Knout:
A leather scourge (multi-tail whip), in the severe version known as ‘great knout’ with metal weights on each tongue, notoriously used in imperial Russia. [Wiktionary]
Noted in “Ukraine’s military culture is its biggest advantage over the Russians,” Max Boot, WaPo:
Two of the Russian weaknesses identified by the Economist [in 1854] particularly leap out. First: “The Russian armies are often armies on paper only. … The colonels of regiments and officers of the commissariat have a direct interest in having as large a number on the books and as small a number in the field as possible — inasmuch as they pocket the pay and rations of the difference between these figures.” Second: “Common soldiers … have no love of their profession, and no interest in the object of the war.” That was because the typical Russian private was “torn from his family and his land, drilled by the knout, neglected by his officers, fed on black bread, where fed at all, always without comforts, often without shoes.”
