Carey Schofield
It is
often the case that people who have achieved something truly remarkable are
exceedingly (and genuinely) modest about what they have done. Carey Schofield
is just such a person. When I first came across Carey’s name I admit it was
with a tinge of jealousy. It was 1991, and she had just published a book
entitled Inside the
Soviet Military. She had spent months researching the book by living
alongside Soviet soldiers, gaining the kind of access which I could only have
dreamt about during my time as a Soviet military analyst from 1982 to 1988.
When I saw Carey in early 2020 after a gap of many years she told me that she
was now running a school in Pakistan, and had been for the past seven years. I
was intrigued, and asked her if she would share more of her amazing story with
me.
 |
| Carey Schofield, London, February 2020 |
Almost 30
years after her first book on the Soviet armed forces was published there is
still one question which stands out for anyone who knew the Soviet Union: how
on earth could a foreign journalist – and a woman, too – gain the kind of
access necessary to produce such an insightful work as Inside the Soviet
Military? Even given the more relaxed atmosphere under President Mikhail
Gorbachev compared to all of his predecessors, surely the armed forces would be
the last bastion of Soviet rigidity?
“I was
fascinated by the changes which were taking place thanks to glasnost and
perestroika [Gorbachev’s policies of openness and restructuring – SD]”,
says Carey, “and wondered how these were affecting the Soviet military. So I
asked for access. It took a while, but eventually I was granted it. And once I
was in the system and had the backing of senior officers I was able to travel
quite easily from one unit to another. I travelled right across the Soviet
Union, from Leningrad to Kamchatka. One thing which fascinated me was that the Army
seemed then to have no real grasp of the implications of what was going on in
Eastern Europe.”
The socialist
systems imposed by the Soviet Union after the Second World War collapsed like
dominoes throughout 1989, the symbolic highlight being the fall of the Berlin
Wall on 9 November. Carey continues: “At the time it almost felt as though the fall
of the Wall was having no effect on the Soviet military. For them, it appeared
then that life would continue as before.”
“But didn’t
they regard you with suspicion?” I ask. “You weren’t just a foreign journalist,
but a woman, too! Given the patriarchal nature of Soviet – and, indeed, Russian
– society, didn’t you feel that they patronised you?”
“No, never.
You know what Russians are like. When you make friends with people they accept
you and introduce you to others. It must have been clear to the Russians that I
loved their country. I got to know people in the airborne forces, the VDV, well.
They were very professional and certainly more confident than others. They took
me to places which I probably shouldn’t have had access to.”
It was
particularly because of her dealings with the VDV that Carey decided to write a
second book, The Russian Elite: Inside Spetsnaz and the Airborne Forces.
This showed her that, curiously, even though Spetsnaz (Voyska spetsialnogo naznacheniya,
Special Purpose Forces, the closest Russia has to the British SAS – SD) were
considered the fighting elite, they were in some cases less well trained and
equipped than the Airborne Forces. The Airborne Forces were formidably
competent and, with their own Headquarters in Moscow, they enjoyed considerable
independence. The Spetsnaz Brigades were full of seasoned fighters, and they
had done more than their bit in Afghanistan and elsewhere, but they didn’t at
that time have such strong institutional support. The Army Spetsnaz forces came
under military intelligence, the GRU (the Main Reconnaissance Directorate) which
devoted most of its attention to intelligence-gathering abroad. The Spetsnaz
Brigades sometimes felt that they were the poor relations within GRU. That
appears to have changed in the decades since then.
It was
noticeable that the Armed Forces all
hated the KGB, the secret service.
A driving
force behind her desire to write these books, Carey laughs, is that she’s “just
nosey!” Certainly her first book was testimony to this. Mesrine, The Life
and Death of a Supercrook, was published in 1980, telling the story of the
French gangster, Jacques Mesrine. She even managed to arrange an interview with
Mesrine when he was on the run from the police.
And her
experiences with the Soviet military helped to encourage Carey to carry out a
similar experience with the Pakistan Army, spending five years with them before
publishing Inside the Pakistan Army in 2011.
The Pakistan
connection helped to pave the way to Carey’s latest venture – or, to be more exact,
adventure. She was asked to use her network to find a new Principal for The
Langlands School and College, in Chitral, in the Hindu Kush in North-Western
Pakistan. The school had been started in 1988, and run by Major Geoffrey
Langlands for over twenty years. In his nineties he was looking for a
successor. After two years fruitlessly searching, Carey offered to take on the
task herself. Seven years later, she is still there.
That, in
itself, is remarkable, and was recognised when she was awarded an OBE for
"services to education and the community in northern Pakistan" in the
2019 New Year Honours List. But from interviewing a gangster, to spending time with
two armies, to being Principal of a school in a remote part of Pakistan, no-one
can be in any doubt that Carey Schofield is, indeed, a remarkable person.
ENDS
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