Author: Dane Lowell
Submitted by: redadmin

Chapt. 39 - 1361 words
Columns :: Icy plunges and cold deaths

MOSCOW, January 19, 2004 –- Comments:   Ratings:
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Epiphany
Frozen soldiers



MOSCOW, January 19, 2004 – Day of Epiphany.

You’ve seen photos and movies of fat old Russians plunging through holes in the ice into the freezing waters of lakes and rivers in the dead of winter. I always thought it was just another Russian aberration, like eating dried fish on the bus or seeing who can drink the most vodka.

Speaking of which, when is a big winner a big loser?

When what he wins is a vodka-drinking contest.

They actually have one in Volgodonsk every year. After last year’s winner heroically downed several pints, he was taken comatose to the local hospital and never left – alive. Five of his fellow contestants were hospitalized, but it turns out they lost less than he did.

Anyway, it seems there is actually a pseudo-reason for dumping your overweight bod into a lake of freezing water in the middle of January.

It’s part of the Epiphany celebration that marks the real true believer. They’re celebrating the christening and Baptism of Christ in the River Jordan.

It’s also supposed to make you healthy.


Probably the religiousest (I know, I know, but I like the ring of it) place to freeze your buns for Christ is a place called New Jerusalem about 50 km from Moscow. One of my students from “Moskovskiy Teleport” explained it to me. A Russian Orthodox patriarch named Nikon decided in the 17th century that, since the real Temple of Jerusalem was in Muslim hands, he should build an exact replica in Russia just for Christians – at least his brand.

Nikon is also revered for another reason. He perceived – rightly no doubt -- that the use of only two fingers when you made the sign of the cross was not nearly as holy as if you used three -- one finger for each of the Holy Trinity. Which one gets the middle finger has never been made public, as far as I know.

Anyway, those recalcitrant and unrepentant “old believers” who refused to hold up another finger when they crossed themselves were ferreted out and exiled – from their home churches if not from heaven altogether. A few of them still persist in defying the State Orthodox church, and there’s actually one of the few “Old Believer” churches in Moscow just around the corner from my apartment at Belarusskaya metro station.

Anyway, the temple at New Jerusalem is purportedly quite a grand affair, and includes a reproduction of the Garden of Gethsemane. Nikon also rerouted the local river to emulate the Jordan in its course around Jerusalem. So now if you really want to be a Cool Christer, you head for New Jerusalem and jump through the cross-shaped hole into the ice while brothers and monks assure you that Jesus won’t let you die of pneumonia. Maybe he won’t. But they don’t publish statistics.


One pneumonia death they did allow was that of a 18-year-old recruit from Lyubertsy in the southern outskirts of Moscow. He and some 200 other virgin recruits were forced to stand in thin clothing on the tarmac in –20 degree (F) weather for several hours while their transport plane was being refueled in Novosibirsk, seven time zones away from their homes.

Ninety of them came down with pneumonia or other respiratory diseases and one of them, 18-year-old Vladimir Berezin, died nearly a month later in the Mogodan military hospital.

Cruel and inhuman treatment in the army is as Russian as jumping in icy rivers or passing out drunk in the metro. Hazing of young soldiers is notorious and is the thing draft-eligible young Russians fear the most – not service in Chechnya. The hazing often ends up with them dead, and it’s not an uncommon occurrence for a young recruit to turn his rifle on his own non-coms or officers, his barrack-mates, and often himself.

My friend, former dissident and ongoing KGB victim Andrei S. says that the army’s cult of violence is no accident, that cruelty and hazing is not only tolerated, but is actively encouraged and perpetuated as one of the primary socialization and control tools developed by the Soviets. And it’s still intact.

“They used to whale -- out of the youth just starting to learn their social role -- the remnants of the ‘idealistic rubbish’ which their parents and teachers had preached to them,” such ideals as kindness, compassion, gentleness, social responsibility, and the traditional ingredients of the vaunted but mythical “Russian soul.”

“The widespread violence created ideal conditions for KGB recruitment of stool pigeons on a mass scale.

“Later on, when ordinary violence became the norm, the pressure had to be increased, and the army began drafting criminals. Ordinary violence deteriorated into murder and rape. The ruling regime was no longer satisfied to have its subjects merely scared, they wanted to have them raped. This symbolic act of spiritual lowering became its trademark.”

When they were finally discharged from the military, “it was only natural that the young men who passed this initiation into modern style slavery, acted like slaves: work less, steal more. The pivotal ideal of the socialist system -- free, creative labor -- was smashed.”

Though the Soviet system which created it is gone, the cult of violence in the army is still alive and well.

As Andrei noted, in this kind of inhuman culture, “any talk about the Military Code of Honor has the same puzzling effect as a discussion of vegetarian diet among cannibals.”


So it was merely part of their initiation into the cult of violence for the brass to order the 200 shivering soldiers to stand motionless on the tarmac for the eight hours it took to refuel the plane.

Another Russian army tradition is for the soldier not to be issued a uniform until he has arrived at his first duty station. And the tradition also calls for throwing away the clothes which he wore in. So mothers of new recruits are careful to dress their soon-to-be-soldier sons in the most worthless rags they have.

So when they tramped down the ramp into the –20 degree weather, they were wearing the flimsiest clothes they possessed. And there they stood for the next eight hours.

So the wonder is that only 90 of them came down with pneumonia and that only one of them died.

Died? A month later? In a military hospital? From pneumonia?

Pneumonia is fairly easily treated with antibiotics and other modern medicines and standard hospital care. So why would a healthy 18-year-old die nearly a month after he first came down with it?


And this is perhaps the worst scandal of the Russian military: The Mogodan military hospital – like virtually all the others -- had no antibiotics.

A defense analyst writing in the Moscow Times reported that in Chechnya, for instance, “a military journalist reported that during the current war in Chechnya, a regiment of the 42nd motor-rifle division he visited in the Caucasus did not get any medical supplies for months on end.” The drugs were all stolen before they got to the hospitals.

“The medics gave soldiers boiled tree bark to stop diarrhea caused by the lack of clean water” after the water purification equipment broke down. What medical supplies they had were bought from their own meager salaries.

“That today is the basic pattern of operation in all state-run civilian and military medical institutions,” the analyst wrote. So if a patient needs a foreign-made drug (Russian drugs are not to be trusted), the doctor tells him or his family where it can be found and they can buy it and bring it to the patient.

If Berezin had been stationed near his home in Moscow, his family could have bought the drugs that would have saved his life. But another Soviet military tradition that is still very much the norm is to station young soldiers as far from their homes as possible. Army commanders are simply afraid that, under the soldiers’ inhuman living conditions, their families would give them the money and civilian clothes they need to escape.

And so the young soldier is dead, killed by his own army and its sacrosanct code of inhumanity and violence.