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Protesters hold portraits of Andrei Sychyov during a demonstration in Moscow on Feb. 23 / Photo from news.yahoo.com
Hazing Victim Honored on Russian Army Day
Created: 26.02.2006 10:15 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 12:02 MSK
Lisa Vronskaya
MosNews
Dozens of greetings flowed from all across the country on Feb. 23, marked here as the Day of Defender of Fatherland, to a hospital where Andrei Sychyov was receiving medical treatment having been savagely beaten by other ’defenders of Fatherland’ — six drunken fellow soldiers — on the New Year’s Eve.
That is what it takes in Russia to be honored as a true Defender of Fatherland. You need to have been battered so brutally so as to have your legs and genitals amputated, and then, there is a chance (a very tiny one, still) that the country’s top brass, Supreme Commander-in-Chief included, will voice concern over your state of health, and the situation in the army ranks in general.
On the eve of Feb. 23, Andrei Sychyov underwent his second operation, the chief surgeon at the Burdenko Military Hospital, Vyacheslav Klyuzhev, told the Interfax news agency the other day.
Andrei is recovering, albeit slowly, the official went on to say. On Feb. 23 he received numerous greetings from all over the country. “On the orders from the Defense Minister, Commander-in-Chief of the Land Forces Alexei Maslov, visited Andrei at the hospital and had a long conversation with his mother, Galina Pavlovna, and sister Natalia,” he said.
The brutal beating of Andrei Sychyov caused a public outcry both in and outside Russia. The State Duma demanded explanation from Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, who, appearing before the lower house earlier this month, tried to convince the MPs hazing was not the army’s fault, but that of the society…
According to media reports, Andrei Sychyov, a 19-year-old private, was allegedly tied to a chair and beaten on his legs for three hours by drunken superiors on New Year’s Eve. The conscript received no medical attention until Jan. 4. By then, gangrene had set in, and doctors were forced to amputate his legs and genitals, The Washington Post reported.
At his annual news conference in the Kremlin in late January, President Vladimir Putin said the hazing was “not just lamentable, it is horrible.” Putin demanded a plan from the Defense Ministry to improve conditions of service.
Rights groups had sounded alarm over bullying in the Russian army for years. “The vast majority of army officers either choose to ignore evidence of the abuses or to encourage them,” because they see the attacks as “an effective means of maintaining discipline in their ranks,” Human Rights Watch said in 2004. “Throughout their first year, new recruits live under the constant threat of violence for failing to comply with second-year conscripts’ arbitrary demands from polishing their shoes to procuring food and alcohol.”
“The fact that this latest case has become so well known gives us some hope that the situation will have to change,” Anna Kashirtseva, a representative of the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, an advocacy group that monitors the military, told The Washington Post. “There is only one real solution, however, and that is to get rid of the conscript army, which is useless and harmful, and replace it with a professional army with professional officers.”
Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov at first played down the incident. “There is nothing serious there, otherwise I would certainly have known about it,” Ivanov said. He backpedaled as the scale of public revulsion in Russia became known. Ivanov dispatched a senior general to the scene of the assault, the Chelyabinsk Military Academy, about 1,200 miles east of Moscow, to investigate.
Later on, as he addressed the State Duma, Ivanov blamed hazing on the society in general. Hazing begins in kindergarten and school, he argued, threatening the media they could have problems with the law if they called for a boycott of conscription.
… It has to be noted that Sychyov is one of the few “lucky ones” whose sufferings have caught attention of the powers-that-be and the media. Hazing is an everyday affair in most conscription based armies of the world, Russia being no exception.
Another victim of hazing, Nursullah Dautov, was hospitalized two days after he was beaten by his fellow soldiers, and died in a hospital in Ufa, in the central Russian republic of Bashkortostan in February. Local prosecutors opened a criminal investigation. He was 23 year old, RFE/RL reported.
Dautov’s mistake was to refuse to wash the barracks floors on the morning of Feb. 8, a fatal act of insubordination that led to his death three days later in a city hospital. Doctors subsequently confirmed that he had suffered a brain hemorrhage, damage to his abdominal organs caused by a blunt instrument, and facial damage.
The abuse of conscripts — known in Russian as the “rule of grandfathers” or “dedovshchina” - has become endemic in the Russian military as conditions in the armed forces have deteriorated over the last 10 years. The Soldiers’ Mothers Committee claims as many as 3,000 conscripts die from hazing each year.
All Russian men between the ages of 18 and 27 are supposed to serve two years in the armed forces, a requirement that will be reduced to one year by 2008. Many Russian parents go to enormous lengths, including bribery, to shield their sons from the draft. Only about 9 percent of eligible men are actually drafted, the Defense Ministry reports.
Natalya Gevorkyan, a Kommersant columnist, wrote in a piece published on Gazeta.Ru website this week: “I wish congratulate Private Andrei Sychyov on the Day of Defender of Fatherland.
”I wish to congratulate a soldier who has been maimed by other defenders of the same fatherland. I am asking myself what kind of the Fatherland that is where one soldier is doing things like that to another. And whom we are supposed to protect our fatherland from while inside it a defender of that fatherland is utterly defenseless before his own comrade-in-arms.“
For many years we were told our country is threatened by external enemies, while the real enemy is here among us, inside us. ”We are our own enemies, that is the problem,“ she says and I cannot but agree with her.
”I congratulate Private Sychyov because it is a tradition to congratulate men on that day. I wish him to survive and live on. I ask the mothers whose sons have proved defenseless among defenders for forgiveness. I don’t congratulate Defense Minister and Supreme Commander-in-Chief — the two men who will never understand that the word “Fatherland” is of the same root as the world “father”.
On Feb. 23, Russia honors those who are serving in the Armed Forces and those who have served in the past. During the era of the Soviet Union, it was marked as Red Army Day or the Day of the Soviet Army and Navy. Since the Soviet times, it has been a tradition to congratulate all men without exception on the day.
Russian kids were taught to mark Feb. 23 and Mar. 8 as boys’ and girls’ days respectively when we went to school. Each year on Feb. 23 the girls in our class were supposed to distribute bonbons and postcards with congratulations to our boys (always fewer in strength than we, girls, so our parents were not as lucky as those of the boys because all those sweets and postcards came at our parents’ expense).
Few of those future defenders were to join the army ranks. Indeed, almost all male species around me were spared the ordeal and owe that, mostly, to their loving parents who went all out to keep their offspring out of sight of draft offices.
None of my friends or colleagues has even been to the army — most, having been lucky to be born into well-to-do and caring families and get enrolled in universities before the conscriptions age hit, some — ironically — because they were “lucky” to be diagnosed with or faked some terrible disease.
It should also be noted that Feb. 23 marked across the country as the Army Day is also marked by the Chechens both in Russia’s restive southern province and in exile as the Chechen Deportation Day. On that day in 1944, thousands of Chechens were evicted from their homes and sent to Central Asia and Siberia to die.
Between 23 and 24 February 1944, nearly half a million Chechens and Ingush were systematically rounded up and herded into freight trains. They were then sent to the dry plains of Kazakhstan, to Kyrgyzstan, and to the Siberian taiga.
Their deportation was ordered by Josef Stalin, who accused the two peoples of collaborating with the Nazi army. About half the deportees are estimated to have died either during the journey or within the year that followed their deportation, succumbing to cold, hunger, and disease. It was not until 1956 that Chechens were permitted to return to their homeland. The charge of mass treason against them was also dropped.
Asya Musayeva, a 38-year-old Chechen woman employed as a senior executive in a Moscow firm, says her entire family, including her father and mother, was deported to Kazakhstan. She has told RFE/RL that her family, like most Chechens, refused to take part in any celebrations marking Defenders of the Fatherland Day. “We have asked my nephew’s school [in Moscow] not to teach him to lay flowers on the monument to some unknown man on Defenders of the Fatherland Day, because this army has brought us nothing but grief.”
SEE ALSO
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