A Russian Sorrow

kirill andreyev, 19, was prodded awake one may morning in Moscow by the barrel of a Kalashnikov machine gun. Opening his eyes, he saw two men in police uniform grinning down at him.

“Get up. You’re coming with us,” one of them said.

Kirill was not allowed to rinse his face or even grab a bite to eat before being whisked away in a police jeep, his mother, Irina, said, her eyes wet with tears.

“My son was going to enter university this summer. If they only gave him a waver for this draft, he would never go to this damn army,” she told Russian Life.

Andreyev is one of hundreds of young men who have been rounded up in recent weeks as part of a joint operation by the Russian police and the military enlistment offices [voenkomats], aimed at fulfilling their quota for the ongoing army draft. The draft, in which 175,000 young Russian males were to be conscripted to serve their two-year mandatory army duty, began April 1, and lasted until the end of June.

According to a major Russian polling agency, VTsIOM, in February only 23% of 1,600 Russians surveyed supported a conscripted army; 71% wanted it to go immediately professional (volunteer).

With rampant hazing in the army and other abuses frequently attracting the Russian media spotlight, conscription remains a widely detested practice that President Vladimir Putin has promised to end within the next decade.

But Putin’s promise – which echoed a similar pledge made about five years ago by President Boris Yeltsin – is little comfort to thousands of young men and their families across Russia, who must face the realities of conscription today.

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In Makhachkala, capital of the southern republic of Dagestan, some 1,200 miles from Moscow, half-naked young men teem in the lobby of a city voyenkomat, their faces strained as they scold themselves about their sad fate.

“I was an idiot to stay at home when the call-up began. If I had just left town for these few months, I would be with my wife,” Shamil Gadzhiyev, 20, said, waiting for his medical examination. “They came after me early in the morning and forced me to sign the call-up notice. After doing that, I could have ended up in jail if I didn’t show up here.”

Under the law, police may take part in rounding up draftees only when a conscript does not have a reasonable excuse for not appearing before a voyenkomat after being handed his call-up notice.

During the last draft, in the fall of 2002, of the 50,000 Muscovite men to be called up, 3,000 did not report to voyenkomats. In the first two weeks of the 2003 spring draft, some 40,000 young men dodged the draft after getting their call-up notices; 50,000 could not even be found to be presented their call-up notices, Alexei Nikolayev, head of the State Duma Defense Committee, reported at a recent parliamentary hearing.

“We cannot even charge these men with dodging the draft,” he said.

To help the military fill their conscription quotas, police hold massive dragnets all over the country.

In Dagestan, for example, in mid-May, 61 draft dodgers were snared in a mountainous district in just one day, local authorities reported.

In Moscow, critics say the roundups are reaching outrageous proportions.

“Rounding up draft dodgers is a standard police procedure in Moscow, but in recent years it has reached a really ugly level,” said Valentina Melnikova of the non-governmental organization, Union of Soldiers’ Mothers Committee. “In many cases, boys who have official waivers are forcibly called up.”

During the last draft, the Moscow Soldiers’ Mothers Committee registered 70 complaints from parents of conscripts who were forcibly brought to enlistment offices from their homes after being rounded up in the metro or on the street.

“These cases are only the tip of the iceberg, because often parents don’t know how to react,” Melnikova said.

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“I offered $800 to doctors at the examination to dismiss my boy as unfit for service, and then twice that sum to the military,” said a man standing next to his son near the gates of a Makhachkala voyenkomat. The man, who only spoke with Russian Life on condition that his name be withheld, said only a small good came from his efforts. “All I managed is that my son will serve here in Makhachkala and we will be able to see him any time.”

His son, a burly teenager with a freshly shaven head, believes it is not a bad option for him. “If I then decide to join the police or another law enforcement agency,” he said, “the required army service will be under my belt.”

Inside, other draftees were undergoing medical examinations. Wearing only underwear, they moved from one physician to the next, stretching their extremities, showing their teeth, reading letters on the wall with one eye closed, and letting doctors probe their groins for possible hernias.

“They could at least hire men to examine us,” one of the draftees meekly blurted as a female physician used a small rubber mallet to tap the knees of a near-naked draftee; another female doctor examined pimples on another conscript’s back.

One of the physicians agreed to talk about conscripts’ typical health problems, provided her name was not used. “Mental disorders account about every fourth dismissal, and about another 10% of dismissed draftees are drug users. Previous skull and brain traumas are responsible for an additional 25% of the dismissals. You know, boys often fight with each other, get into traffic accidents,” she said. She added that those who try to deceive the physicians most often pretend to have mental and intestinal disorders.

Viktor Kozhushkov, who heads up the draft effort for the General Staff, told parliament in late April that, in the last draft in Moscow region, 38% of draftees were found to have mental disorders. Fully half of all draftees fail to fulfill the minimal physical requirements, he added.

Vasily Krasnogorsky, head of the Moscow military enlistment office, said that, of 50,000 Muscovites eligible for mandatory army service, only 5,000 – one in ten – will be called up in the current draft. Others have received student deferments or have documented health problems, he said. “For us, it is not the quantity that matters, but the quality of the draftees,” he said at a press conference at the beginning of the spring draft.

Deputy Head of the Duma Defense Committee and former Defense Minister Yuri Rodionov told the Duma in April that, in the past decade, the number of draftees with prior criminal convictions increased by a factor of three.

“This is what I am afraid of. I want to be sure that my son will not be gunned down by a former criminal or a drug user on a ‘high,’” said Natalya Bocharova, 45. She came to bid farewell to her son, Igor, and waited in the crowd near the gates of the call-up center in Makhachkala.

Suddenly the gates flung open and a bus full of conscripts slowly drove through the crowd of family awaiting them. A deafening bedlam ensued. Conscripts’ relatives, mostly fathers and brothers, screamed, jumped, waved hands and whistled as the bus moved through the crowd, faces of the conscripts glued to its windows.

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For those unwilling to serve and literate enough to know their constitutional rights, alternative service may be a way to escape the military. The Russian constitution allows draftees a choice between military and community service. Almost nowhere in Russia, however, can enlistment offices or local authorities find such jobs for willing draftees. Therefore those with an iron will can escape service by demanding their right to perform community service.

Andrei Rodionov, a 25-year-old Muscovite, says he is a pacifist and long ago decided that he would not serve in the army. “When I got a call-up notice last spring, I sent a letter to the voyenkomat, saying that I cannot go to the army because of my principles. When I got a second notice, I went to court with a complaint, saying the military is violating my right to alternative service,” he said. “While my case dragged on in the court, the draft came to end.”

During the next draft, last fall, the military sent him yet another call-up notice. This time, Andrei and his relatives carried out a small demonstration in front of the voyenkomat building. The military has since left him in peace.

“They probably gave me some kind of a waiver; I don’t even know what kind,” he said with a contented look.

Some men who are forcibly conscripted do not stay in the army for long. Roman Zimin, 21, fled almost immediately. Zimin said he got no call-up notices until October 31 last year, when a district police officer called him at home and asked him to come to the voyenkomat to fix some problems with paperwork.

“I came by myself and was locked in the voyenkomat for the whole day without a meal,” he said in a telephone interview. “Late in the evening, they made me take a medical examination that took five minutes and was very offensive.”

Voyenkomat doctors turned down his complaint that he had flat feet and poor eyesight and found him fit for military service. Three weeks later, Zimin defected from his unit and is now on the run.

“Military prosecutors told my relatives that they are opening a criminal case against me this month,” he said. “But I wasn’t given any chance to prove my case in the voyenkomat.”

Anna Neistat, director of the Moscow office of Human Rights Watch, told Russian Life, that, under the law, the authorities have the right to forcibly conscript men who try to dodge military service after receiving a call-up notice. “But those forcibly drafted are practically stripped of their right to appeal the conscription decision, and also Russian law does not provide a way for them to be dismissed from the army if they were illegally conscripted,” she said. “There were cases when, after being forcibly drafted, conscripts managed to prove that they have waivers, but they could not be let go because there is no legal basis for this.” RL