RIGHTS: Young Draftees Tortured In The Russian Armed Forces

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Andrei Ivanov

MOSCOW, Dec 4 1997 (IPS) - Late on the night of Nov. 22, 1997, Vladimir Maltsev finally snapped. A young soldier based at Radar Post 11 in the Trans-Baikal Frontier District, he took his gun and killed five of his fellow soldiers before escaping into the night.

He was found the next day sleeping in a haystack two kilometres from the post. He offered no resistance during his arrest. He now faces murder charges that could end in life imprisonment, or even the death sentence.

Maltsev had been a victim of what the Russian soldiers call ‘dedovshchina’ — prolonged and vicious hazing. Dozens of soldiers are dying at the hands of fellow soldiers, thousands more are deserting, risking years of incarceration in even more vicious military jails. Almost all the victims are young draftees.

Conditions in the Russian military are “inhuman”, says Nikita Cheldymov, a member of President Boris Yeltsin’s human rights commission. He can cite 1,408 reported cases of bullying or hazing in the first nine months of 1997 — the real total is much greater. Over the same period 314 officers and men committed suicide.

Life in the Russian armed forces, starved of the state funds to pay their troops, let alone feed and keep them warm, has turned national service into a deadly experience.

Accidents with substandard equipment, careless safety routines and plain thuggery claimed the lives of 1,037 service personnel in the first nine months of this year, compared to only 974 over the same time period in 1996. In addition another 2,106 were injured.

With some understatement, Commission Chairman Vladimir Karashkin says soldiers and sailors, especially in their first year of service, are not enjoying the rights and freedoms guaranteed to them by the constitution. “The picture we are getting is a depressing one,” he says.

To try to deal with the situation, the Military Prosecutor’s Office recently dispatched 110 staff members to units to six military districts in ‘surprise’ raids.

The first two inspections targeted two crack units, where regimental traditions and elite status encourage this kind of macho brutality.

The first was the Moscow Security brigade attached to the Defence Ministry itself and a special-purpose division from the International Troops airmobile unit, formerly known as the Dzerzhinsky Division.

The raids resulted in criminal proceedings being initiated against 60 people. In the Dzerzhinsky Division, notorious for its operations in Chechnya, they found evidence of 272 crimes. One young soldier was forced to eat a rat in a small punishment cell.

Military Prosecutor Yuri Dyomin, who led the investigations, describes conditions as “terrible”. The investigators also found a young conscript confined to hospital with a ruptured spleen after a beating from his officer.

Over 100 soldiers in the division were known to have suffered severe injuries and trauma through similar beatings, but only 37 cases were handed over to the prosecutor’s office. The investigators also found evidence of more than 20 cases of hazing which had not been reported to them.

Most victims simply run away. The Dzerzhinsky division alone is searching for 180 deserters. Overall, an estimated 10,000 servicemen have abandoned their divisions, according to Valentina Melnikova, spokeswoman for the Soldiers’ Mothers Committee in St Petersburg.

She says some 70 percent of the 10,000 inquiries the organisation deals with each year are related to hazing. Each year, over 2,000 young men, mostly conscripts, contact the organisation’s headquarters with stories of maltreatment and abuse which have resulted in their deserting their battalions.

Melnikova advises parents of abused servicemen to take immediate legal action by writing complaints to the Military Prosecutor’s Office and obtaining medical and psychological evaluations to confirm charges of hazing.

In October 1996 the organisation submitted a report on torture in the armed forces to the U.N. Committee against Torture. The report stated that in 1996 alone they had been approached by 601 servicemen who had deserted their army units because of torture and ill-treatment.

Of these, 221 had been tortured, 34 had been forcibly taken into the army and 30 had applied to the Soldiers’ Mothers because they feared being sent to Chechnya, where one of the most brutal wars fought by Russia in half a century was then raging. Some 57 servicemen were released from army service following a court decision on their poor state of health due to torture.

The report also contains cases of soldiers who died of starvation in their barracks. In March 1996 in the town of Khabarovsk, in two separate incidents, soldiers Mikhail Kubarsky and Nikolai Mikheyev, died of starvation.

Subsequently 55 more soldiers were sent to hospital suffering from malnutrition. The commander of the unit was dismissed and nine other commanding officers were disciplined, but no criminal charges were ever brought.

In December 1995, private Dmitry Zhukov, 19, stationed on the island of Severny Berezovy in the Finnish Gulf, was hospitalised in the town of Vyborg almost dead from starvation. He also had multiple injuries to his head and back, allegedly as a result of ill-treatment and abuse by a commanding officer.

In a letter to his mother Zhukov says the commander of the base deprived him of food rations to punish him for his “slowness”. One of the other soldiers later admitted that he had seen Zhukov eating from a dog-bowl. He was suffering from stomatitis (inflammation of the mouth) and early stages of kidney failure.

Earlier this year, Amnesty International produced a report on ‘Torture And Ill-Treatment in the Army and Ill-Treatment of Conscientious Objectors’.

It documented “the inhumane treatment of soldiers, including lack of suitable housing, poor nutrition, and unsanitary conditions, has resulted in outbreaks of disease, such as hepatitis and dysentery”. It also said officers had subjected soldiers to inhuman and cruel punishment.

In September 1994, for example, the commander of the Northern Fleet cruiser Admiral Gorshkov allegedly punished soldiers who violated discipline by locking them into a metal pit, some for as long as 370 days. Seven sailors, imprisoned in a room measuring just four square metres, were killed when a steam pipe burst.

Amnesty International is not aware of any investigation of this incident, but in future it may be more difficult for officers to keep such activities secret.

Dyomin says his investigators were shocked by what they found in their recent investigations. “When people are being beaten unmercifully, they have nowhere to turn,” he explains. “Without a doubt, we need military police in the Russian military, but the biggest problem is financing.”