Unleashed violence as the norm: Irpin, Butcha, Mariupol … The unprecedented violence that the Russian army is sowing on the territory of Ukraine, has its roots in the Russian social structure, says historian Sergei Medvedev

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  1. Translation Part 1:

    Unleashed violence as the norm: Irpin, Butcha, Mariupol … The unprecedented violence that the Russian army is sowing on the territory of Ukraine, has its roots in the Russian social structure, says historian Sergei Medvedev on Holod.

    After a hundred days of war, the ability to be horrified and shocked dulls. But then new evidence of Russian army atrocities emerges, and one plunges into the abyss again.

    In early April, Russian soldiers in the village of Termakhivka near Kyiv took five young men off the street, tied them up, laid them in a circle in a field, and left them like that for two weeks, a rifle pointed at them. At night the temperature dropped to -10 ° C, it was snowing. One of the men was shot in the leg. He lay there for nine days with the open wound. Then the soldiers dragged the body of a villager and threw it in the middle of the circle: “So you can sleep well.”

    These soldiers had hardly seen the film Grus 200 by Alexei Balabanov – the prophetic director who, among other things, had predicted the phenomenon of Russian fascism – but even the late filmmaker could have learned something from their perverse fantasies.

    ORGY OF EPIC, UNBOUND VIOLENCE

    What has been happening in Ukraine for the past three months is an orgy of epic, unbound violence. With mass shootings and bestial torture, the murder of civilians, just like that, out of boredom, for fun, with rape and murder of parents in front of their children and vice versa, with violence against women and girls from eight to 80 years old. To read these reports is unbearable, but necessary, out of a duty of compassion and empathy, but also in an attempt to understand where this archaic evil that the Russian army has brought upon the country comes from, from what earthly abysses, from what nightmares and horror movies? Has there been a genetic mutation in Russia that has produced indifferent sadists who have now arrived on Ukrainian soil?
    The survivors, who witnessed these atrocities, tell about it not so much full of fear, but rather in immeasurable amazement: “Vpershe take batschymo”, we see such a thing for the first time, “We had no idea that such a thing is possible”.

    ROUTINE PRACTICES OF THE RUSSIAN VIOLENT APPARATUSES

    You don’t have to be Fyodor Dostoevsky, Yuri Mamleyev or Vladimir Sorokin to explore the darkest corners of the Russian soul. One need only look at the chronicle of police violence, the torture in police stations and penal colonies, the crimes of the army, to understand that the events in Butcha, Irpin and all the other towns and villages occupied by the Russians are neither excess nor pathology. Rather, they are a part of the norm, routine practices of the Russian violent apparatus.

    Project journalists have uncovered the antecedents of the Russian units stationed in Butsha – the name of this village near Kyiv will henceforth be spoken, like Katyn or Samashki.

    And as it turns out, these are units that were known for their brutality even in peacetime. For example, the 64th Motorized Rifle Brigade of the 35th Army from Khabarovsk is notorious at home. Their nickname Mletschnik is even used to scare children. Suicides occur there time and again, conscripts and contract soldiers flee the unit; in February 2014 alone, there were seven deaths in three weeks in Troop Unit 51460, which is stationed in Knyaz-Volkonskoye. It is significant that Vladimir Putin gave this very unit the honorary title of a Guard unit after it withdrew from the Kyiv area-as if he were awarding it for the war crimes it committed.

    UNITS KNOWN FOR THEIR BRUTALITY EVEN IN PEACETIME

    A similar trail trails behind the 127th Motorized Rifle Division of the 5th Army, also stationed in the Far East: it regularly appears in crime reports, and bodies of soldiers without heads are found in its vicinity.

    In Butsha, it was not some fanatics who were at work (there were rumors about special units of the Rosgvardiya and Chechen troops – although apparently they were also involved in the brutal massacres), but regular units of the Russian army, which, despite all the reforms of Anatoly Serdyukov and large-scale image campaigns, still relies on brutality as the only means of leadership.

    WAR CRIMES WENT UNPUNISHED

    Jeffrey Hon of the London School of Economics and Political Science has researched the violent practices of the Russian army. He concludes that Russian army war crimes have gone unpunished in the 21st century-from Chechnya and Georgia to Syria and the Donbass to the beginning of the current phase of the war. The Russian armed forces, unlike Western armies, have not developed an institutional culture that would minimize civilian casualties: No safeguards against unjustified, indiscriminate violence exist in the Russian army.

    “Today’s Russian Army atrocities result from a latent inability to overcome the legacy of its Soviet predecessor,” says Hon. “Lethality and victory at all costs remain the Russian Army’s top priorities.”

    NO SAFEGUARDS AGAINST UNJUSTIFIED, INDISCRIMINATE VIOLENCE EXIST IN THE RUSSIAN ARMY

    The same is true for the other institutions of the Russian power apparatus: the police, which sends OMON units to the front lines, the Russian Guard, the penitentiary system. In recent years, thanks to the proliferation of mobile devices in penitentiaries and access to social networks, terrabytes of shocking evidence of torture, abuse, and rape have leaked to the public, becoming common practice in Russian prisons for decades and the norm in how the administration treats prisoners and prisoners treat each other.

    RUSSIAN PRISON DESPOTISM HAS SPREAD BEYOND THE COUNTRY’S BORDERS

    Soldiers fighting in Ukraine today come from the most depressed and crime-ridden Russian regions, where the prison subculture significantly shapes the male population: Most men have either done time themselves or have close friends and relatives who have done time; the youth there are involved in AUE networks-and now this order, with its “customs” and practices of extreme physical and sexualized violence, has spilled over into the occupied territories of Ukraine: Russian prison despotism has spilled over the walls of the camps and across the country’s borders.

    The violence is not limited to state institutions; it also prevails in families, in the relationships between husband and wife, parents and children, younger and older, superiors and subordinates. It seeps out of the intercepted telephone conversations between Russian soldiers and their commanders, in which mat, threats and humiliation are rampant. From the soldiers’ phone calls and chat messages with their families, in which maudlin sentimentality is mixed with cruelty and cynicism, in which wives tell their husbands what to eat and what size shoes to take in Ukrainian homes, and others admonish them, “When raping Ukrainian women, use a condom.”

    This violence is second nature to Russian society; it has become the identifying code for the socium, which is based on hierarchy and subjugation, on taking away and dividing resources, in which brute force is above morality and power is above the law.
    This order is sanctioned by the behavior of the ruling class, which drives the common people to death in its blue-light limousines, always getting away with it; it is sanctioned by the speeches of President Putin, who teaches that you “hit the weak” and you “have to hit first,” earning thunderous applause.

  2. Russian society is one great pyramid of bullies, is it any surprise that the soldiers on the very bottom turn out to be utterly horrible when they finally find someone on a lower tier than themselves?

  3. Is this war in particular worse or is it just the “normal” violence that happens in almost every war?

    Because from what i have read of ww1 ww2 or vietnam it seems that a lot of similar things were happening.

  4. Eastern European tradition. Ukraine is the same. I think, correct me if I’m wrong, but in Eastern Europe minus Russia this is slowly changing and becoming unacceptable, like in Romania beating up wives which was the norm up until a few years ago.

    Well Russia is isolated and the law of the bully is basically what perpetuates this loop of violence. Russian conscripts being abused and raped create future abusers and rapists. Very well known in psychology.

    A kid being sexually abused in his/her infancy has a very high probability of becoming a pedophile himself. Different education of the population is the solution. There’s a balance we need to achieve, that is educating and disciplining the kids but not abusing them.

    If you go to the opposite however you’ll create dysfunctional societies and shitholes like France and the UK and now Italy as well, where kids are little delinquents since their parents taught them they can do whatever they want. That’s probably worse of ovwrsisxiplining kids.

    See Poland is now a beautiful example of functioning society, the kids in school are very well behaved and respectful, in Italy it’s like entering a minors’ penitentiary basically.

  6. It has its roots in the Romanov Empire – and the Leninist and Stalinist Empires, and the R.F.

    Attributing it to Russian culture , or ethnicity, or language, is not only a diversion but a P.R. wash.

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