Russian Soldiers Spend Years Raping, Murdering, and Stealing - Then What?
They return to a society that doesn't care and pretends the crimes never happened
To put it mildly, the young man in the photo above is in a bit of a pickle. Protesting Russia’s law that LGBT citizens could be imprisoned for “propagandizing and perverting” children, the unfortunate kid took his protest to St. Petersburg’s cultural and historical heart: The Palace Square behind the famous Winter Palace.
The day was August 2nd. Most Russians recognize this date. It is an absolute nightmare for Russian cities’ parks and central squares. On this day, the magnetic energy from the moon turns thousands and thousands of passively violent and barely civilized men into raging animals. August 2nd is Airborne Day (Den’ Desantnikov) in Russia.
Wearing their blue-striped sleeveless t-shirts and green berets, the army of Mr. Hydes is up bright and early, and even before noon, many of them are already drunk but still standing. They are in the violent phase of their day. A few hours from being passed out on the benches around fountains but inebriated enough that the shouting, bear-hugging, and “Ros-si-ya” chanting mob is still coherent enough to replace law and order with New Testament-style judgment.
The police in most towns and cities, especially from 2013 when this incident occurred, were ordered not to intervene unless they absolutely had to. The Kremlin began to silently support fascist and pro-military movements by not condemning their mischief — like beatings of dark-skinned immigrants.
The animals swarmed the young man undertaking his lone protest above. He was poked, prodded, hit, verbally abused, and threatened with death. The police finally fought their way through the mob and removed him — pushing and shoving him the whole, all the while calling him things like “faggot” and other unkind things.
People run from them
Over my 30 years in Russia, I have seen families run in the opposite direction when turning onto a street or entering parks and suddenly finding themselves in the midst of an airborne troop celebration. I was warned in 1995 by friends that that is the one day it would be best advised to either stay home or leave the city.
Thousands of these conscience-less animals meet for celebrations in the city center, celebrate, tear things up, and then agitated, drunk, and ready for violence, stagger back to their neighborhoods.
The celebrations often end up with torn-up apartments, beaten wives, and children psychologically scarred until it’s their turn to rape, murder, and steal in one of the Kremlin’s wars. No one heals these men because they must cultivate the fruit of their illnesses and domestic violence. Should Russia get all sensitive and start helping the tens of thousands struggling with PTSD, then there is the risk that their kids wouldn’t be pliable enough to go off and commit the same atrocities in the future. Such softness can hinder the long-term plans of a dictator.
In many of the military celebrations, which are not exclusive for airborne troops but also veterans from other branches of service and disciplines take part, it was first the veterans of the Afghan War who set the mood and then those who survived the two Chechen wars.
The Chechen wars, in many ways, resemble the war in Ukraine. Sent to restrain innocent civilians caught in a tangled web of political intrigue, many conscripted soldiers initially resisted harming people; they fought the orders to slaughter everything that moved. Chechens were fellow citizens of the Soviet Union, and the Russian soldiers sent to kill them struggled to murder and torture them because they resembled their neighbors, former classmates, teachers, and bus drivers.
But after a friend would get killed, the anger blinded them. The necessity to appease the sorrow with the fleeting joy of revenge made the first murder much easier.
The situation is the same and even more amplified in Ukraine. Many Russians have kin there. Many Russians have an in-law or good friend from Ukraine. The countries are so bound together that each time a Russian murders one of them, it is not unlike shooting a neighbor at the dacha. It was hard for many to commit their first murder, but it got much easier.
If you have listened to any of the intercepted calls made by Russian soldiers to their families back in Russia, you can hear how some talk about the deaths as burdens on their souls. Others, however, after they have been there for a while, begin to brag about the murders. The family members have difficulty listening to these tales, and sometimes a worried mother or wife will say, “But that’s not you. How will you live with that when you come home?” The young men make verbal shrugs of their shoulders.
Being a soldier in a war like Ukraine, Chechnya, and even Vietnam is a brutal affair not just for the country’s victims being ripped to shreds but also a form of torture for the civilian soldiers sent to kill. At first, they take up their positions on the battlefield, believing that what they are doing is right. Then the harsh reality sets in that what they are doing is wrong in every way.
Sooner or later, though, the elixir of the propaganda dulls the senses, and the civilian soldiers transform into zombified ones. Killing machines, they mindlessly, even joyfully stomp to death anything on their path, unmoved by the victim’s suffering.
Tens of thousands morally dead
The figures vary wildly, but it is estimated that between 50,000 and 100,000 civilian noncombatants died in the two Chechnya wars. Russia was humiliated in the first one, which lasted from 1994 to 1996. No one ever knows how many Russian service members get killed, but some put the figures at between 20,000 and 40,000 for the two wars. In Russia’s ten-year war in Afghanistan, it is estimated that 15,000 died.
The failures in Chechnya, which led to so many dead Russian service members, are repeating themselves in Ukraine. Poorly trained, if trained at all, and because of corruption, seldom supplied with the necessary equipment to even field a proper combat battalion, Russian troops are not so much as deployed as they are given a bare minimum of weaponry and set loose on the civilian populations. Their sole command is to kill and do whatever you need to break them.
When you are a young man thrown into the chaos of a battlefield and told to go berserk or die, you quickly learn how to go berserk. The wild animals who return from these wars and then inflict their newly-learned aggression onto un-baptized civilians in Russia are victims. But, in a society that never will offer them any help, let alone admit their victim status, is it possible to feel sorry for them if we know they will always be the mindless thugs and murderers they have become? Feeling sorry can leave us vulnerable to their violence.
I know it sounds harsh to call them mindless animals, but if you have never talked to these people or seen them in action in the parks and streets during their celebrations and on just really any day of the year, then you have to accept that this is what many of them have become. Their first instinct after their time in service is to violently attack and then consider later whether or not such a reaction was necessary. Sure, it’s all a form of PTSD, but in a society rejecting such an ailment, it becomes the law.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many of the mafia leaders who seized much of the commerce in the country were Afghan war vets. I recall countless meetings with mafia figures, anyone who did business then or just lived there would inevitably have some dealings with the mafia — even it was to drink some vodka — who were vets of that wars. The most notorious or hardened mafia were the vets. Then, the Chechen vets started competing with the Afghan war guys. Power struggles ensued, and violence erupted in wild shootouts and bombings. Not far from where I used to live, one mafia guy was shot by a sniper driving down a busy street in the city’s center around 11 a.m.
Because there were so many veterans returning from Chechnya, though, there weren’t enough opportunities for them in the mafia. As a result, many joined the police and the OMON — a para-military, anti-riot force known for brutally beating civilians in Russia just for the hell of it (and I say that without exaggeration) — and the FSB. Those morally broken men, killers, rapists, and thieves were overseeing the official and unofficial law in the country.
Ukraine’s vets will feed on Russian complacency
As we have seen in Ukraine, Russian soldiers repeat the crimes that their grandfathers and father who came before them committed. Mindlessly killing women, children, older men, combatants, non-combatants, raping, stealing, and even their own comrades-in-arms who fall back from foxholes being overrun by the opposing army, these soldiers are lied to and treated like dogs by the well-fed and, often, drunken officers. The incompetence of the officer class is not unique to the Ukrainian conflict. Russian officers are notoriously incompetent and known for using meat waves to overrun enemy positions.
As in the generations before Ukraine, these “survivors” will be released from their time in service, wrecked physically and mentally, and become the police, the fathers, the husbands, the mafia, and the future corrupt politicians. They will return to a society that calls them all heroes regardless of the crimes only they know they committed. No one will help them overcome their PTSD. Admitting that something could be wrong with them would be an admission that these great warriors were something less than “Russian men.”
The wounds will fester, and another generation and more of Russian men will grow up to be exactly what so many of them that came before them were: weak, sickly, morally corrupted, and incapable of doing anything on their own. Russian men are this way not because they are somehow inferior to other men on the earth but because Russian society regards them as completely and utterly redundant — who needs a male head of household when they have a dictator? — and destroys them from birth.
Russia’s future looks bright indeed.