A FEW SHORTER STORIES
Misha Nikolaev lived in Moscow Province. His family saw him off to the army in July 2001. He was sent to the Border Guards, to a frontier post ten hours’ flying time from Moscow, at the village of Goryachy Plyazh, on Anuchina Island in the Lesser Kurils—the Pacific islands that have vexed Russian and Japanese politicians since the end of the Second World War.
While the two nations argue, someone has to police the border. Misha was one of those doing the job. He lasted just six months at this outpost of the Russian Far East and died on December 22, 2001. By the autumn he had already been writing alarming letters home, having discovered festering sores on his body. He asked his family to send medicine: Vishnevsky’s Balm, sulfanilamide, “in fact, any medicines for treating suppuration, metapyrin, antiseptic, bandages and as much sticking plaster as possible. There is nothing here.” His parents sent off the parcels without complaining; aware that the army is underfunded, they assumed that things could not be all that bad, since Misha was still working as a cook in the army’s kitchens. If he was seriously ill, his parents supposed, he wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near food preparation.
Even when his skin was covered with oozing sores, though, Misha continued to cook meals for the troops. The pathologist who conducted the autopsy reported that the unfortunate soldier’s tissues literally split apart under the scalpel. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a Russian soldier rotted alive under the eyes of his officers, receiving no medical attention at all. What killed Misha was the complete lack of responsibility of his superiors.
DMITRY KISELEV WAS posted to serve in the Moscow Province village of Istra. In Russia such an assignment is regarded as a stroke of luck. He was close to Moscow; his parents, being Muscovites, could visit their son and battle their way through to his commanding officer if he needed help. It was not the Kuril Islands. The location did not, however, save Dmitry from his officers’ depravity.
Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Boronenkov, Private Kiselev’s commanding officer, had a lucrative sideline. Nothing too unusual about that in today’s army. People are up to all sorts of tricks, because their wages don’t amount to much. This particular lieutenant colonel’s enterprise was trading in soldiers. Istra is a dacha settlement of second homes, and Boronenkov sold his soldiers to the owners of nearby plots of land as cheap labor. The soldiers worked only for food; their pay went straight to their commanding officer. This moneymaking scheme is by no means unique. Indeed, it is widespread: soldiers become the unpaid laborers—that is, slaves—of wealthy people for the duration of their military service. In some cases, the officers use the troops as a means of bartering with people they think of as useful. If an officer needs his car repaired and has no money, he herds a few soldiers along to the local body shop. They work there, unpaid, for as long as the shop requires; in return, the officer gets his car fixed.
In late June 2002, it was the turn of the newly conscripted Dmitry Kiselev to be sold into slavery. Private Kiselev was sent to build a house for a certain member of the Mir Horticultural Association in Istra District. Initially he was constructing a house, but then he and seven other conscripts were required to dig a deep trench the length of the plot. On July 2 at seven in the evening, the sides of the trench collapsed, burying three of the troops, including Dmitry, who suffocated under the earth. His parents tried to have Lieutenant Colonel Boronenkov brought to trial, but he wriggled out of it. He knew a lot of useful people. Dmitry was the Kiselevs’ only son.[2]
ON AUGUST 28, 2002, Army Unit 42839 was deployed in Chechnya, not far from the village of Kalinovskaya, a place where there had been no fighting for a long time. The Granddads were drinking themselves silly. Granddads—ordinary soldiers about to be demobilized into the reserves—are the most terrifying, murderous force in the army. In the evening it seemed to the Granddads that they were running short of vodka, so they told the first soldier who came along, Yury Diachenko, to go into the village and “get some more from wherever you like.” The soldier refused. In the first place, he was on duty guarding a section of the perimeter and had no right to leave his post. In the second place, as he explained, he had no money. The Granddads told him to steal something in the village and get them the vodka that way.
Yury, however, said firmly, “No. I won’t go.” They beat him brutally until five in the morning, and between beatings subjected him to cruel and disgusting humiliations. They dipped a floor cloth into the latrine and rubbed the filth in Yury’s face. They forced him to clean the floor, and when he bent over, took turns ramming the handle of the mop into his anus. To conclude their training session, as they called it, the Granddads dragged Yury into the canteen and forced him to eat a three-liter can of kasha, beating him if he tried to stop.
Where were the officers? That night they, too, were drinking themselves senseless and were physically incapable of being in charge of anything. At around six in the morning, Yury Diachenko was found in the provisions depot. He had hanged himself.
ALTHOUGH SIBERIA IS not Chechnya—it is far removed from the war—the distance makes no difference. Valerii Putintsev, a young man born in Tyumen Province, was posted to the Krasnoyarsk Region to serve in the district town of Uzhur, in the elite units of the strategic missile forces. His mother, Svetlana Putintseva, was delighted. Because they were dealing with the most up-to-date and dangerous weaponry on the planet, officers in the missile units were considered to be the best educated in the army, not likely to get drunk or to beat up conscripts, and likely to maintain discipline. Soon, however, she, too, began to receive distressing letters from her son, in which he wrote that the officers were no better than “jackals”:
Hello, Mom! I don’t want this letter to be seen by anyone other than you. In particular, please keep what I am writing from Gran. We both know the score there, and I’m sure you won’t undermine what health she has left. I worry about her a lot. I can’t accept that I have to work as a slave to benefit people I despise. More than anything in the world, I want to work for the good of my own people, to better my family. It’s only since being here that I have understood how important you all are….
Valerii was never to return to work for the good of his people. The officers in the Uzhur barracks robbed the soldiers of everything they had, degrading any who, like Valerii, tried to defend their dignity. In the half year he spent in his unit, four soldiers were carried out in coffins, all of them privates, all of them beaten to death.
The officers’ first game was to confiscate Valerii’s uniform (the soldiers have no clothing apart from their uniforms). They told him that now he had to ransom it. They assumed he would write home and ask for money to be sent as a matter of urgency. Valerii resisted. He knew that his mother lived very modestly with his grandmother, an old-age pensioner, his sister, and her little daughter, and could ill afford to send him money. As a result of his concern for his family, he was brutally and repeatedly beaten. In the end, he had had enough. He turned on the officers and was sent to the guardhouse for insubordination. Pretending he was attempting to escape, they wounded him badly. Svetlana Putintseva became anxious and called the unit’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Butov, who she says informed her that he knew how to beat people so as not to leave any trace. Svetlana dropped everything and flew straight to Uzhur, where she found her son at death’s door. He had gunshot wounds to the pelvis, the bladder, the ureter, and the femoral artery. In the hospital his mother was told to find blood for a transfusion: “Urgently! We have no blood here.” Alone in a strange town, she was expected to find donors. She rushed back to the army unit to ask for help. The commanding officer refused. She scrambled through the city, trying to save her son. She failed. Valerii, lacking a transfusion, died, on February 27, 2002. In one of his last letters, he had written to Svetlana, “I wasn’t expecting much help from the officers. All they are capable of is humiliating people.”
2
This incident was handled in much the same way as the case of the fifty-four soldiers. An inquiry was held by the garrison prosecutor’s office, whose employees were effectively subordinate to the commanding officer of the military unit in which the incident occurred. Again the prosecutor’s office acquitted the officers. The illegal “sale” and “renting out” of soldiers as inexpensive laborers, usually by their junior officers and in order to carry out particular agricultural or building tasks, is common practice in Russia. Payment usually goes to the officers for their role in the deal. It is extremely rare for the soldiers to be paid other than in food, cigarettes, and overnight accommodations. Occasionally no payment is involved. If the officer and the employer are decent people, the soldiers may be moved out of their units for a time simply because they can be more adequately fed away from the army.