THE RUSSIAN ARMY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 March 1943, Page 4

THE RUSSIAN ARMY

PROMOTION METHODS A DEMOCRATIC SYSTEM. MERIT ALONE COUNTS. The great deeds which are being performed by the Russian Army against the Huns on the eastern front has drawn world wide attention to that army.. Dr. D. N. Pritt, K.C., English M.P., in a recent article, described the Russian army as the most democratic in the world, where every soldier had an equal chance to rise to the highest rank. Sir Bernard Pares, an Englishman who had lived many years in Russia in the Czar’s time and under the Soviet, and who was exiled from Russia for a considerable period by the Soviet Government, stated in a recent address that only men showing ability were selected to train as 1 officers in the Russian Army, and that the labourer, the shoeblack or the carpenter carried a marshal’s baton in his knapsack. “Red Star,” the newspaper which is the mouthpiece of the Soviet Army, stated recently that in the five years before the Huns attacked Russia 45,000 men had been selected from the ranks of the Russian Army and sent to camps to be trained as officers, irrespective of whether they were peasants, labourers, artisans, clerks or students. Vincent Sheehan, the noted American writer on Russia, states that no man in the Russian Army could jump into an officer’s position without possessing ability; birth did not count, which is evident seeing that Soviet Russia is a socialist state. Vincent Sheenan was the man who in 1939 stated in one of his articles, that the day Germany attacked Russia would mark the doom of Hitler and his gang, because Russia had the greatest army in the world. The’ great feature of the Red armed forces is the democratic method of promotion, writes Mr P. Sloan, editor of “Russia Today,” and who with the Dean of Canterbury, has been delivering addresses to large audiences in England on Soviet Russia. Admission to alVthe soldiers’ training institutions from the ranks is based on merit only, he states, and full-time students are paid while studying. Any private in the Red Army showing the desire and the necessary ability to qualify as an officer, has the opportunity to do so. The importance of this equality of opportunity can only be fully understood in comparison with the British system. For, in theory, in the British Army, promotion is strictly according to merit. Yet it happens to a striking degree that the recommendations for commissions are concentrated on those who have passed through a “public school,” and are considered socially desirable additions to the officers’ mess. Hundreds of thousands of skilled British soldiers and sailors since the war began have seen greenhorns from civilian life promoted to the position of officers, though they have never had any wartime experience of any kind. Their social origin, however, guarantees that they will not let down the social level of the mess. In the Red Army, he states, there is nothing of this. On the contrary since 1917 the workers and peasants Red Army has given preference to the workers and peasants in promoting from the ranks, with the .result that the overwhelming majority of the commanding personnel have been drawn from the ranks of the working and peasant population. In the Red Army social barriers do not exist between officers and men because they are all of the same class. But they are not of the property-owning-class; they are all of those classes which live on the earnings from their work.