About ten activists from the National Bolshevik Party (NBP), a radical populist party in Russia, staged a protest at a Ministry of Defense building in Moscow yesterday to contest Russia’s system of military conscription and the horrid living conditions of young soldiers, Lenta.ru reported. According to the NBP press service, “the army has tuned into a place of punishment: Russian youth are sent to the army as if they were being put through a meat grinder.”
Kommersant has reported that seven National Bolsheviks approached the Ministry building with the party’s flag and lit red and green flares. They then proceeded to chant slogans such as “Fire Putin,” “Russia without Putin,” and “The Army without [Minister of Defense] Ivanov.” When soldiers from the Defense Ministry apprehended the seven, two more appeared and handcuffed themselves to the fence surrounding the building. All protesters were eventually taken into custody.
The practice of Devdovshchina, a Russian military custom in which new conscripts are abused— sometimes to the point of severe injury and even death—regained international exposure when news broke in early January that an eighteen-year-old conscript, Andrei Sychev, had been beaten so savagely by older soldiers that his legs and genitals required amputation.
The incident touched off renewed debate in Russia over the country’s conscript system, which requires males to serve two years in the military when they reach the age of eighteen. According to an All-Russian Public Opinion Center (VTsIOM) poll published in Military and Society on 17 February, fifty percent of those surveyed supported a system of contractual service, up from twenty-five percent in 2002. The number refusing to enter into military service because of hazing also increased from sixty-three percent in 2004 to seventy-four percent in 2006.
In addition to living in squalid, impoverished conditions, many new soldiers are subjected to abuse by older conscripts, while officers remain indifferent or actively participate in the violence. According to Chief Military Prosecutor Alexander Savenkov, six thousand soldiers fell victim to military abuse last year, and more than twenty-six hundred were prosecuted for committing abuses. (Vremya Novostei 8 February, No. 21, p. 5). According to official statistics reported by the Associated Press on 27 January, sixteen soldiers died from abuse and maltreatment last year and a further 276 servicemen committed suicide. The official sources provided no specifics regarding the latter figure.