It was an unprecedented redeployment both in scale and timeframes. The most powerful and combat efficient group of the Soviet, and then, Russian armed forces was stationed in East Germany from 1945 to 1994. It is worth looking at some figures just to remind ourselves about what was involved.
The Western Group of Forces - this is how this group was called then - had 62 operative-tactical missile launchers and 90 tactical missile launchers with a range of up to 500km. It also had 7,900 tanks, most of which were gas turbine powered T-80Us that could reach the English Channel within 24 hours, 7,537 armoured combat vehicles (BMP-1, BMP-2, BTR-60 and BTR-80), as well as 4,414 pieces of artillery, including large-calibre guns, i.e., with a calibre over 100mm (Gvozdikas, Akatsias and Pions), 940 combat aircraft (fighter planes, assault planes and frontline bombers) and 785 landing-transport and strike helicopters. There were also 17 submarines and 227 surface ships, as well as 351,274 servicemen (taken with their families - 1,200,000 people).
No country had ever had to move so many people to a new permanent location within three or four years.
It should be recalled that at this time Russia was also withdrawing military units from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Mongolia, Cuba, Moldova, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and the new independent Transcaucasian republics. In all, 1.5 million tonnes of ammunition, 759,057 troops, 98 operative-tactical and 162 tactical missile launchers, 13,214 tanks, 18,305 armoured combat vehicles, 9,668 artillery guns, 2,722 aircraft and 1,844 helicopters came back to Russia. This mass of people, together with combat equipment, returned to their homeland and discovered that most of them had no place to live. The current problems of the Russian army - 165,000 officers and warrant officers, or practically every third serviceman do not have a roof over their heads - are also rooted in that period.
In Germany, the Russian army left 777 military garrison towns where there were 36,290 buildings and various structures, including modern residential blocks. Over 21,000 of these had been built with Soviet funds. Experts then valued the Western Group of Forces' immovable property at DM30 billion. Indeed, Colonel-General Matvei Burlakov, the last commander-in-chief of the Western Group of Forces, also cites this figure.
He believes that, although Russian troops were withdrawn on a scheduled basis and all the necessary security measures were observed, it still looked like the troops were fleeing rather than being redeployed en masse on a well-considered basis. The general blames Soviet leaders for this, above all, Mikhail Gorbachev, who "conducted an extremely short-sighted and irresponsible policy". He also points the finger at Russia's first president, Boris Yeltsin, who cut the deadlines for the troop withdrawal, tight as they were, by four months "to do his friend, Chancellor Helmut Kohl a favour."
The former commander-in-chief is by no means the only critical voice. Russian society remains divided over the events of a decade ago. However, no one, perhaps, except extreme left-wingers, doubts that this large group of forces, a part and a symbol of the cold war, had to return home. Russia had to part with the past once and for all.
However, one cannot but agree with the critics of the troop withdrawal process. Russia's leaders should have shown more concern for people and respected the rights of Russian servicemen and their families, who were by no means to blame for the Soviet leadership's policy over a number of years.
Germany allocated 7.8 billion marks for the construction in the USSR of residential blocks for the families of the servicemen being withdrawn from the former East Germany. There were plans to buildfour million sq m of housing, or 72,000 apartments, with this money. In addition, town and city infrastructure was to be developed with shops, nurseries, schools, gyms, hospitals, outpatient clinics, cinemas and even TV studios. In the Moscow, Leningrad and Pskov regions, four plants to produce construction materials and elements for pre-fabricated buildings were to be set up with a total annual capacity of 100,000 sq m. Half of the work was to be carried out by firms from Germany, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Korea, Turkey or any other country that won a tender and could propose the most economical and effective construction methods. Alas, Russian politicians and generals failed to use the opportunities rationally.
Construction of the first garrison towns, which were of genuinely high quality by the standards of that time and had all the amenities, began in Ukraine. There were plans to build 18 such towns and another ten in Belarus. Large groups, although smaller than the one in Germany, of course, were to be deployed in both republics. A mere nine garrison towns were to be built in Russia.
In early 1991, when this work began, nobody in the Kremlin or the Defence Ministry dreamt that within six months or so both Ukraine and Belarus would become sovereign independent states and the main military contingent from the Western Group of Forces would have to be withdrawn to Russia. Moreover, no one there tried to look into the future and think what army the new Russia would need or what objectives it would be required to tackle. Ordinary people, officers, warrant officers and their families, had to pay for this geopolitical miscalculation and lack of strategic thinking.
Many military units, for example, the 10th tank division, which included three tank and one self-propelled artillery regiment, all in all, 2,193 troops, 274 tanks and 107 artillery guns, were sent to open field near the town of Boguchar, the Voronezh region (Central Russia). Officers, warrantofficers, their families and soldiers were accommodated in tents and metal barracks, while equipment was left in the open air. The servicemen of the division and officers' families had to spend three years in conditions unfit for normal life until a town was built for them.
There are many such examples. Korean builders built a wonderful garrison town with German money for the 144th mechanised-infantry division (3,938 troops, 88 tanks, 238 armoured combat vehicles and 30 artillery guns). The township included 24 five-storey blocks with a thousand apartments, as well as a gym, shops, a hospital, a nursery, a school and a TV centre, near the district centre Yelnya, Smolensk region. It is almost a hundred kilometres to the nearest city where the servicemen's wives could find work. However, as long as the division was fully manned, there were no problems. Then, it was cut fourfold and an army depot replaced it. The heads of families, young and healthy men, who were forced to leave the army discovered that they had good housing but no work. They could not apply their knowledge and skills in Yelnya because there were no plants there.
When former top Defence Ministry officials are asked now why, in particular, the 144th division was deployed in Yelnya, and not outside Smolensk, where people could have found jobs, they answer: "For the allotment of land for construction, the local authorities would have demanded at least a hundred apartments from us. In Yelnya, all the apartments went to the army".
Indeed, the consequences of the hasty and ill-thought withdrawal of Russian troops from Germany and the myopic decisions of Russian politicians and generals will be felt for a long time by the officers and their families who were involuntarily caught up in this historical process. Like to any other similar event, there are two sides to the coin. However, one thing is clear: in late August 1994 the Soviet/ Russian military threat was reduced to nothing but a myth for Europe.
