Full Metal Torture - the Russian military's culture of brutality

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https://www.vice.com/en/article/gqdx44/full-v13n4

Full Metal Torture
Over the recent New Year's holidays, Private Andrei Sychyov's superiors tied him to a chair and beat him continuously for hours and hours, taking breaks only to sustain their drinking binge.
by Jake Rudnitsky
March 31, 2006, 6:00pm

Over the recent New Year’s holidays, Private Andrei Sychyov’s superiors tied him to a chair and beat him continuously for hours and hours, taking breaks only to sustain their drinking binge. When it was over, Sychyov was told not to say a peep. He didn’t complain, and the doctors who examined him reported that he was fine. A few days later, gangrene appeared in his most badly beaten areas. He was rescued from death only by having both legs and his genitalia amputated. While this example of savage hazing in the Russian army made headlines everywhere, one detail too gruesome yet all too common was left out: The officers also repeatedly raped the shit out of the poor young conscript.

The word “hazing” doesn’t come close to capturing the terror of dedovshchina, or the “rule of grandfathers,” in the Russian army. Dedovshchina isn’t some prank where the victims are forced to shotgun cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon until they puke. Dedovshchina is what happens when the officer corps loses authority and 19-year-old conscripts start making the rules for the 17- and 18-year-olds. It is so bad that draftees fear it far more than Chechnya. One former soldier, Vlad, told Vice, “On our first day in the barracks, everybody yelled at us, ‘Hang yourselves now, it’s too much shit to handle.’” Many soldiers sooner or later take that advice: The Russian army averages some 500 suicides a year, or about 45 per 100,000 soldiers. The U.S., by contrast, averages about 17 per 100,000. Military prosecutors say that dedovshchina is the primary reason for suicide. More than 10,000 soldiers desert every year, for the same reason. Others go nuts, like two conscripts in 2002 who shot dead eight fellow soldiers at their outpost in Ingushetia, in southern Russia. When they were captured a couple of days later, they claimed they did it “to avenge dedovshchina.”

Indeed, incidents of AWOL soldiers heading into the forests and leaving a few corpses behind are incredibly common. The abuse starts from day one, when older soldiers seize the recruits’ newly issued clothes and replace them with used, ill-fitting rags. This isn’t just an intimidating gesture; it helps identify the new recruits, who are called dukhi, or “ghosts.” Recruits are drafted to serve two years, which, according to the rules of dedovshchina, are broken up into four six-month segments. Second-year soldiers, who are usually 19 or 20, are referred to as “old-timers,” and soldiers with less than half a year left are called dedy, or “grandfathers.” The dedy have more authority than even officers, and they are eager to get their turn after the abuse they suffered. Besides, the system of dedovshchina has a built-in mechanism to make sure that it perpetuates itself: If old-timers aren’t harsh enough on new conscripts, they themselves will be “demoted” back to the level of dukh. Last year, at least 16 soldiers died from abuse at the hands of dedy.

Both physical and psychological abuse continue nonstop. While there are no statistics on it, Valentina Melnikova, who runs the Union of Soldiers’ Mothers Committees, says that rape is endemic. She mentions sleep deprivation, beatings, starvation, and forced labor as some of the other tactics used to break dukhi. One particularly foul type of torture is forcing a dukh to scrub the toilets with a toothbrush. These toilets are shit-splattered holes in the ground with barely running water, nothing like those spotless tile johns in Full Metal Jacket. Using a toothbrush to clean them is like asking an elephant to wipe his ass with Q-tips. We asked Lyosha, another former soldier, about dedovshchina. He showed Vice a scar as thick as a thumb running from his navel to his Adam’s apple. While he refused to elaborate on the circumstances behind the scar, he did say, “I served the rest of my term in the hospital.”

The roots of dedovshchina go back at least to the 1960s, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union it mutated from a ritual of breaking in new recruits to a sadistic system of torture and abuse. After 1991, the army descended into chaos and it became possible to buy your way out of conscription. It currently costs around $5,000 to escape the draft and, given the horrors of dedovshchina, anyone who can afford it pays. Only the poorest ten percent of Russians end up serving. They tend to be the dregs of society, often the children of raging alcoholics or petty criminals. As a rule you won’t find any Muscovite or Petersburg kids serving in the army. Dedovshchina is exacerbated by the fact that Russian petty officers only get around $200 a month. Even in a country as poor as Russia, that’s not nearly enough to live on. Officers quickly realize that one of the best ways to supplement their income is to convert the only resource they have into cash. They start renting out their conscripts as cheap day laborers. The system of dedovshchina lends itself to this by putting the responsibility for running the business on the old-timers. The dedy force the dukhi to cough up money regularly. Ragged soldiers begging for money are a frequent sight in Moscow, and conscripts are often “rented out” for use at construction sites.

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