Dagestani Soldiers: Bully or be Bullied

It happens all too often. Last month, a 20-year-old conscript soldier from the southern Russian town of Volgodonsk serving in Dagestan committed suicide after deserting from his unit, after complaining of bullying by his fellow soldiers.



That he was a Caucasian like the locals did not help Ruslan Makhiyanov. His parents said their son was attacked by other soldiers from the Caucasus.



Dagestani soldiers often find themselves on the receiving end of systematic violence in the Russian army, but they also mete it out themselves. Coming from a culture with a strong pride in its traditions, and suffering racism from other Russian nationals, they inevitably get drawn into fights and bullying.



“More than 80 per cent of conscript soldiers called up from Dagestan have problems during their military service,” said Khuri Pirsaidova, head of the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Dagestan.



Dagestani soldier Malik Hajibabayev was one of those who suffered this year – and it was his fellow-countrymen who were involved. He wrote his parents a letter begging them to seek a transfer for him from the Russian Far East to another unit. But, despite the intervention of the military prosecutor’s office and an order for his transfer, the young soldier was left where he was.



Malik’s sister Angela told IWPR, “His fellow soldiers envied Malik because he worked in the hospital. Six men beat him but Malik ran away and begged the commander of the company for help on the phone. But his commander let him be ‘educated’ by his fellow countrymen.



“On May 16, Malik was taken to the Amur regional military hospital in a deep coma, with heavy concussion and damaged limbs. On May 28 he died without regaining consciousness.”



Bullying – known as “dedovshchina” in Russian – is an old problem within the Russian army. Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov came under pressure to deal more effectively with the problem earlier this year when a conscript soldier named Andrei Sychev had to have his legs amputated after suffering violent abuse.



Ivanov has said that things are getting better and “dedovshchina” is on the decline.



However, Pirsaidova provides some extremely disturbing figures. “In 2005, 21 Dagestani conscripts returned home dead,” she said. “A total of 296 had criminal cases opened against them and of those more than 80 were found guilty of various criminal charges. More than 500 conscripts have appealed to the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers of Dagestan, with over half the cases involving bullying.”



Pirsaidova said that the number of conscripts fleeing their units was increasing, with 52 cases officially recorded in the first eight months of this year – although this was only a fraction of the actual number of deserters.



One soldier who deserted from his unit with a group of other Dagestanis wrote home, “Whenever the officers got drunk they beat us with rubber truncheons or spade handles and called us monkeys. There were six of us from Dagestan. They got us up in the night and beat us. We complained to the commander of the regiment, Colonel Tyshchenko, and wrote a complaint. He showed us 15 statements from our fellow conscripts saying we had bullied them, but that wasn’t true.”



Russian military officials in Dagestan declined to comment on individual cases to IWPR. But Abakar Davudov, head of the military department that looks after soldiers’ well-being, confirmed that the violence cut both ways.



“In bullying cases, the Dagestani boys are more often the attackers than the attacked,” he told IWPR. “Our boys are stronger in spirit and look out for one another. But the commanders believe that any rule-breaking by Dagestanis in the army is because of their ethnic background.”



Activists complain that the bullying is authorised from the top.



“These boys are called ‘defenders of the fatherland’, but what kind of defenders are they when they are just slaves?” complained Pirsaidova.



“They are the slaves of their commanders and of the whole military set-up. The commanders have nothing to do with training their soldiers. This is done by the ‘grandfathers’,” she said, referring to the “dedy” or longer-serving conscripts whom the officers allow to maintain order among the rest, and whose behaviour has led to bullying being called “dedovshchina”.



“When the soldiers tell their commanders about health problems, they are told they are faking. In April this year one such ‘faker’, Visirpasha Aminov, died of pneumonia. He went to hospital only when he lost consciousness, but it was too late to save his life. Parents of soldiers, when they come visiting, can be given any excuse why they cannot see their sons. Everything is up to the commander. He is like the soldier’s owner - he can do what he wants with him.”



Shihsaid Davidkhanov, who heads the Dagestani branch of the pro-Putin youth movement Nashi, agrees, “The main problem is the position of the commanders, who seethe with hatred towards ‘blacks’. The biggest problem now is not bullying so much as the lawless behaviour of the officers. They cause conflicts between the young men, they create little clans, protect some and deliberately destroy and crush Caucasians.”



However, Pirsaidova says she gets letters not only from the conscripts themselves and their parents, but also from the officers as well.



In one recent letter, a colonel in Krasnoyarsk in Siberia wrote to the military commissar of the Dagestani town of Buinaksk complaining about the behaviour of a soldier from there. The letter said that the man had thrown a stool through a window, raged with anger and insulted officers, while in an earlier outburst, “he complained about being called up and made to wear a uniform, so he deliberately stripped off and ran through the unit’s base in his underclothes”.



“I always warn the boys who are called up how this kind of behaviour could end,” said Pirsaidova. “They defend themselves by saying we are Dagestani men and we should not wash floors. Even these day-to-day issues can cause conflicts between officers and men. And which verse of the Koran says that you shouldn’t wash floors?”



The mufti of Dagestani, Akhmad-Haji Abdulayev, has even intervened on this issue in local newspapers. He wrote, “I call on all Muslim soldiers to do their duty with a good conscience. There is nothing in the Koran that says it is humiliating or insulting for a man to do household work. The call-up has begun and I have told the imams of the mosques to instruct conscripts not to cause problems in their units.”



Many parents try to avoid having their sons serve at all. Ubaidat Magomayeva from Kizlyar said she found a place for her younger son to do his military service at a university, and forged a medical card for the elder one, saying he was mentally unfit and needed to spend time in a psychiatric hospital.



“When I had to visit him in this awful place he said, ‘Don’t worry, these guys are normal - just people like me skiving from the army.’”



But this story too ended in tragedy, when the young man died after a real psychiatric patient attacked him with a knife, slashing an artery.



Sapiyat Magomedova is a freelance journalist in Makhachkala, Dagestan.