ""Hurrah"") and a heavy sprinkling of KGB agents--to prevent fraternization. The jokes stop, however, when Suvorov witnesses a young soldier's execution for trying to escape to the West. As for Suvorov, ""I carried my ideas away with my brains intact."" It's hard to know how seriously to take the rest, but it is effective and strangely entertaining--a kind of pendant to Andrew Cockburn's The Threat (p. 423).

Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1983

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1983

Categories: NONFICTION