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Equally striking is the way the public's view of the Spetsnaz has changed. Ten years ago, the special forces were regarded as the country's secret weapon, the men who had overthrown the President of Afghanistan in his own palace and would strike deep inside Western Europe if a new world war broke out. This has changed. The most popular video in Russia last year was Schizophrenia. An unremittingly bleak portrayal of modern Russia, it tells the story of a Spetsnaz-type officer who is framed by the security police and then forced to assassinate a banker planning a run against the incumbent President. The officer carries out the murder and is later eliminated by state-security thugs. Many Russians find the film plausible. Over the past year, for example, a number of current and former Spetsnaz officers from the Russian airborne forces have been arrested in connection with the 1994 murder of Dmitri Kholodov, an investigative journalist killed by a booby-trapped briefcase while he was working on a story about high-level military corruption.
Spetsnaz soldiers also hire themselves out to the underworld in less dramatic ways, Alexei says. "Say a crime boss is planning a confrontation with a rival," he explains. "He phones his Spetsnaz contact and asks for four or five guys. They take time off from their units and stand behind the boss, fully armed, while he talks to his rival. The other side sees they are serious kids and is impressed." For a couple of hours' work, they make $200 each, Alexei says. If there is any shooting, their fee goes up to $500. This is more than a year's salary for an experienced noncommissioned officer, who officially makes about $30 a month.
Wretched salaries are not the only source of demoralization. Living conditions would provoke a mutiny in many countries. Sergei, the Spetsnaz noncommissioned officer, lives in a slum. Officially called noncommissioned officers' married quarters, his single room measures 5 ft. by 8 ft., and he lives there with his wife and daughter. Ten families share a rat-infested kitchen and a single toilet whose walls are rotting from dampness. Sergei does not wear his uniform when he goes into the city--civilians view soldiers as losers, he says.
Yet when he first joined the Spetsnaz, he felt great pride of accomplishment. In those days, it was rare to be recruited for the Spetsnaz, and even harder to qualify. Spetsnaz veterans across the country acted as informal talent scouts, identifying promising soldiers for their old units. The recruits were fit and tough, and sometimes edging dangerously close to trouble with the law. "The saying used to be," Ivan recalls, "that you went either into the Spetsnaz or into prison." They had something else in common, veterans say: though often unsophisticated, they were usually very bright. Volodya, a well-educated officer who commanded a Spetsnaz unit, remembers his men as "some of the most intelligent people I have ever known."