The Torture Routine, Russian Style

Russia's police force is blighted by corruption, brutality and outright torture. When a police major went on a fatal shooting rampage in a Moscow supermarket in April, the incident prompted the ouster of Moscow's police chief and fresh promises of reform. In a recent cover package, NEWSWEEK's Russian-language partner, NEWSWEEK Russky, looked at whether the shuffles in the department known as the MVD (Internal Affairs Ministry) could actually make a difference. This article, adapted from a report by Yelizaveta Mayetnaya, Pavel Sedakov and Aleksandr Raskin, examines some of the problems endemic in the Russian force.

 

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In early April, Russian police picked up Aleksei Yakimov in Nizhny Novgorod, a sizeable city 200 miles east of Moscow. Solidly built, bald and with a criminal record, officers wanted to confirm Aleksei's identity. "A gangster," the detectives of the criminal-investigation division snickered. After tying plastic bags around Aleksei's neck, the officers beat him half to death. Toward morning, he was dumped in the icy Volga River. "I was lucky—at the last moment they took the cuffs off me," Aleksei says. "The cops got scared that government handcuffs would be found on the corpse."

Aleksei's story is hardly uncommon. In Tyumen, a Siberian outpost, authorities are currently investigating a case in which a drunken police officer strangled a disabled person. In Saratov, three detectives are on trial for beating a robbery suspect to death and then burning the body. In Perm, staffers at a medical sobering-up station tied a detainee's hands behind his back and tied his bent-back legs to them, known as a "swallow." The detainee died, and investigators charged the officers with no crime.

All of these incidents result from a systemic problem in the MVD, which is essentially the national police department. The combination of poor recruitment policies and a shortage in police ranks have made for a volatile mix. Reporting by NEWSWEEK Russia reveals that the MVD has been undermined by a system of clans, personal acquaintances and hometown cronyism. "There is neither parliamentary nor public oversight of the police," complains lawmaker Gennady Gudkov. Despite claims by the MVD that wrongdoing by its officers is on the wane, the reality is that misconduct, and torture, is rampant throughout the system.

According to the European Court of Human Rights, every third complaint from Russia involves the use of torture during interrogations. Conversely, the MVD recently reported optimistically that the number of criminal police officers is steadily dropping. In 2008, criminal proceedings were initiated against 1,300 Russian police officers, and 1,500 were dismissed from police bodies for various offenses, a 10 percent drop from 2007. At the same time, citizens' confidence in the police grew from 30 to 38 percent, according to Rashid Nurgaliyev, head of the MVD, based on 2008 survey results. After an incident involving Maj. Denis Yevsyukov, who on April 27 fatally shot a cab driver and then opened fire at a Moscow supermarket, shooting eight more people and killing two, Russians are now increasingly skeptical of these positive statistics.