In December 2019, police officers came to
Ruslan Shaveddinov’s Moscow apartment, sawed through the door and placed him in
handcuffs before whisking him away for forced military service in the Arctic.
اضافة اعلان
Denied access to a cell phone — a rule violation, according
to the 25-year-old opposition activist — he had to correspond with his loved
ones via handwritten letters that took weeks to arrive.
“They sent me as far away as possible,” the ally of jailed
Kremlin critic Alexei
Navalny told AFP.
Sequestered for one year to a military post accessible only
by helicopter and surrounded by roaming polar bears, Shaveddinov said he and
the other four soldiers at the base even had to melt snow for drinking water.
“It was like I had been exiled, with no connection to the
outside world, in these unliveable conditions,” he recalls.
While military service is mandatory in Russia, with more
than 250,000 men between the ages of 18 and 27 conscripted each year, many
Russians get out of it through medical or educational exemptions. Some also
simply ignore the summons or pay bribes.
But for those harboring opposition sympathies, avoiding
service is a more complicated endeavor.
The opposition and rights activists say conscription in
recent years has become another weapon in the authorities’ arsenal in their
drive to silence dissent.
In Shaveddinov’s case, authorities had taken an interest in
him that summer when Navalny’s aides organized protests in Moscow demanding
fair elections.
They also riled authorities that autumn by launching a
voting strategy that saw Kremlin-linked candidates lose races in local polls.
Shaveddinov says he provided proof he was medically unfit
for military service, though his appeals were shut down three times.
‘Punishment without crime’
But Shaveddinov says he didn’t think his activism could
result in forced conscription, in what he likened to the Soviet-era practice of
exiling dissidents to the Gulag network of labor camps.
“It was impossible to imagine that such a practice would
return to Russia,” he said.
“That politically undesirable people would be sent into
exile.”
Shaveddinov is one of three prominent Navalny allies who
have been sent to the army against their will in the past five years. Four
others have been prosecuted for evading military obligations.
Years before Shaveddinov’s case, human rights defender Oleg
Kozlovsky was arrested in 2007 and sent to a military base in central Russia
despite being exempt as a full-time student.
“My case was a dangerous precedent. These methods began to
be used over and over again,” says the 36-year-old Amnesty International
researcher.
Describing conscription as “punishment without crime”,
Kozlovsky said it was “a way of isolating a person, cutting them off from
contacts” and is used “when it is difficult or impossible to fabricate a
criminal case”.
The researcher believes cases involving well-known
opposition activists are just the “tip of the iceberg”, accusing law
enforcement of routinely sending details of protesters to the army to check
whether they have skipped out on military service.
He pointed to Moscow rallies in the summer of 2019, when the
Investigative Committee, which probes major crimes in Russia, said it had
identified “134 cases of military evasion” among detained protesters.
And this year, after mass rallies in support of Navalny in
January and February, the committee’s head Alexander Bastrykin ordered
investigators to probe whether any had evaded service.
The defense ministry did not respond to AFP requests for
comment.
‘School of slavery’
In the town of Luga about 100km south of Saint Petersburg,
Margarita Yudina is indignant that her two sons, 24-year-old Robert and
20-year-old Rostislav, have recently been summoned for military service.
She blames their situation on her “political activities” and
says she will fight for her children, one of whom is diabetic, not to be sent
to “a school of slavery”.
In January, video footage went viral showing Yudina being
kicked in the stomach by a police officer, sending her tumbling onto the
pavement during a rally in
Navalny’s support.
She had publicly denounced her assault and filed a
complaint.
“It’s pressure, mockery, and harassment so that I will speak
up less and not look for who beat me up,” says the 54-year-old woman.
She also worries that her sons will be hazed — a problem
that is still rife in the army even though it dropped significantly, experts
say, when Russia in 2008 reduced mandatory service from two years to one to
prevent older recruits from beating younger ones.
While President Vladimir Putin has said that conscription is
becoming a historical relic, it remains a steadfast part of Russian policy in a
country that is always prepared to be invaded.
And as long as it persists, Vsevolod Gunkov, a 19-year-old
libertarian activist in Siberia’s Altai region, plans on skipping his service.
Although he already narrowly escaped in December by filing
an appeal, conscription resumed in April, and Gunkov was summoned once again.
The activist, however, says he will not go down without a
fight.
“Everything is unpredictable. Let’s see.”
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