Russian Spetsnaz

Russian Spetsnaz functions in the narrative as the armed instrument through which a collapsing Russian state restores order by making violence both immediate and participatory. Its decisive significance lies not merely in its ability to overpower mutinous soldiers, but in the method it enforces: punishment is converted into a ritual that binds the survivors to the system through fear, complicity, and guilt.

Suppression of the Rebellion

Russian Spetsnaz appears when soldiers confined during the crisis turn against the authorities. After Arkady kills an infected old woman in front of the assembled troops, the crowd’s fear becomes collective rage. The soldiers chant that they want to go home and protect their families, while the narrator joins them, imagining that the creatures may already threaten his parents. A shot destroys Arkady’s left eye, tear gas fills the scene, and Russian Spetsnaz suddenly surrounds the demonstrators, beating them down, shackling them together, and pinning them to the ground with such force that the narrator believes he may die there.

This intervention is presented as the beginning rather than the culmination of the repression. The narrator explains that other army units had already rebelled by the time the base was closed, and that the government had decided how to restore order before the demonstration itself. Russian Spetsnaz therefore operates within a broader emergency apparatus: it does not negotiate with the soldiers’ fear or investigate the conditions that produced the mutiny, but physically contains the disorder and prepares the prisoners for exemplary punishment.

Enforcement of the Russian Decimation

The force assembles the captured soldiers on the parade ground in full dress uniform, placing the spectacle of military ceremony beside the prospect of execution. A new commanding officer speaks of duty, responsibility, the oath to protect the motherland, and the soldiers’ betrayal through selfish treachery and cowardice. For the narrator, these appeals sound alien to his generation, whose army had chiefly provided work, food, shelter, and occasional pay in a society marked by chaos and corruption. Russian Spetsnaz makes the old patriotic vocabulary operational again, not through persuasion, but through the armed presence surrounding the formation and the guard towers that make resistance appear impossible.

The procedure is called decimation in its literal sense: one person in every ten must die. The soldiers are divided into groups of ten and forced to vote on which member will be executed. Russian Spetsnaz does not simply carry out the killings; it compels the prisoners to perform them themselves. Pushcarts of sharp, heavy stones are rolled past the groups, and the chosen men are murdered by their comrades. The narrator remembers Baburin kneeling silently and looking directly at him as the stone descended.

The method is calculated to produce more than obedience. Conventional executions might have imposed discipline from above, but this system makes every survivor an accomplice. The soldiers could refuse and be shot themselves, yet they comply, creating a structure in which fear is reinforced by guilt. Russian Spetsnaz thus enforces a punishment whose deepest effect is psychological and institutional: the survivors surrender their freedom of choice because obedience offers a way to displace responsibility onto those who issued the order.

Emergency Law and Coerced Obedience

Russian Spetsnaz embodies the conversion of suspended ordinary protections into a new military normality. The soldiers are treated as threats to be contained rather than as citizens whose grievances require a response. Their confinement, the armed encirclement, the use of lethal force, and the forced vote all reveal a state operating through emergency measures while preserving the outward forms of command, parade, oath, and procedure.

The organization’s violence also exposes the paradox of order under collapse. The soldiers rebel because they fear for families left behind and because they suspect that authorities are concealing the nature and extent of the undead threat. Russian Spetsnaz answers that fear with public coercion, then uses the resulting guilt to prevent further resistance. The state does not restore trust; it makes distrust dangerous and makes collective participation in violence the price of continued membership in the unit.

Narrative Function and Significance

In the interview structure, Russian Spetsnaz is remembered through the survivor’s bodily and moral recollection: the shot passing his ear, the tear gas, the shackles, the boot on his chest, the creaking carts, and the stone striking Baburin. These details make institutional violence concrete without presenting the force as an individualized villain. Its power comes from procedure, formation, weapons, and the authority of command, while the most intimate acts of killing are delegated to the condemned soldiers themselves.

Russian Spetsnaz therefore marks a central transformation in the book’s politics of survival. The crisis exposes the weakness of institutions, but the response does not simply abandon organization; it rebuilds organization through terror. The force becomes the visible edge of a system that claims to defend the motherland while compelling soldiers to destroy one another. Its legacy is not only that the rebellion is crushed, but that the survivors are taught to understand obedience as a refuge from responsibility—a freedom to say that someone else ordered the act, even when their own hands carried it out.