‘Even Hell Was Better’: Russian Vets Describe Treatment In Army

Last August, Cpl. Sergei Valdov drove his tank into the worst battle of the Chechen war. Most of his platoon died in that final, desperate fight for Grozny. Valdov was lucky: he escaped with only a large piece of shrapnel in his leg.

When he heard three weeks ago that he and his devastated unit, Russia’s 205th Motorized Infantry Brigade, were finally about to withdraw from Chechnya, he fell to his knees and wept.

“I was sure I was going to die there,” he said, tears once again filling his flat gray eyes. “Most of my buddies did.”

But ask him about life on his new base on the outskirts of this frigid city in southern Russia and he doesn’t hesitate to speak his mind. “I’d rather be back in Grozny, for God’s sake,” the 22 year-old Siberian farm boy said, reaching for a bottle. “Even hell was better than Budyonnovsk.”

Having been defeated in battle by their Chechen opponents, the soldiers of the Russian army have come limping home to humiliation, hunger, sickness and despair. Like hundreds of thousands of their comrades scattered throughout the country, the young men who fought in Grozny find themselves humbled and demoralized before a nation that sees in them all it wants to forget.

Once the invincible protector of the mighty Soviet Union, Russia’s military has become the atrophied symbol of its loss and shame.

Soldiers in ripped sneakers and frayed uniforms beg for food at city markets from here to Moscow. Outside the Chechen war theater, suicides accounted for one-third of the army dead last year. As many as half of all Russian draftees now simply refuse to serve. For those who do, housing shortages have become so acute that thousands live in boxes or forage for space in abandoned factories. Even the general staff in Moscow acknowledges that a quarter of all servicemen have no place to live.

“Anya, I have solved my housing problems,” Capt. Andrei Golubev, based in remote eastern Kamchatka, wrote in an all-too-typical suicide note to his wife last month. He then drew his service revolver and blew his head off.

Few soldiers have suffered like the men of the 205th, who bore the brunt of the fighting throughout the Chechen war. Those who managed to survive now live crammed into drafty tents pitched hastily on the icy steppe here. Many are dressed in rags and have not been paid in months. Malnutrition is common; so are other preventable illnesses.

For food, the soldiers have already come to rely on the grudging charity of a city that learned to expect them on the day their trains pulled into the station.

People here are already terrified of their new neighbors. Drunken soldiers roam the streets at will; crime rates have tripled every week since their arrival. Hand grenades sell on the brand-new black market for $2 each. Both of the town’s hotels have turned into dangerous holding pens for discharged soldiers with little money and nowhere else to go. Last week a soldier was found dead from drink in the Prikumsk, the “better” of the fleabags. Since then, only officers have been allowed to register.

“I served and was wounded for my country!” one indignant soldier shouted after being refused a room. “How dare you ignore me!” The woman behind the Plexiglas looked away and mumbled something about not making the decisions.

“I actually signed up for the army because I thought it was my duty to help my country,” said Pvt. Volodya Yarilov, 20. “It was one of those things stupid kids do. One of the stupidest things kids do.”

Yarilov served for eight months in Chechnya, fighting in some of the largest and bloodiest battles of the war. He was in the southern mountains last spring when the Chechens destroyed a column of Russian tanks and support vehicles in one of the war’s biggest ambushes.

“I was there,” said Yarilov. “I was in one of the trucks at the beginning of the column. One of the only trucks they didn’t hit.” Told that videos of that attack now sell in the Grozny marketplace for $5 each, he almost started to retch.

“I don’t know what it was for,” he said, sipping and then slurping down icy glassfuls of the bad vodka that soldiers here seem to live on. “We lost. We never had any guidance. We were lucky to get helmets. Nobody ever told us what our mission was. Nobody ever told us why we were killing the people we insist are Russians. And now we are supposed to sit here and freeze to death until we get the nerve to desert.”

There are large piles of lumber at the entrance to the new base here. Asked when barracks will be built for the 6,000 men of the 205th who are now living in tents along a windswept lake, one of its commanders, Col. Viktor Boikov, thought for a minute and answered, “When somebody gives us the money to buy nails.”

It is not clear what the soldiers are doing on their new base.

With fuel and material in short supply, training is far too costly to carry out. Most of them earn about $20 a week.

In Moscow, where army generals talk of reform and commitment, there is much discussion about the erosion of values. Nobody here would disagree.

“I was not expecting a hero’s welcome,” said one young conscript from the Moscow region. “We lost. But I assumed they would feed us. It almost seems as if they are trying to kill us here.”