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Moscow Times
August 11, 2004
Police Are at War With the Russian People
By Yulia Latynina

In the Moscow metro, a policeman walked up to a Tajik man who had no ticket and asked if he was looking to get himself shot. Before the man could answer, the policeman shot him in the mouth. The bullet passed through the man's throat and lodged in his back. Miraculously, Ruslan Baibekov survived.

How many people must you have beaten and killed before you forget that you're not supposed to kill anyone in a public place, only back at the station where there aren't any outside witnesses?

In Nizhny Novgorod, Alexei Mikheyev gave a ride to a young woman he knew. When she didn't come home that evening, Mikheyev was arrested. He was tortured in the usual way -- the way Indians tortured white settlers and Chechen fighters torture Russian contract soldiers. Among other things the cops attached electric wires to Mikheyev's earlobes, a technique they like to call zvonok Putinu, or "a phone call to Putin." Mikheyev confessed to rape and murder. At this point the cops went for a cup of tea. Half-dead, Mikheyev threw himself out of a third-story window, breaking his spine and leaving him permanently disabled. Four days later the girl showed up at home, alive and well.

Mikheyev has taken his case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

In the town of Serov a young man named Smolyaninov was strolling with his girlfriend when the cops hauled him in. It seems that a robbery had just occurred nearby. Smolyaninov was beaten to death. The cops recorded the whole gory scene: Smolyaninov's clothes were soaked in blood, his head beaten to a pulp and his buttocks ripped apart. In their report, they wrote that the corpse bore no signs of "injury inconsistent with life," and that Smolyaninov had died from an overdose. To substantiate this, they injected his lifeless body with narcotics.

And that would have been the end of that if the cops hadn't started bragging and showing the video to their buddies.

These cases are exceptions, of course -- in the sense that the cops got caught. How many men like Mikheyev have admitted to crimes under torture but the girl never did come home? How many people like Smolyaninov were beaten to death, but the cops kept the video to themselves?

While these crimes are horrifying, society's total indifference to the war that the police are waging against their own people is even more disturbing.

In the West, any one of these crimes would have been front-page news for months. The trial of Mikheyev's torturers or Smolyaninov's murderers would have relegated even the news about Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison to the inside pages. In Russia, however, these stories aren't news, just the way of the world. Every Russian knows that the cops have the right to torture and kill, just as the Japanese samurai had the right to test the sharpness of their new swords on passing peasants. And it never occurred to the peasants to protest.

In the West, people don't flinch when they see a policeman. We flinch. We relate to the cops not as citizens to the defenders of law and order, but as inmates to prison guards. We just hope they'll leave us alone. The cops have killed and maimed more people in Russia than the Chechen fighters.

Russia is a feudal state, like 13th-century Japan. There's no point in getting upset when the police refuse to investigate your complaint, when they beat you or arrest you for no reason. That's not their function. Like the samurai, the cops aren't defenders of law and order; they are given the right to commit acts of violence in exchange for preserving the regime that gives them this right.

They're just not supposed to kill people in public. The cop who shot Baibekov in the mouth forgot this simple rule, and he got caught. The cops who tortured Mikheyev were smarter, and they're still on the streets. They've even installed bars on the precinct house windows so they can call Putin without interference.

Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.