#7
Financial Times (UK)
12 December 2002
Russia's conscript army frozen in communist past
By Andrew Jack in Moscow

Sergei should never have been drafted into the Russian army, but he began his two-year stint in good faith. It was only after several months of appalling food, beatings and demands for money by other soldiers in his unit that he decided to desert.

A weak, 18-year-old loner whose health problems included childhood meningitis, he was conscripted because he could not provide the medical documents to prove his illnesses. His refusal to finish his military service cost him three months in prison.

His story of violence, misery and alcohol-sodden evenings in the total absence of officers is a familiar tale for thousands of deserters each year. It is also at the core of the broader problems facing Russia's armed forces as discussion grows about the latest round of proposed military reforms.

When George Robertson, Nato's secretary general, visited Moscow this week, he spoke of the challenges of terrorism: "The military forces of yesterday - huge arsenals of battle tanks, static headquarters and inflexible soldiers - are not only useless in meeting these new threats. They also divert scarce defence resources away from urgent and pressing modernisation."

In theory, he was preaching to the converted. Sergei Ivanov, the defence minister appointed by President Vladimir Putin in 2001 with a mandate to bring about reform, announced last month that the era when "the task of the army was survival" was over and the aim today was "raising the professional skills of soldiers".

While some soldiers have been hired on professional contracts since 1992, he promised more by next June as the centrepiece of a wider overhaul.

But the task is enormous. Under Mr Ivanov is a Soviet-era monolith still locked into a cold-war mentality with substantial interest in maintaining the status quo. It employs about 2m people and spends more than $50bn a year, according to some estimates.

Valentina Dmitrievna, head of the Soldiers' Mothers Committee, is sceptical. "I have heard discussions about military reform since 1990. Boris Yeltsin promised the abolition of conscription by 2000," she says. "This latest effort is just another bureaucrats' game to push the timetable beyond 2011 when Putin and Ivanov will no longer be in power."

In Ms Dmitrievna's cramped office in Moscow, a queue of nervous mothers and deserters seek advice. Bulging files bear details of nearly 2,000 conscripts from Moscow alone who walked out this year. She estimates up to 50,000 desert each year in Russia, most with stories of being beaten, robbed or humiliated. Conscription is one of the most powerful legacies of communism, delivering some 350,000 young recruits a year for their two-year terms.

It continues to haunt Russians with teenage boys today, and many will do anything to protect them from bullying, humiliation and even death.

One man put his career on the line, hoping a job transfer to the US could help his son avoid the draft. A Moscow woman is already saving towards the $5,000 bribe friends say it will cost for her 14-year-old to avoid the draft when he turns 18.

But many within the armed forces oppose change. Top military men fear a professional army - with higher salaries and better barracks - will cost too much, and suspect it will be hard to find enough recruits. Mr Ivanov placates them by stressing that some form of conscription will remain.

Some officers still hold a deep-seated belief in the need to remain ready for war against western Europe. And there is a resistance to delegating authority to non-commissioned officers, the backbone of army discipline and training in many other countries.

For more cynical commanders, conscripts are a source of free labour - and money, if they are hired out to others, or even sold into near-slavery in the North Caucasus, according to the worst stories.

And for those administering the draft, corruption helps perpetuate the existing system.

The real victims are the conscripts themselves. Aside from the several thousand casualties in Chechnya since 1999, Ms Dmitrievna estimates more than 2,000 die each year from accidents, murder or suicide.

Lieutenant-General Vasily Smirnov, head of the General Staff's mobilisation unit, doubts such figures: "These mothers would do better to concentrate on feeding their sons well so that they can be strong and fulfil their constitutional obligations," he says.

He concedes that there were problems in the mid-1990s, and personally he would like to see a professional army. But in the meantime, he argues that the number of allegations examined by military prosecutors has fallen in recent years.

There are certainly some signs of hope. Last week Alvaro Gil-Robles, the Council of Europe's human rights commissioner, hosted a closed session with representatives of European armies on human rights and the military.

He sees it as positive that the first ever such meeting took place in Moscow, while highlighting a distinction between most participants' idea of "individual human rights" and the Russians, who stressed the "collective " - the state comes first.

Meanwhile, incidents such as that in which 53 protesting conscripts walked out of their unit in Volgograd this September, or the soldier who last month killed several of his colleagues in the Caucasus after eating hallucinogenic mushrooms, serve as a painful reminder to Mr Ivanov of the challenges ahead.

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