AN OFFICER'S CAREER IN THE ARMED FORCES OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION: SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL ASPECTS

Special military operation has objectively aggravated the problem of revising the attitude to an officer's career, at the head of which should be the maximum meritocratic criteria of promotion. In this context it is required to define at what stages and under what conditions the most and the least effective career movements take place, to reveal the driving forces and mechanisms of an officer's career. The article considers and analyzes the genesis of officers' careers in three periods: 1) pre-revolutionary (18th century - 1917), 2) Soviet (1917-1991) and 3) post-Soviet, contemporary (since 1992 till the present). The peculiarities and specificity of an officer's career in peacetime and wartime have been revealed. The urgency is characterized by the introduction of the mechanism of stratification movement of officers of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation as a "program" of selection on higher posts of the best candidates, on the basis of meritocratic principle. Thus, the analysis presented in the article allows us to conclude that the development and implementation of the career mechanism is an important practical and scientific task. There is a search for the optimal model of an officer's career, taking into account the age, professional and job qualifications, as well as historical experience and the requirements of the ongoing special military operation.