#12
In These Times
January 6, 2003
Going AWOL
Russian soldiers desert en masse
By Fred Weir
Moscow

Igor ran away from his central Russian army unit just two months after being inducted. He says he fled because he was repeatedly beaten and sexually abused by older soldiers.

"I'm not against serving in the army, but I won't go back to that unit," says the thin, pimply faced 18-year-old, one of dozens of young military deserters who seek refuge at offices of the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers on any given day. Sergei says officers in his battalion, stationed near the city of Vladimir, organized conscripts into begging rings and forced them to burglarize in local homes. He claims he was beaten with a shovel when he refused. These young men, and the appalling tales many of them tell, are one worrisome signal that the comprehensive military reform announced a year ago by the Kremlin may be collapsing. In an unusually frank speech in May, the Russian army's chief of staff, Gen. Anatoly Kvashnin, admitted that the officer corps is "bogged down in embezzlement and corruption" and that a decade of underfunding and failed reform has left the armed forces in "a post-critical situation."

Breaking decades of secrecy on the subject, the Defense Ministry has conceded that 2,265 conscripts deserted in the first half of 2002, of whom more than 800 are still missing from their units.

The Soldiers' Mothers, which works directly with most runaways, says the true number of deserters is more like 40,000 annually. "The system of compulsory military service in this country is almost indistinguishable from prison," says Natalya Shvol of the group's Moscow office. "In my experience, no young man runs away from his unit except under the most extreme conditions."

The Russian armed forces have about 2 million personnel, including some 800,000 conscripts, who serve a compulsory two years. Twice-yearly conscription drives pull in about a quarter-million young men, though most well-connected families manage to arrange exemptions for their sons. "Within a month of the regular conscription intake, the boys start turning up in our office with tales that would curl your hair," says Natalya Serdyukova of the Soldiers' Mothers.

In November 2001, President Vladimir Putin announced a plan to transform Russia's elephantine, 19th-century conscript army into a much smaller, all-volunteer service by 2010. He decreed a one-year experiment that would turn a division based in Pskov into an all-professional model unit that could act as a guide for the rest of the army. But in September, the officer in charge of the plan announced it could not be implemented due to a lack of funds to attract and keep suitable volunteers.

Another key plank in Putin's military reform was a new law on alternative service, meant to breathe life into the right of conscientious objection stipulated in Russia's 1993 constitution. But the long-awaited law, passed by the State Duma in July, has appalled human rights workers. Each applicant for alternative service must prove his pacifist credentials before a military tribunal, then accept three years service (instead of two). "Those on alternative service will live in identical conditions to other conscripts, for a longer period of time, and their only privilege will be not to bear arms," says Vladimir Urban, a military expert with the Novye Izvestia newspaper. "It just looks like a punishment prescribed for those who don't want to serve in the army."

Russian authorities have at least been forced to acknowledge the growing scale of military desertions. In a growing number of cases, conscripts are fleeing with their weapons, sometimes leading to violence. In August, two young men who deserted from a border patrol unit in the war-torn region of Chechnya killed eight of their own comrades while escaping. After being apprehended, the two said they did it because they were "sick and tired" of being beaten and abused by the older soldiers.

In September, a group of 54 young soldiers walked away from an army firing range near Volgograd and marched together to Mother's Right, a local human rights group, to complain they had been brutalized by their officers. That episode led Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov to threaten commanders with "serious penalties" when their conscripts run away. "This sort of thing happens because officers don't work properly with people," Ivanov fumed in a September speech to the Duma.

But experts say the major military overhaul laid out by Putin just a year ago has already expired. "Military reform has run into a brick wall due to resistance from the officer corps and insufficient resources to change anything," says Sergei Kazyonnov, an expert with the Center for National Security and Strategic Studies in Moscow. "As long as the whole country is in a state of disorder, why should we expect the army to be different?"

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