I really enjoyed Suvorov's The Aquarium, about his career and defection as a GRU officer, but Spetsnaz is simply not as compelling.

Suvorov provides an overview of the doctrine and training of Soviet special forces, the Spetsnaz. The overall objective of the Spetsnaz is strategic reconnaissance and chaos. Some categories of objectives are clearly military, to locate and destroy NATO nuclear weapons, aircraft, radar, and other key facilities on the eve of a general attack to clear the way for the Red Army. But Spetsnaz also has objectives of political terror and sabotage, using the weeks leading up to war to dislocate NATO infrastructure and political systems.

Spetsnaz training is self-consciously extreme, combining snake-eating machismo with the omerta of Russian prison gangs. Spetsnaz soldiers are desensitized to violence, hardship, and danger, and trained to use deception and torture to achieve their ends. Training includes frequent beatings, harsh survival exercises against the Siberian wilderness and Soviet internal security, and obstacle courses that include a literal maze of blood.

Suvorov reveals several secrets. The Soviet athletic complex is intimately bound up with Spetsnaz, with the top ranks of the organization consisting of Olympic quality athletes, especially those focusing on militarily useful sports like parachuting, scuba diving, and mountaineering. Western Europe is also riddle with Spetsnaz agents and safehouses, locations operated by non-political local pensioners stocked with supplies and vehicles. In the event of war, Spetsnaz soldiers will infiltrate to these prepared safehouses, stock up, kill their owners to ensure silence, and then carry out their attacks.

It's all very thrilling, very hardcore, but also somewhat abstract and graceless, especially compared to the sharp specificity of The Aquarium