РЕАЛЬНЫЙ БЫТ СОВЕТСКОЙ ЗАСТАВЫ БЕЗ ЦЕНЗУРЫ

CHAPTER 1. THE BORDER LOCKED DOWN: WHO THEY ARE Let's be clear: the Soviet border guards are not the army. They are not the Ministry of Defense at all. The USSR's border troops were part of the KGB. The State Security Committee. Do you understand what I'm getting at? A border guard isn't just a soldier with a machine gun. He's a representative of the security agencies. With all that entails. Service was tougher than the army. The term was three years instead of the usual two. The selection process was stricter. The checks were more thorough. Before joining the border troops, you were thoroughly checked. Your biography, your parents' biography, where you lived, who you socialized with, whether you had any relatives abroad, whether anyone had been in prison. One veteran recounted: "They sent me to interviews three times. They asked the same questions in different words, checking to make sure I wasn't confused in my answers. Then they questioned my neighbors, my school teachers. "I thought they were sending me to the moon, not to an outpost." And rightly so. Because a border guard had access to classified information. He knew the locations of outposts, the security system, patrol routes, passwords, and signals. If such a person defected, it would be catastrophic. So they recruited those who were vetted. And then they trained and educated them so that the thought of escape never even entered their minds. The border guards had a special uniform. Green. Not khaki, like the army, but specifically green. A cap with a green band and a red star. It was a badge of distinction. A sign that you were elite. That you weren't just a conscript being driven around the parade ground for two years. You were a defender of the border. And you really felt it. The border guards held themselves apart. In the army, they were looked upon with respect and a little envy. Because their service was difficult, but prestigious. CHAPTER 2. WHERE THE LAND ENDS The USSR had the longest border in the world. Over sixty thousand kilometers. Imagine the scale. From the Barents Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south. From the Baltic in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. The border ran through forests, mountains, deserts, tundra, swamps, and rivers. And at each stretch there were outposts. An outpost is not a large military base. It's usually a small garrison of twenty to thirty men. The outpost commander (an officer), his political officer, several sergeants and privates. Plus cooks, a medic, and signalmen. Outposts were built in the most remote places. Because where people live, where roads run, the border is in plain sight. But in the taiga, in the mountains, in the desert—those are the places where you have to guard around the clock. Because that's where trespassers try to cross. Some outposts were so far from civilization that food and mail were delivered by helicopter once a month. And in winter, when the weather was bad, the helicopter wouldn't fly for weeks. And so the outpost was completely isolated. One border guard recalled: “We served in the Pamirs. The nearest village was a hundred kilometers away. In winter, the snow was so thick that you couldn't walk from the barracks to the kitchen—you had to tauten a rope to avoid getting lost. Communications were spotty. If anything happened, there was no help. You had to cope on your own.” There were outposts in the Far East, where mosquitoes ate you alive in the summer. There were outposts in Central Asia, where the shade was over fifty degrees in the summer. There were outposts on the Kola Peninsula, where the polar night lasted for months. And everywhere, the men serving were twenty-year-olds. Conscripts. High school graduates from Moscow, Kyiv, Minsk. Boys from villages and cities. And they all had to guard the border. CHAPTER 3. THE DAY BEGINS WITH RISE Let me tell you what a typical day at the border outpost looked like. Rise at six in the morning. In winter, that means it's dark and cold outside. You jump up on command and get dressed quickly. No "just five more minutes." Late for formation means you'll get priority duty.