Arrival in Moscow. Because Lena believes that her work as a guide is to make those in her charge see things as they really are, she takes us-a group of visiting academics-directly to Pushkin Square. Adored for almost two centuries as only a Russian poet is adored, Pushkin represented in stone continues to receive fresh cut flowers laid at his feet daily.
But today at this site, concern is for the recently dead. Mothers of soldiers killed while serving in the army hold up crudely printed placards displaying the picture of a deceased 18-year-old in his military uniform. Seeing them, and listening to them-as translated for us-I am struck by the courage of these women and the similarity they bear to the Argentinian Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenas Aires of the late 1980s, carrying pictures of
”the disappeared” day after day, demanding justice.
A sorrowful and solidly determined woman tells me the story of her son, who was inducted into the army at 18 and came home in a coffin. She asks me to write about the atrocities that are a part of army life in the USSR. Activated rather than depressed by pain, Lubov Lymar is the driving force in the loosely organized Mothers of Russia.
The next night I follow Lena-who is also a teacher-through a maze of hotel corridors to a room where members of a network of bereaved relatives meet. Their hope is to bring public opinion to stop what is going on in the army. Still, it does not take long to see that this room serves also as a place for them to bring their grief. Lubov says that the bodies of many of the young men shipped home in coffins bear marks of torture. The official report in such cases states: suicide.
How did this movement, driven by the energy of the women, begin?
”Spontaneously,” Lymar said. ”Five, 10, 15 in a town would get together. It was an explosion in the society. Mothers began to talk-a boy was killed-and another. It started with the war in Afghanistan.”
The coffins continued to arrive after the war was over.
”In the Baltic republics there were 10 or 15,” Lymar said. ”The mothers began to meet in military cemeteries. When they received the coffins, they saw the signs of violence.”
The mothers` organization quotes figures that of an armed forces of some 4 million, several thousand die every year at the hands of fellow soldiers. A recruit is set apart from the others. Difference marks him.
In the hotel room, letters are read. One is to the grandmother of a soldier. ”Dear Granny, let them bury me on our ground-not this (profanity)
place. Tell everybody nobody shoots here, but this is worse than being a prisoner of war. Worse than the SS. You will see me, but I will not see you.” Abuse of 18-year-old inductees, mothers` group members say, is by ”the Grandfathers,” 20-year-olds who have gained seniority during their two-year stint in the army. Ethnicity and even superior intellect may fuel hatred that subjects a man to forms of hazing and leads to his death.
”The powerful military suppress the personality,” Lubov says. ”We are the first to cry aloud. We have lost fear. We think the common people understand us. The governments don`t need us. They think they are not accountable to anybody.”
The day of our departure in late May, Lena gives me the news that the Russian Federation Parliament will organize a committee to adopt into law a penalty of up to 20 years for humiliation of a soldier, a death sentence for the death of a soldier. On the same day, an issue of the Soviet magazine, Ogonyon, is published with a story on abuse in the army. The article`s title is ”Dead and Alive.” In Leningrad I meet with Olga Lipovskaya, a translator, who tells me that she will risk anything to prevent her son from being inducted into the army.
Several weeks after returning to Illinois, I reach Lena on the phone in Moscow. She has word that the Congress of Parents of the Soldiers will meet soon to reorganize their committees split by pocket groups set up by the Communist Party. I think of individuals banding together to struggle against entrenched power and realize that much of my new understanding of the experience of women, theme of the symposium that took me to Moscow, did not come to me at the conference table.
