Russia’s Military Cruelty Begins With Its Own Conscripts

Every six months, approximately 130,000 Russian conscripts are called up for their year of service, where most of them will face sadistic hazing. In Russian, it’s called dedovshchina, a brutal internal army regime that began in Soviet times but is thoroughly embedded in modern military culture. Western militaries have worked hard to reduce bullying and hazing in the ranks with some, but not complete, success. But in Russia’s army, dedovshchina is a unique cultural staple and a formative part of the military identity. It’s a process that leaves Russian soldiers brutalized and traumatized; it in turn teaches them to inflict pain on others.

Conscripts line up to begin military service in the Rostov region, Russia, on Oct. 19. Vasilii’ Derjugin/Sipa via AP

In an image supplied by Sputnik, a Russian state-owned news agency, conscripts pack their things at Moscow’s recruitment office before their departure for military service on July 7.Alexey Kudenko/Sputnik via AP

Not all punishments are physical. In a blog called Army Diary of a Conscript 2012-13, the author, who just goes by “Sergei,” writes: “It is one thing when you are awakened at night by a blow on the head with a stool, after which you get bullied just for ‘fun,’ and another thing, for example, when younger conscripts are sent to hard and dishonorable work in the first place. The difference is in the goals—sometimes suffering and humiliation is the main purpose, and sometimes it is a side effect.” 

Another former conscript posted about his experiences in a link that’s now only accessible through waybackmachine: “Fear. Misunderstanding. And fear again. To the point of shaking at the knees. It’s a strange feeling. I’m surprised it’s so prevalent. We weren’t ‘guests for three days’ in the old army tradition. We got picked up and beaten senseless the first night.”

“Guests for three days” here means the unwritten rule once adhered to in Soviet times, where the conscripts were treated with overplayed kindness and politeness for three days, before the horror began, just to see what kind of people they were and how they would act in stressful situations. Such niceties have largely disappeared.

But those are just the regular methods. Some of the ways to dedi, or break, the young conscripts are genuinely disturbing—and those who’ve served seldom want to talk about the worst experiences they’ve had. This isn’t surprising, because oftentimes it’s on the same level as the worst punishments in the prison culture, and parallels incidents in today’s police torture cases in Russia. There are cases of rape and being forced into prostitution and threats of such. Then there are abuses like the infamous sitting on a bottle, often used by Ramzan Kadyrov’s Chechen units to punish those who oppose them. It’s all about humiliation—some of it imitated from the ponyatiya, the sadistic regime of Russian prison culture. 

Russian soldiers march in a victory parade in Moscow, circa 1945.Ivan Shagin/Slava Katamidze Collection/via Getty Images

Veterans who had survived a war that killed 8.7 million of their comrades and around 19 million Soviet civilians were not interested in peacetime military affairs and everyday chores like washing floors or cleaning. Nor did they care much about proper dress code and discipline. Their officers had often served with them in the war and tended to treat them with well-earned respect—so these veterans instead delegated all the daily work to the fresh recruits and also took it upon themselves to teach them proper discipline and the ethos of the army, severely beating them in cases of disobedience. And then the veterans demobilized and the previous victims took their place, creating a permanent cycle of violence. 

This only intensified after Leonid Brezhnev’s 1968 reduction of the term of service in the army from three to two years. Since the Soviet Union had become a stagnant bureaucracy, the reduction had numerous flaws and was implemented carelessly and haphazardly. Those who had already served one year had to continue serving for two more, while the new recruits had to serve for only two years. This caused resentment in the older recruits and hatred in the younger, so the older service members began to amplify the violence and humiliation they inflicted upon new recruits, who then did the same to subsequent conscripts. 

After the introduction of the one-year system, in another half-hearted attempt at military reform in the mid-2000s, these term-based beatings became less formalized. However, this didn’t mean a stop or even a general decrease in violence, just a change in the reasoning and pace behind it. Today, the older service members just beat up whomever they like. A soldier used to take beatings for a year and then spend another year giving them to the fresh recruits. Now a conscript does both for six months apiece. Once-organized violence has become general brutality. 

Despite selling itself as an international workers’ paradise, the Soviet Union was anything but. Russian culture was always pushed to the national republics as a superior one, and if you weren’t seen as properly Russian, then you’d often be treated as a second-class citizen. We in the Baltics were always “evil Nazi sympathizers,” with Estonians especially portrayed as slow and dim-witted. There was a range of ethnic slurs: Caucasians were chernye, “blacks,” or “black-assed”; Central Asians were cherka, “blockheads”; Ukrainians were nothing but khohols; and so forth. Those attitudes have persisted, producing conflicts between the ethnic Russians, who tend to view themselves as superior, and everyone else.

For some groups, these were essentially protective alliances, shielding members from the brutality. My late father told me that, in his unit, people from the Baltics used to hang out in the vehicle workshop, doing all the necessary work there, while those from the Caucasus took over the canteen. That spoke to their power, since it was always warm there and they had access to extra food. Neither of these groups spent much time in the barracks, thus avoiding the dedovshchina that took place there. Teaming up in this way was vital, because otherwise Russian racism led to minorities being subjected to the worst bullying—as in the tragic case of Shamsutdinov, an ethnic Tatar from the Tyumen oblast who snapped and shot his comrades.

This case blew up all over the Russian internet at the time. My interviewees agreed that because he had an “Asiatic look,” he must’ve been treated extra harshly by the ethnic Russians. “He must have jumped higher than his place,” a Russian sailor currently serving in the North Sea told me on the phone. “Must’ve tried to complain to someone about the beatings or dared to stand up to someone. Bad idea. For the army, they (the non-Russians) are meat. They’re far from Moscow or Saint Petersburg. Nobody cares when they die.” Today, the attitude of Russian superiority beaten into soldiers feeds into the racism of Putin’s war, where Ukrainians are portrayed as subhuman.

Russian President Vladimir Putin (center) eats lunch with soldiers at the Sergeevsky training ground, near Vladivostok, Russia, in June 2004.Mikhail Klimentyev/AFP via Getty Images

To some extent, dedovshchina thrived during peacetime in the absence of anything else to do—and traditionally it diminished during war. However, as Putin fuels and supports hate groups within his own country for political reasons, it’s only getting worse. One traditional aspect that hasn’t changed about brutality, however, is that it tends to play out in violence against civilians. Ukrainian civilians suffer war crimes from brutalized Russians, just as Chinese suffered from the brutalized imperial Japanese. That, too, was a militarized society, where people were taught that their lives belonged to the emperor. Training was brutal, and beatings—for very little reason or none at all—were often. And those who endured became brutal and desensitized themselves, capable of justifying any cruelty. Similar parallels can be drawn with the South Korean Army of the Vietnam War, whose ultra-harsh internal discipline and brutal training produced its cruel treatment of the Vietnamese.

And the internal violence in the Russian army has gotten worse—even before the brewing ethnic tensions are taken into account. There are reports of those who want to refuse fighting in Ukraine, or just misbehave in the Russian army, being beaten by the military police and then being put in torture pits for days. The soldiers who are returning home are committing crimes, and violence in Russia is becoming ever more normalized. 

This is nothing new—statistics published by the U.S. Department of Justice in 1992 showed that, in 1989, when the Soviet-Afghan War ended, the overall number of recorded crimes grew by 31.8 percent. Obviously, the last returning soldiers weren’t the only cause for this, but they certainly played their part. And then came the 1990s, when veterans of the Chechen wars played their part in creating the peaks of murder reached in 1994 and 2002. 

Another generation will be put through the wringer of Russia’s self-inflicted misery. Russian opposition journalists are already talking about how Russia has changed and what it’s going to be like to live there after the war. But none of this brutality, nor the hate groups and crime that have spawned from it, is going to go away easily.