Yeah, the ranking system exists only on paper. IIRC it was established in 2005, but there's not really a record of who's what rank (other than the various degrees of Master of Sports).
Some events are held and sanctioned by other sambo organizations or associations. That's why sometimes you'll see sport and combat sambo events where the participants wear no headgear, where there's less weight classes, where there's no weight classes, or where they can wear a white kurtka.
Just like in BJJ; not all BJJ events are sanctioned nor organized by the IBJJF.
I could say Dragunov's sambo is portrayed as accurately as Sub Zero's shotokan karate in Mortal Kombat.
There is a lot of variation in self-defense/military sambo. In part, because in the russian army, there's no unified system for hand-to-hand combat. The hand-to-hand combat training is delegated to the divisional commander, who may pass on the task to a brigade commander. So that's why in the russian army, some units train tae kwon do, others train kyokushin karate, shotokan, sport sambo, combat sambo, and others train "military sambo".
So over the course of the years of a brigade/division using "military sambo", the sambo they use is tweaked to accomodate the divisional/brigade's needs. After all, sambo is "defense without weapons".
So sometimes you'll see OMON units (kind of a military police) training a "military sambo" that is much more oriented towards restraining (grappling) and disarming, than say, a Spetsnaz unit that performs specialized missions (extraction, anti-terrorist, hostage, etc).
I've seen some people refer to the variant of sambo that the Spetsnaz use, as "Spetsnaz sambo". And for good reason, because they do training you normally won't see in a "regular sambo school" - like ukemi while carrying guns, a knife, fighting in body armour, CQC with guns, etc. Some people say they are "Spetsnaz sambo" instructors. And if they say so because they teach unarmed combat (sambo) to Spetsnaz units, well, you can't really argue with that.
Some people say these specialized forms of sambo look a lot like Systema. I personally think that SOME forms of Systema are very specialized versions of combat sambo. But let's not deal with politics and history (for now!).
These are actual Spetsnaz beating the crap out of each other. You can see they wear sambo kurtka.
YouTube - Spetsnaz "Vitjaz" training
As usual, when it comes to the military, they don't have the same technical level of a professional that trains in the same martial art/sport. Simply because a soldier has to spread his training amongst various skills, and someone who is not in the military can specialize in just hand-to-hand combat. You can't compare one of the guys in the previous video to Fedor Emelianenko and say "that soldier sucks". Just like you can't say X soldier that trains Army Combatives "sucks" when you compare him to Vitor Belfort.
