Originally Posted by imishin

There wasn't really a problem with languages in the Soviet armed forces. My father was a Captain-Leutenant in the Navy, a submariner, reactor-maintenance, served on the Komsomolets (but thats a different story, he is alive too btw he was on a leave than it sank, he later went into R&D until the Union collapsed). One of his high school buddies whom he still knows was an officer on a diesel sub. He told my father that they had a lot of native Siberians, Yakutians and so on in their crew, he joked "Came down from a mountain to buy some medicine for his deer and got dragged into the navy." about them. A lot of them didn't speak Russian so the solution was simple, you don't understand the order you get a fist to the face, still don't understand it, the procedure gets repeated, by the end of the first month all of them spoke Russian.