WHAT'S IT LIKE LIVING IN RUSSIA TODAY?

Putin opponent receives asylum

Germany has for the first time granted a Russian opposition activist asylum because of his resistance to the government politics of President Vladimir Putin. Because of his involvement with the opposition movement Yabloko, the 36-year old Oleg Liskin from Moscow faced political persecution, it says [..] in the decision of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. Liskin is in danger "of being accused of a punishable offence" and ending up in prison. [The decision comes in the wake of] Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder [having] recently still assured Putin that he was a "pure democrat". It hasn't happened before that a Russian citizen gets political asylum in Germany, says Peter Franck of amnesty international: "That is a sign."

Young, patriotic and bullied to death
Systematic abuse of conscripts rife in Russian army

Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow
Thursday July 28, 2005

Guardian

Maxim Buchin, 18, was the ideal recruit to the Russian army. From the age of 12 he sang along to tapes of songs from their campaigns in Chechnya and Afghanistan and dreamed of joining the special forces to defend the motherland.
But last month, a year after he said goodbye to his tearful mother, Olga, and became a conscript, his decapitated body was returned to her.

Maxim had never set foot in a war zone. Instead, he was one of hundreds of conscripts who die in "non-combat related" incidents in the Russian army every year, the most recent call-up having ended on June 30.

About 350,000 men aged 18 to 27 are annually called up for two years' service, but, according to the defence ministry, 90.5% avoid or delay the draft. In wealthy Moscow the figure rises to 97%. Only the poor serve.

Most conscripts fall victim to dedovshchina - the rule of the grandfathers, a vicious code of bullying and subservience that pervades the Russian army.

Most survive the repeated beatings. Others, like Maxim, don't. He drank a bottle of vodka and threw himself under a train. "He had a misconception of the army, where everyone is a victor," said Olga.

Joining the army was a rite of passage honoured in the Buchin family. Maxim's grandfather, 82, who had served in the second world war, joined friends and family gathered in their small wooden house in a tiny village near the northern town of Vologda for his "provod". This is part farewell and part wake, dating back to the tsarist era when conscription was a 25-year sentence from which few men returned.

Olga hates drinking, and replaced the usual vodka toasts of this ritual with games for her son and his friends, including a race to strip down a mock AK47 rifle. Instead of making a toast, Maxim proudly recited the military oath of allegiance.

"Of course I was worried," said Olga. "I know what the army is. When I took him to the dispatch point the next day, I was crying. 'Be worthy. I love you and wait for you,' I said."

His induction lasted six months and he appeared content, even when he rang his mother to say he was being sent to Chechnya. "He was like a tank. He said he would go, that he could not stay behind if his unit was sent."

But Olga would not give up her only son to Russia's conflict in the war-torn separatist republic, and approached a senior officer who had him assigned nearer home as a mechanic and driver for armoured personnel carriers.

Maxim seemed fine until January, when he came to relieve his best friend in the unit, Denis, from guard duty at the base. He found Denis lying in a pool of blood, one bullet between his eyes. Olga suspects that Denis committed suicide after being "heavily beaten by superior officers", but she does not know why he was targeted.

Soon after, Maxim was transferred to near St Petersburg, and Olga visited him there in May. It was only then he confided that a fellow soldier who had served in Chechnya had started demanding money from him. It was not blackmail, just extortion, a routine way for soldiers to supplement their income. "A change came over him. He said to me: 'Mum, there's a lot you don't know about life'."

On May 30, the night she returned him to barracks, he rang her mobile three times, begging her to visit again. "He told me, for the first time in his life, that he was lonely."

The next day Maxim was hospitalised for two weeks, apparently having endured a beating from senior officers. "They beat him with everything they can lay their hands on - belts, stools", said Mikhail Riabov, a former officer and friend of Olga who took the phone from her when she became too distressed to speak. "They beat him on the hands, feet and kidneys so there are no traces."

Maxim's sergeant was also allegedly asking for money from him, even suggesting Olga sell her mobile for £30. But there are many other nice earners for Russia's corrupt officer class, Mr Riabov said. Conscripts were used as couriers for goods stolen from the base. They used a local train network as a distribution system and, if they were caught, it would be the conscript and not the officer that took the rap.

On June 18, an officer relieved Maxim from guard duty to go and buy some vodka. But Maxim never returned. Instead he drank the vodka, and wrote three letters, detailing months of abuse.

He etched in biro on his upper arm: "Mother forgive me. I am afraid." His headless body was found on a railway track near the base, along with the letters, which are now evidence in an investigation. Olga was informed of his death by the army in a 20-word letter the next day.

Maxim's fate is far from extraordinary. In one week alone last month, 46 conscripts died of "non-combat related" injuries. Anna Kashirtseva, from the army victim support group, the Mothers' Rights Foundation, estimates that 3,000 soldiers die each year from non-combat related injuries, three times the official figure. "Deaths are often declared suicides and then not investigated," she said.

Some escape, like Alexei Medvedev, who was called up on May 25, but returned to his home near Moscow weeks later, blue from bruising and covered in deep cuts from a blade. His officers had demanded £1,000 to let him go. "The army lives in a different world of big money," said his mother, Raisa.

Valentina Melnikova, from the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers, which has formed a political party to end conscription, said: "The military system in Russia is designed to create weak people who will fulfil any order, even shoot dead protesters in a crowded square."

A spokesman for the defence ministry said conscripts remained necessary until the army switched to paid volunteers in the coming years. He described dedovshchina as "a natural process among men when one of them wants to be a leader ... It's no worse in Russia than in any other European army."

Pavel Felgenhauer, a defence analyst, said dedovshchina was deliberately created to instill discipline in the absence of professional sergeants in the army. "The conscription system is totally pointless and was created in the 19th century," he said.

He added that for today's military challenges, such as fighting militants in the north Caucuses, "fighting with conscripts is like sending second-year medical students to do heart surgery".

He said the top brass, who retain the mindset of the Soviet era "want this huge army of workers and peasants they can mobilise if Nato attacks".

Ms Melnikova said: "You can't trust any figures. Nobody properly counts these boys. It's pure Soviet madness."

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

The Battle over the Draft
By Leon Aron
Posted: Thursday, July 28, 2005

RUSSIAN OUTLOOK
AEI Online
Publication Date: July 28, 2005

This essay is available here as an Adobe Acrobat PDF.

Summer 2005

On December 29, 2004, Russia's minister of defense, Sergei Ivanov, announced plans to eliminate draft deferments for college students. Predictably, the popular reaction was so uniformly negative and furious that the abolition of deferments has been postponed--but not eliminated from the Kremlin's agenda.

This confrontation between the state, determined to preserve the draft, and the society, which fears and detests it, is only the most recent clash over the three-century-old institution--and it will not be the last. For the draft is one of the last vestiges of the formerly omnipotent Soviet state, the epitome of the absolute command over society it wielded with mindless and often self-defeating cruelty.

Post-Soviet Russia's break with the past will not be complete without the shedding of the conscript armed forces. For that reason alone, the political battle over the draft is worth watching carefully as a weather vane of Russia's direction.

The Long Roots of the Draft

Until the late 1980s, the paramount goal of the Russian and Soviet states for almost three and a half centuries was expansion and defense of the empire. The very birth of a modern Russian state under Peter the Great (1698-1725) was in many respects an extension of Peter's principal goal of building a modern--by eighteenth-century standards--army. From the construction of St. Petersburg on the bones of countless serfs to forbidding male nobles to marry until they passed rudimentary arithmetic and geometry exams, Peter's reforms were ultimately aimed at winning wars. Over two centuries later, Stalin's even bloodier "revolution from above"--which robbed and enslaved the peasants and introduced breakneck industrialization--was also justified by war preparation.

Introduced by Peter in 1705, the conscription law required every twenty peasant households to provide one draftee who would serve in the tsar's army for thirty years. It was the first systematic military induction in Europe, where kings relied mostly on mercenary armies. Until the French Revolution almost a century later, Russia remained the only European country with compulsory military service. Even then, however, Russia's army continued to be the largest in the world.

The system survived unchanged until 1874 when, as part of the reforms of Alexander II, the length of service was drastically reduced and all male citizens, regardless of social class, became eligible for conscription.

After seizing power in 1917, the Bolsheviks were initially determined to rely on a "volunteer army of workers and peasants." Yet already a year later, amidst a raging civil war, the chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council, Leon Trotsky, introduced universal conscription--buttressed by instant executions of deserters (sometimes entire platoons, companies, or even regiments), draft evaders, and violators of discipline. Thus secured, the seemingly inexhaustible supply of poorly trained, poorly fed, poorly armed but multitudinous conscripts made the complete disregard for soldiers' lives a cornerstone of Soviet military doctrine. In the "human wave" strategy, the enemy was to be overwhelmed by relentless attacks until victory was achieved--regardless of the casualties.

Because of conscription the Soviet Union survived the disastrous first two years of the war with Nazi Germany, when up to 5 million Soviet soldiers were estimated to be killed or captured in 1941 and 1942. (According to various estimates, the Soviet troops lost between five and ten soldiers for each German casualty.)

Thus, just as the victory over Napoleon in 1812-1814 appeared to the tsarist court and the generals to have vindicated Peter's century-old rekrutchina (military conscription), so did the vanquishing of Nazi Germany confirm to the Soviet leadership the essential soundness of the social organization in which the glory of the country was equated with the might of its army; the society's key reason for existence was to supply the armed forces with whatever was necessary in blood and treasure; and conscription was the backbone of the army.

Revolutionary Demilitarization

One of the most palpable results of the democratic anti-Communist revolution of 1991 was an unprecedented demilitarization for a country not defeated on the battlefield or occupied by the victors. Under Russia's first post-Soviet president, Boris Yeltsin, defense spending was slashed by 90 percent, from at least 30 percent of the GDP to between 2 to 3 percent. Between 1992 and 2001, the 2.7 million troops that Russia inherited from the Soviet Union's 5-million-strong armed forces were reduced by half to 1,365,000.[1]

Throughout the Yeltsin era, the end of the draft and the creation of professional armed forces were among the reformers' main objectives. Volunteer ("contract") service by privates and sergeants was introduced on December 1, 1992. Adopted by a referendum a year later, the new constitution recognized the right of conscientious objection and guaranteed the objectors alternative (nonmilitary) service. In May 1996, Yeltsin signed a decree ordering the transition to all-volunteer armed forces and the abolition of draft by the spring of 2000.

Yet every attempt to switch to a professional army was scuttled by the lack of funds to pay competitive salaries to volunteer soldiers2 and by the fierce resistance of the generals and their supporters among the leftist "popular-patriotic" plurality in the 1995-1999 Duma, who viewed the abolition of the draft as treason. Unable to collect taxes--and thus impoverished like every revolutionary government before it--and unwilling to take on yet another battle against the "patriots" amidst the endless economic and political crises, the Kremlin failed again and again to dispose of the draft.

Why the Brass ResistsThe Prison and the Torture Chamber

Russia's new military doctrine no longer views the United States and NATO as the enemy. Gone, too, are the commissars (politruks), and with them the indoctrination sessions in communist ideology and the evils of imperialism, conducted in the ubiquitous "Lenin's rooms" at every military base. Yet the Soviet-style draft still daily reproduces the Soviet-style army, which humiliates and torments the conscripts.

The unbridgeable gap in status and education between officers and the conscripts in the tsarist army, so vividly portrayed in the stories and novels about the Russian imperial army by Leo Tolstoy and Alexander Kuprin, did not diminish in the Soviet Union. In the absence of professional noncommissioned officers (especially veteran sergeants who play such a central role in the U.S. Army's socialization of the men, the inculcation of skills, and respect for authority and regulations), the Russian army barracks are ruled by the second-year draftees, known as dedy, or "grandfathers."

The result is a monstrous routine called dedovshchina--the word that strikes terror in the hearts of millions of Russian parents and their draft-age sons and forces them to seek any and all means to avoid conscription. Entirely at the dedy's mercy, the draftees are brutally hazed, forced to perform meaningless and degrading tasks, and robbed of their personal possessions, money, and food parcels. The daily humiliation and often savage beatings of first-year recruits have been recorded in harrowing detail in letters smuggled out of bases and given to kind civilians to mail. Sometimes they reach the aggrieved and outraged parents after the sender has already died from abuse, committed suicide, or disappeared without a trace.

According to Defense Minister Ivanov, during a ten-month period in 2002, 531 soldiers were killed in noncombat situations,[6] including one-third by suicide.[7] Yet the national anti-draft organization, the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers, estimated the total number of dedovshchinadedy, while the officers routinely cover up these crimes. A leading advocate of military reform, former first deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov, has claimed that the total number of abused every year is closer to 20,000.[10]

Desertion is rampant. According to the deputy chief of General Staff, 2,270 servicemen fled their units between January and June 2002. The Soldiers' Mothers estimate that 40,000 soldiers per year desert or attempt to desert--a number which represents about one in fifteen of all conscripts serving at the time.[11] In August 2002, two soldiers deserted in Chechnya after murdering eight comrades in retaliation for systematic hazing. In another case that attracted national attention three years ago, fifty-four soldiers left their units' firing ranges and marched thirty-five miles to a Soldiers' Mothers chapter in the southern city of Volgograd in order to protest regular beatings by the officers.

Resistance and Draft Dodging

Along with airing many other dirty secrets of the Soviet regime, the liberalization of the late 1980s resulted not only in public awareness of the horrors of dedovshchina, but the emergence of informal support groups of the mothers of conscripts who were killed, maimed, vanished, or deserted from their units. Soon, the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers became one of the largest, best-organized, and most active civic organizations, now consisting of nearly three hundred local branches throughout the Russian Federation. By publicizing the abuse, the organization seeks to force the authorities to abide by the laws and to reform the armed forces. The Soldiers' Mothers also provide legal services and counseling on deferments, arrange medical consultations in the cases where exemptions were not granted despite illness or deformity, as well as bring lawsuits against the Ministry of Defense.

Yet tens of thousands of future conscripts and their relatives still choose to bypass the system rather than to challenge it. Bribery is pandemic, as parents and grandparents pool resources to pay off college officials in order to ensure college entry and the deferment. President Vladimir Putin's representative to the G-8, Igor Shuvalov, estimates that Russians spend some $7 billion a year on bribes to get their children into institutions of higher education,[12] much, if not most of the sum, going to shielding boys from the army. Members of medical commissions are routinely bribed to disqualify a draftee as physically unfit.

Some of the future conscripts' relatives have even called for a kind of a "draft tax"--with the price of deferral officially established and payable to the state instead of going to bribes--to help fund a professional army. Speaking in support of the scheme, the mother of a thirteen-year-old boy from Rostov-on-the-Don recently told a major Russian daily that her "buy-out" money could then be used to "pay [to feed, to house, and to equip] a boy who is in good health and wants to serve in the army."[13]

The Chechnya Factor. The first Chechen war (1994-1996) turned the dread and loathing of the draft into near hysteria. Assured by then-defense minister Pavel Grachev and his generals that a victory over the Chechen separatists could be achieved by "a battalion" of Russian troops, President Yeltsin ordered the December 1994 assault on the capital of the breakaway province, Grozny.

The result was a massacre of the raw, untrained draftees, thousands of whom were trapped in the streets and mowed down by machine guns and grenade launchers, as the Russian commanders kept sending more and more troops into the ambush. The official estimates of the casualties in the first Chechen war vary between 4,000 and 5,500. Independent observers put the number at 8,000 killed, and the Soldiers' Mothers, at 14,000.[14]

The prospect of dying in Chechnya increased draft avoidance many-fold, turning into resisters even those groups of youths that ordinarily served willingly (mostly from villages and smaller towns). With terror and fear--the key instruments of totalitarian control--having melted away, hiding from the draft was no longer impossible. Many of those who failed to obtain college deferments or medical disqualifications simply did not bother to reply to the summons; others "went underground" by moving in with distant relatives or friends; still others, who were served the summons, failed to present themselves at the collection points on the day of the draft.

Two months after Yeltsin's reelection in July 1996, Russia signed a peace agreement with the Chechen leaders. Chechnya was granted de facto independence, and by January 1997, not a single Russian soldier remained on its territory.

Yet the end of the war was not enough to diminish the fear of the draft. Today, an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 young men ignore the call-up letters.[15] In recent years, the military has managed to draft no more than 11 percent of all eligible men. The quality of the draftees, now virtually void of middle-class youths, has also deteriorated drastically, as the military is compelled to draft those who can barely read, have criminal records, or use drugs.[16]

Junior Officer Exodus. Just as importantly, the radical demilitarization of state and society, as well as the first signs of economic revival after the crisis inherited from the Soviet Union, resulted in an exodus of junior and mid-level officers. In contrast to the Soviet days, when their salaries were among the highest and they had priority in the allocation of scarce apartments, these officers were no longer part of Russia's most prestigious institution. They began leaving the army in droves. Almost one-third of all officers who retired from the armed forces in 2000 were under the age of thirty.[17] By 2002, nearly half of all platoons were without leaders.[18]

The already-limited involvement of junior officers in the daily life of the barracks diminished even further, and the reliance on dedovshchinaThe Second Chechen War. Coinciding with Putin's appointment as prime minister of the Russian Federation in August 1999, the second Chechen war, which began with the invasion of the Russian province of Dagestan by Chechen militants seeking to establish the "Islamic Republic of Northern Caucasus," further highlighted the inadequacy of the draft-based system. Although, like Yeltsin before him, Putin had been told that the battle-ready troops stood by waiting for his command to attack, it took almost a month for the federal units to gather and drive at most 1,000 to 2,000 invaders back into Chechnya. As Putin's angrily acknowledged three years later, "There was nobody to send to war."[19]

Mindful of the bloody fiasco in December of 1994, the Ministry of Defense (MOD) sought to mollify public opinion by substituting volunteer contract soldiers (kontraktniki) for some draftees in the battlefront units. Attracted by the promise of a monthly salary of nearly $1,000 (or, at the time, about three times the average national wage), kontraktnikiPutin: A Familiar Trajectory

Regarding the draft, Putin's behavior fits the broader pattern of his regime: from the seemingly enthusiastic adoption and implementation of the key Yeltsin-era structural reforms, which had been blocked by political opposition or impeded by the state's empty coffers,[20] to a slowdown after the first two and a half years, followed by freeze and, in some areas, reversals after Putin's 2004 reelection.

The newly elected president came out swinging in November 2000, when the Kremlin announced, without specifying the deadline, a reduction of the armed forces by 470,000 men and the retirement of 380 generals after the cuts were implemented.[21]

Half a year later, around the first anniversary of his presidency, Putin declared that a "professional army is the goal to which it is possible and necessary to strive. . . . I think we can gradually reduce the draft and bring it to the minimum . . . around 2010."[22]

The Kremlin's show of solidarity with the United States after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks highlighted a radical change in Russia's strategic environment and the need for an overhaul in the composition and structure of its armed forces. Overruling his generals (and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), Putin declared support for the U.S.-led war on Islamic terrorism. He ordered intelligence and logistic cooperation in preparation for the U.S. war on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and allowed the unprecedented overflight of Russia's territory by U.S. and NATO transport planes, as well as the deployment of U.S. and NATO troops at former Soviet bases in Central Asia. A month later, the president's press service announced that Putin had approved a plan to "phase out the conscription system" and "go to a contract army."[23]

In November of the same year, the president seemed to endorse the "fast track" program, advocated by the then co-chairmen of the Union of Rightist Forces (SPS), Boris Nemtsov and Yegor Gaidar,[24] when he invited them to take part in a Kremlin meeting with the leadership of the MOD and the General Staff. The president ordered the government to prepare a comprehensive reform program for his review no later than July 1, 2002. In April 2002, in his "State of Russia" address to the Federal Assembly, Putin for the first time presented the transition to an all-volunteer military as his top priority.

IraqApplying the Breaks. Lessons of Iraq notwithstanding, the Kremlin was already beating a retreat. When it was finally adopted in July 2003 (a year after Putin's original deadline), the "Special Federal Program to Transform the Staffing of the Armed Forces Primarily with Contract Servicemen" did call for the reduction of service from two years to one and for the introduction of the professional sergeants, yet the program set no date for the end of the draft. Instead, it envisioned fully replacing only 145,500 conscripts (or around 21 percent of the 700,000 drafted privates and sergeants currently in the army) with volunteers in eighty "combat ready" units by 2007.

A year before, the pro-Kremlin majority in the Duma made a mockery of the "Law on Alternative Service." Conscientious objectors were to serve three and a half years instead of two for conscripts. They would have no say in the choice of occupation and would most likely serve outside their home regions and possibly within military units--where they were certain to be brutally hazed.

Defying Public Opinion and Keeping the Draft. In refusing to eliminate the draft, the Kremlin defies the longstanding and strong preference of a vast majority of Russians. In a national poll a year ago, 87 percent of Russians thought that "youths today do not want to serve in the army."[26] Asked, in early 2005, if they wanted to see their son, brother, husband, or another close relative serve in the armed forces, 67 percent of Russian citizens said no, and only 28 percent answered in the affirmative.[27] In the same poll, 62 percent of the respondents supported the transition to contract armed forces, as compared with 31 percent who wished to preserve the draft.[28]

Yet so apparently determined is the regime not to allow any significant force reduction that it is willing to change the arrangement that has been in place for half a century. With the approaching 2007 deadline for reducing the term of conscription from two years to one year, Defense Minister Ivanov--who is President Putin's confidant and putative successor--announced that he intended to scrap college deferments in order to make up for the halving of the numbers of conscripts serving at any given moment.

Even leaving aside the waste and ineffectiveness associated with a mostly conscripted force, Ivanov's arithmetic is suspect. According to the July 2003 "Program," in the year 2007 kontraktniki are supposed to replace 145,000 conscripts and, a year later, the armed forces are to be reduced by 200,000,[29] thus making the increase in the call-up unnecessary.

Nor can the transition to a fully volunteer army be any longer excused by a lack of funds. Although the changeover is estimated to cost $4.3 billion,[30] with the prices of oil reaching $60 a barrel, Russia clearly can afford it. What better use could there be for some of the $33 billion "stabilization fund," built on oil superprofits, or for the record $149.6 billion in foreign currency and gold reserves in Russia's Central Bank?

Between 1999 and 2003, the defense budget more than doubled and grew again by 28 percent in 2005. Yet, the MOD has been stinting where increased spending was most needed: the salaries of the future kontraktnik's are still below the minimum necessary to attract a sufficient number of volunteers.[31]

Retreat and Counterattack. It is hard to think of a more explosive social issue in today's Russia than the elimination of draft deferments, which could overnight turn millions of college students and their largely middle-class parents into political opposition and, perhaps, send them into the streets. When asked in February 2005 whether deferments should be granted to college students, 83 percent of those surveyed agreed.[32] Moreover, a plurality of Russian citizens (46 percent) believes that the changes in the draft exemptions must be decided not by a government decree, but by a national referendum.[33]

The Soldiers' Mothers, who in late 2004 forged a political party, quickly began collecting signatures for a national referendum on the draft, exemptions, and the transition to a professional army. Facing a nightmarish scenario of students and their parents joining the retirees, who at the time were demonstrating in every major city against the necessary but bungled monetization of in-kind social security benefits, the government retreated. Ivanov promised to keep deferments in place "for now."

On the principle of conscription, however, the government remains unyielding. Ivanov has already declared that conscription as such will never be completely phased out. Resuming the offensive in June of this year, the MOD declared that, instead of abolishing college deferments, the state will achieve the same objective by closing down the so-called "military departments" in 199 out of 229 Russian colleges and universities.[34] These "departments" conduct military training and confer the ranks of junior officers on graduates, thus shielding them from being drafted as privates.

A Battle for Democratic Control

With the government flaunting public opinion and all but goading the middle class and college students, Alexander Golts was right to surmise that "the contract army may be one of the hottest issues in the next presidential campaign."[35]

Yet the matter is much broader than a proximate political battle. After the radical demilitarization of post-Soviet Russia, the society and the economy are no longer mere resource appendages to the military-industrial complex at the service of an expansionist totalitarian state. The impoverished, abusive, and dehumanizing conscript army is too heavy a baggage to carry into a peaceful, democratic, and prosperous Russia in which most Russian people would like to live.

The draft is a symbol of the contest between the Russian state and the society for democratic control over a central institution: the armed forces. It is here that the Kremlin, now in the throes of counter-revolutionary restoration, has chosen to make a stand. The outcome of this clash will go a long way to defining Russia's path for years to come.

Leon Aron is a resident scholar and the director of Russian studies at AEI.

Notes

1. See, for example, Dale Herspring, "Putin and Military Reform," in Putin's Russia, ed. Dale Herspring, 189 (New York: Roman & Littlefield, 2003).

2. In 1993-1995, some 50,000 contract soldiers left the army because of the low pay, with their salaries less than twice the national subsistence minimum. See, for example, Herspring, "Putin and Military Reform," 191-192.

3. Fred Weir, "In Russia, An Army of Deserters," Christian Science Monitor, September 30, 2002.

4. Alexander M. Golts and Tonya L. Putnam, "State Militarism and Its Legacies," International Security 29, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 154.

5. Alexander Golts, "Militaristy otstupili? Net, oni manevriruyu" [Have the militarist retreated? No, they are maneuvering] Ezhenedel'nyi zhurnal, January 20, 2005.

6. Golts and Putnam, "State Militarism," 148.

7. Vladimir Isachenkov, "Russia Battles Hazings, Desertions in Military," Los Angeles Times, October 13, 2002.

8. Ibid.

9. Sharon LaFraniere, "Russia's Battered Military," Washington Post, May 20, 2001.

10. Vladimir Voronov, "Reforma: po generalski ili po umu" [The reform: according to the generals or according to logic] interview with Boris Nemtsov, Novoe Vremya, August 3, 2003.

11. Weir, "In Russia, An Army of Deserters."

12. Judith Ingram, "Kremlin Adviser Says Russia is Vital to G8," Moscow Times, July 1, 2005.

13. "Vypusknikov vuzov zastavyat sluzhit' v armii" [College graduates will be forced to serve in the army] Izvestia, June 10-12, 2005.

14. Diederik Lohman, "Russia," Human Rights Watch Report 14, no. 8 (November 2002): 6-7.

15. Golts and Putnam, "State Militarism," 136; and Lohman, "Russia," 7.

16. In 2003, Boris Nemtsov estimated that 15 percent of the draftees had difficulty reading and writing, while one-fourth experimented with drugs (Voronov, "Reforma," 9).

17. Leonid Polyakov, "Military Reforms in Russia," Toward Understanding of Russia, ed. Janusz Bugajski (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2002), 89.

18. Ibid.

19. As quoted in Golts and Putnam, "State Militarism," 135.

20. Among the measures backed by Putin's sky-high popularity because of economic revival, the rapidly growing Treasury revenues from rising oil prices, and the results the 1999 Duma elections that for first time since 1993 produced a pro-Kremlin and pro-reform plurality in the parliament, were the flat 13-percent income tax, privatization of urban and later agricultural land, the progressive Criminal Procedural Code, the creation of private pension accounts, and the laws on breaking up and privatizing the government electricity monopoly.

21. Maura Reynolds, "Putin Order Cuts Military by 600,000," Los Angeles TimesEuropean Security 12 (2004): 56.

24. The SPS program envisioned the abolition of the two-year conscription from spring 2002 and its replacement with a six to eight months training course. The transition to an all-volunteer force was to be finished by the fall 2002. The plan called for competitive salaries for the volunteers, private pensions, and free college education. "Voennaya reforma" [Military reform] Vestnik (Institute of the Economies in Transition), November 8, 2002; and Voronov, "Reforma," 9-11.

25. Discussion between author and Russian pollster, March 25, 2003.

26. Public Opinion Foundation, "O sluzhbe v armii," [About the service in the army] national poll, July 3-4, 2004, http://bd.fom.ru/report/cat/socieas/army/d042711 (accessed on February 4, 2005).

27. Levada Center, "Rossiyane ne khotyat, chtoby ikh blizkix prizyvay v armiyu" [The Russians don't want for their close relatives to be drafted into the army] nationwide poll, January 21-24, 2005, http://www.levada.ru/press/2005020902.html (accessed on Feb. 4, 2005).

28. Ibid.

29. Golts, "Militaristy otstupili?"

30. Herspring, "Putin and Military Reform," 196.

31. "Voennaya reforma."

32. Public Opinion Foundation, "Armeyskaya sluzhba I otsrochki dlya studentov" [The army service and the deferments for students] February 10, 2005, http://bd.fom.ru/report/cat/societas/army/d050616 (accessed on March 1, 2005).

33. Levada Center, "Rossiyane ne khotyat."

34. "Vypusknikov vuzov zastavyat sluzhit' v armii."

35. Golts, "The Russian Volunteer Army," 62.

Angry Russians bombard Putin with questions in trial by TV

The Independent
By Andrew Osborn in Moscow
Published: 28 September 2005

Vladimir Putin has subjected himself to a rare and at times deeply uncomfortable three-hour grilling on live television at the hands of the Russian public in an attempt to bolster his democratic credentials and appease his critics.

It was only the fourth time he has exposed himself to what looked like a genuinely unscripted TV debate since assuming the presidency in 1999 and he expressed feelings of empathy, anger and concern in a polished performance. He managed to answer about 60 of more than a million questions put to him by e-mail, text message, telephone and video link yesterday, often sighing heavily as he dealt with complaints about wages, accommodation shortages or the army.

Anxious to avoid the kind of revolution that swept Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and Georgia, Mr Putin talked up the economy and political stability, and promised ordinary people's living standards would steadily rise.

When asked if he would run for a third successive term in 2008, something his critics say he is planning despite its illegality under the constitution, he tried to come across as altruistic, saying he was laying the foundations for Russia's "long-term development" and "young literate managers".

He ruled out altering the constitution but was coy about his own future, suggesting he would have a role in any future Russian government. "As they say in the military, I'll find my place in the ranks," was his enigmatic response. Though some analysts claimed questioners and questions had been selected so as not to embarrass him, Mr Putin claimed otherwise and there were awkward moments.

The Russian leader's most trying session came in a live link with an audience in Grozny, Chechnya.

A woman who said her son had been kidnapped and disappeared without trace asked Mr Putin when the abductions would end and who would be held responsible. Human rights groups have accused Russian troops and Moscow-backed militia of being behind many kidnappings.

"We will continue the search for missing people and those guilty of these crimes," said Mr Putin. He said it was impossible to know if the perpetrators were rebels "in disguise" or members of the law- enforcement authorities.

Another Grozny resident said the city resembled Stalingrad after the Second World War because of Kremlin-sanctioned bombardments and asked him why reconstruction efforts were taking so long.

A young woman student asked him why Chechnya had the highest unemployment in Russia, complaining that she could not find a job anywhere else in the country because of the discrimination she faced as a Chechen.

Mr Putin admitted that a "distorted image" of Chechens had developed and said the media and the government should help to counter it.

Russia's 1-Step Program: Scaring Alcoholics Dry

By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, October 2, 2005; A23

MOSCOW -- Svetlana, a 32-year-old self-described alcoholic, had managed to stay off the booze, but one day two years ago she just had to have a drink. This time she sat down by the phone so she could call an ambulance, then took a sip from a bottle of beer.

"I was very afraid," said Svetlana, who fully expected to asphyxiate when just one swig of alcohol hit her bloodstream. She only hoped that she would have time to make the call and that the ambulance crew would be able to revive her.

"I was absolutely sure something terrible would happen to me," she recalled.

Three months earlier, Svetlana had been "coded" -- a catchall term for a Russian method of treating alcoholism that essentially involves scaring the living daylights out of the alcoholic. Dating to the former Soviet Union, it involves the manipulation of the alcoholic's psyche to create the belief that alcohol equals death.

In Svetlana's case, that was induced by mild hypnosis followed by injection of a temporary but powerful drug that could attack her respiratory system. Before the drug kicked in, the doctor gave her a little vodka to taste. She became dizzy and had difficulty breathing before the doctor stepped in with some oxygen to revive her.

The injected medicine, the doctor said, would stay in her system. "I've coded you for a year," he said, according to Svetlana. "And if you drink in that time, you will die." He insisted that she sign a release form saying he would bear no responsibility for her death should she drink within 12 months.

"I believed him, because we had all heard stories about people who were coded and died when they drank," said Svetlana, who didn't want her last name published because she said her co-workers didn't know she was an alcoholic.

In the last 20 years, hundreds of thousands of people in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union have been coded against the desire to drink. But some doctors fear that the increasing sophistication of the population and the use of the technique against other addictions, such as gambling, are draining the method of its essential ingredient: the power of suggestion.

Russian chat rooms now buzz with discussions about its fallibility, and Web sites offer methods to test whether a coded alcoholic has been administered a placebo or a real drug that can cause violent illness when mixed with alcohol. "Knowledge about unsuccessful coding is spreading, and faster than it ever has before," said Alexander Nemtsov, a psychiatrist at the Moscow State Scientific and Research Institute of Psychiatry. "But we still don't have the alternatives to replace it."

Alcohol abuse, marked by binge drinking, has soared to all-time highs in Russia. More than 50,000 people die annually from alcohol poisoning, compared with about 400 annually in the United States, according to Russian researchers. It is not unusual for Russians to consume one or more bottles of vodka at a single sitting. There is little available to alcoholics in the way of long-term counseling; 12-step programs, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, are still in their infancy here.

For many Russians, the only available treatment is coding.

After 30 minutes of waiting for a medical crisis that never came, Svetlana said, she drained the bottle of beer and then cracked open another. By the next day, she was deep into a binge that would last four months. Now two years later, she attends Alcoholics Anonymous and has been sober for 16 months.

Coding was created by a Soviet psychiatrist, Alexander Dovzhenko, who assumed a cult-like status in the treatment of alcoholism. "The Dovzhenko method is basically a form of hypnosis: You drink, you die," said Andrei Yermoshin, a private psychotherapist who no longer uses the method, preferring long-term therapy. "It's fast and cheap, and supposedly you don't have a problem for a year or two years or five years, depending on how long you have been coded for."

The method's efficacy has never been seriously studied, Nemtsov said. But some Russians swear by it.

Andrei Pavlov, a chemist at a state research institute in Vladimir, about 100 miles east of Moscow, was first coded for five years in 1995. After a group lecture that involved some relaxation techniques, he said, a doctor massaged his head for several minutes, whispering mantras about the dangers of drink.

"He said, if you drink, it might lead to paralysis or blindness," said Pavlov, 54, who was re-coded in 2000 and says he's been sober for nine years. "Coding is like a computer program inside your head. And when you start drinking, something goes wrong and it may damage your brain."

Nemtsov said he used to tell his patients that he could manipulate nerve points in their mouths that would lead them to become very ill if they drank. He said he gave them a liquid local anesthetic to swill and then placed electrodes with a very mild current in their mouths to create the belief that he was permanently removing their ability to consume alcohol safely. "I was an actor much more than a doctor," Nemtsov said. "I had a wonderful effect on them. It's a form of psychotherapy, quick, indirect psychotherapy."

Other doctors place astronaut-style helmets on their patients and tell them they are manipulating their brains. And some say they are administering potentially fatal drugs, which are in fact placebos, to convince patients that their bodies contain a substance that will be fatal if mixed with alcohol.

"It's a technological secret we're not supposed to disclose," said Alexei Magalif, a Moscow psychiatrist, when asked what drugs are administered to patients. "I can only say all these cocktails are a form of psychotherapy." He said the method is not used at the private clinic where he now works.

"You have to believe in something," said Dmitry Polyakov, 32, who has been coded four times in five years and has been sober for six months. Most recently, he had what he believes to be a drug that can't be mixed with alcohol stitched into his shoulder. "You have to have the will to stop. But coding is an auxiliary help, just in case. I want to believe in it because I don't want to drink."

Serso, I'll be in Moscow from May 31 to June 2, 2006. Any chance of meeting and having coffee or drinks?