Pvt. Andrei Sychov had a bad feeling about New Year’s Eve. He knew older soldiers at the Chelyabinsk Tank Academy were bound to get drunk, which meant they would be prowling for first-year draftees to haze.
When he called his mother, Galina Sychova, on Dec. 29, Sychova heard the dread in her 19-year-old son’s voice. “He said he didn’t want to see the drunken faces of the officers and soldiers,” Sychova said. “He just didn’t want to be there.”
On New Year’s Eve, Sychov’s foreboding became reality. After an all-night binge, a group of older soldiers ordered Sychov and seven other first-year conscripts to clean up after them, military prosecutors told the Sychov family. A quarrel ensued, and the older, second-year conscripts forced Sychov to crouch in a knee-bend for more than three hours. One older soldier in combat boots viciously kicked Sychov’s legs and feet.
The abuse caused clotting in the young private’s legs that turned his feet black. By the time Sychov arrived at Chelyabinsk Hospital No. 3 five days later, gangrene had set in, and the damage was irreparable. Doctors first amputated part of his left leg. A little more than a week later, they removed his right leg just below the knee, his genitals and one of his fingers.
“I thought things like this only happened in the movies,” said Sychova, clutching a photo of her son in uniform. “The first time I saw him in the hospital, it was horrifying–tubes and needles everywhere. I had to walk out of the room.”
A source of pride during Soviet years, today’s Russian military is plagued by a host of problems ranging from substandard health care to corruption. Sychov’s case has put hazing atop that list.
Thousands desert each year
Thousands of Russian conscripts desert each year to escape hazing from older soldiers, according to military family advocacy groups. Hazing killed 16 draftees last year, Russia’s Defense Ministry said. Another 276 conscripts committed suicide, and hazing was believed to be a factor in nearly half those cases, a military prosecutor told the Interfax news agency.
Hazing exists in armed forces across the globe, and indeed existed in the old Soviet army, but young conscripts face brutality that plumbs new depths. Already in an uproar over what happened in Chelyabinsk, Russians learned recently that Sychov’s plight appears to have been preceded by a similar case. Authorities are investigating allegations that a conscript in Russia’s Far East whose legs were amputated last spring was the victim of brutal hazing.
Ridiculing draftee Yevgeny Koblov as fat and slow, older soldiers at a base in Khabarovsk pummeled Koblov on May 2, said Valentina Reshetkina, head of the Khabarovsk branch of the Soldiers’ Mothers Committee, an advocacy group for military families. Unable to walk, Koblov crawled into the basement of a nearby apartment building and hid for 23 days. By the time a crew of plumbers discovered him, his legs were too damaged to save. Doctors amputated both legs below the knee.
Investigators began looking into the Koblov case only after Sychov’s ordeal became national news, Reshetkina said. On Thursday, prosecutors arrested a soldier, Dmitry Nagaitsev, in connection with the Koblov beating. Up until Nagaitsev’s arrest, the only person charged had been Koblov, who was accused of deserting his base.
Such cases help explain why parents of draft-age men scramble for ways to keep their sons out of the military, either by securing university deferrals or bribing doctors for medical waivers. The bulk of the 400,000 Russians drafted each year come from the country’s poorest families.
For several years, President Vladimir Putin has been pushing new rules that would require half the military’s troops to be paid volunteer soldiers. The draft still would be in force, but conscripts would serve one year instead of the two-year terms they serve now.
The government, however, has been slow to implement the changes. Moreover, experts say they believe the Kremlin’s plan doesn’t go far enough. Hazing flourishes because the military lacks a well-trained corps of sergeants that can maintain discipline in the barracks, said Alexander Golts, a Moscow military affairs analyst.
Instead, second-year conscripts with little training and no pay are relied upon to maintain discipline, a policy that invites abuse, experts say. Second-year conscripts who were physically and psychologically abused by older soldiers during their first year find that in their second year, it is their chance to mete out the abuse.
“There is no supervision at all, and the army just stews in its own juice,” Golts said.
As a result, a draftee’s first year often devolves into a hellish exercise in servitude and predation known in military circles as dedovshchina, or “rule of the grandfathers.” The “grandfathers,” soldiers who already have served a year, enslave first-year conscripts with an endless stream of chores, from bedmaking and shoe-shining to panhandling money for liquor and cigarettes.
Draftees who resist face a vast array of punishment. The conscript can be ordered to perform 200 push-ups. Or he can be punched and kicked by a band of older soldiers. The penalty for not shaving, according to a 2004 Human Rights Watch report on hazing in the Russian military, is being burned on the face with a lighter.
When groups such as the Soldiers’ Mothers Committee confront military authorities with allegations of hazing and physical abuse, commanders routinely downplay the accusations or cover them up.
In the case of Sychov, Chelyabinsk Tank Academy commander Maj. Gen. Viktor Sidorov was told what happened but reported to his superiors in Moscow that the amputations were performed because of an illness Sychov was suffering, not because of any attack, military prosecutors said. Sidorov has been relieved of his duties and charged with covering up what happened to Sychov.
Code of silence
Perhaps the best evidence of the code of silence that shrouds hazing in the Russian military comes from Sychov himself. After he was hospitalized, he resisted telling anyone what had happened, says Renat Talipov, the surgeon at Chelyabinsk Hospital No. 3 who performed the amputations.
Since then, Sychov has given investigators details about the abuse. He named the alleged ringleader of the attack, Alexander Sivyakov, who has since been arrested and charged. Sychova also wants her son to explain what happened–when the time is right.
“On the third week he was in the hospital, I asked him, `Have you been beaten?'” Sychova said. “He wrote down on a piece of paper, `Yes, on my heel and calf.’ That was the only information I could get. We’ve never come back to it. When it is time, we’ll talk more about it.”
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ajrodriguez@tribune.com
