Boston Globe

14 June 1998

THOUSANDS FLEE RUSSIA'S BRUTAL MILITARY

Fugitives fear hazing, death in armed forces

By By David Filipov

MOSCOW - Every few days, the powerfully built men in Russian military uniforms pound on the door to the central Moscow apartment, frightening the neighbors and threatening the occupants with fines, imprisonment, and worse if they do not give up their son, 23-year-old Alex.

The men always go away angry, empty-handed, and vowing to return. For Alex is on the run from the law. His crime is that he does not want to do his compulsory service in Russia's armed forces, where brutality and maltreatment of draftees is the only reality.

For the five years since he turned 18 and his number came up, Alex's life has been driven, as he puts it, by ''pure, animal fear.'' He frequently changes jobs and apartments, avoids encounters with authorities and trips to the doctor. Most of all, he stays away from his parents' home and those soldiers who keep trying to break down the steel door.

Vitaly, 19, has not been so lucky. He was walking to the street market where he makes his living as a vendor when two military men accosted him and dragged him to his local draft board. The law says soldiers have no right to arrest people in Russia, but during draft season, no one cares much about the law.

Neither man would provide his last name.

June is the month when the thoughts of tens of thousands of Russian young men like Alex and Vitaly turn to life on the lam in a desperate attempt to avoid service in the country's harsh, hungry, and underfunded military. They are pursued by modern-day press gangs of burly soldiers and military recruitment officers, no less desperate to meet enlistment quotas and fill the ranks of the world's second-largest armed forces, after China, by the spring draft deadline at the end of the month. These people have been known to beat, imprison, even plant drugs on their quarry - anything to get their man.

Russia's Defense Ministry estimates that 30,000 men skipped the draft last year, and the number is expected to be higher in 1998. They do not run from fear of another Chechnya, the ugly 20-month civil war that claimed the lives of 80,000, according to unofficial estimates, many of them Russian servicemen.

What turns so many men into fugitives is a different statistic, this one official: On only three days last year, when the country was not at war, a Russian soldier did not die. Of more than 1,700 victims, 500 are believed to have been suicides. Non-military observers say they believe the real figures are much higher.

''Young people are not afraid that they will have to shoot another person, but that they will kill you in training or in the barracks,'' said Alex. ''I personally wouldn't serve in any army, but for most others, the main thing is fear.''

The specter of the war with Chechnya is seared into the life of the ordinary Russian grunt, even now, nearly two years after the fighting stopped. The humiliating Russian defeat, which many Russian and Western analysts attributed in part to the low morale and poor training of the Russian forces, has spawned a name for the hazing and harassment of new recruits.

''If they hit you in the face, they tell you `Chechnya.' If some idiot shoots at you with a machine gun, it's `Chechnya,''' said Muscovite Alexander Gorokhov, who recently finished a two-year hitch serving near Vladivostok.

Hazing exists in any army. But in Russia, hazing is particularly brutal.

How bad is it? When the military opened a hazing hot line this year to allow soldiers the chance to drop the dime on their tormentors, they received 2,000 calls in the first month. Shootings among soldiers, like an incident in May in which four servicemen killed their commanding officer, have become so commonplace that they are no longer front page news.

Yury Dyomin, Russia's top military prosecutor, has vowed to crack down on hazing. But his efforts have had little visible effect so far. The Defense Ministry says that 20,000 Russian soldiers have deserted their posts in the past four years. Despite an amnesty program set up by Dyomin that allows deserters to explain why they bolted, few want to risk the mandatory five-year prison sentence if the army does not accept their explanations.

Valentina Melnikova, of the Committee of Soliders' Mothers, a non-government watchdog on military affairs, puts the number of deserters at at least twice the official total. In most cases, she says, deserters cite beatings, hunger, forced imprisonment, and other mistreatment as the reason for leaving their units.

Some military analysts say they believe a smaller, well-paid professional army would have higher morale and better leadership, and therefore less hazing, than Russia's huge, chronically underfunded conscript army of 1.5 million servicemen.

In 1996, during an election campaign and at the height of the Chechen war, President Boris N. Yeltsin promised to cancel the draft and move to a professional armed forces of 500,000 men by 2000.

This promise may have helped Yeltsin win reelection. But this year, his defense minister, Igor Sergeyev, has said a transition to a professional army would take as much as five years longer. If Yeltsin honors his word and does not run for a third term in 2000, some of the favorites to replace him do not support his plans for military reform. One potential front-runner, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, has denounced the idea.

Meanwhile, the army, which in Soviet days was seen as a ''school of life,'' and an integral part of becoming a man, is now loathed as a hellish prison to avoid at all costs. One recent opinion poll showed that 82 percent of young people do not want to serve in Russia's armed forces.

As in most countries, the rich and resourceful in Russia have ways to avoid military service. They can pay bribes of up to $5,000 to recruitment officers, or pay slightly less for doctors to ''find'' an illness that disqualifies them from service. Some men enter into fictitious marriages with women who have infants to exploit a two-year delay for new fathers.

Alex chose to run because he could not pay the bribes. The irony of his situation is that he has declared himself a conscientious objector to military service, which, under Russia's 1993 constitution, should grant him the right to alternative civilian service.

But the law detailing how such alternative service should work has been bogged down in Parliament for four years, and the powerful military lobby of the lower house of Parliament, the State Duma, is dead set against passing it any time soon. As a result, recruitment officers ignore the constitutional right.

So have the courts. In one highly publicized case here this spring, a Moscow judge ruled that Alexander Borodin, a 23-year-old conscientious objector, was guilty of dodging the draft. Borodin was ordered to pay a fine of $2,840 by the judge, who also ordered him to report and serve. The case was a warning to young men like Alex, who believe that their best bet is to remain in hiding. Thousands of others not do not even know they have a right not to serve.

''The draft board doesn't tell them and the papers don't write about it, and the people don't know the Constitution,'' said Nikolai Khramov of Russia's Antimilitaristic Radical Association, which opposes the draft and advises young men to declare themselves conscientious objectors.

Khramov tells draft-age, able-bodied men to obey the law by appearing at their draft boards, but then to demand alternative civilian service. A complicated appeal process ensues, and the army usually threatens criminal proceedings. But in most cases when the would-be draftee follows the letter of the law, and exposes the contradictions in it, he wins, Khramov says.

Khramov's efforts have come under attack from the military lobby, which says he is teaching people to break the law. Melnikova of Soldiers' Mothers, which also advises young men how to legally avoid the draft, disagrees.

''The fact that you don't support that kind of military service is also a kind of social action,'' Melnikova said. ''If the state doesn't want to change the way its military is run, maybe if we get enough people involved, we can make them do it.''