In Russian Army, enemy is a comrade

CHELYABINSK, Russia -- Just before New Year's Day, Army Private Andrei Sychyov called his mother and asked her to come bring him home for the holiday. He had a four-day leave, he said. Please don't make him spend it in the barracks.

But Galina Sychyova thought of the extra hours she had to put in at the market where she works. Conscripts are not allowed to go on leave unaccompanied, and it would take her 11 hours on the bus each way to travel roughly 100 miles down the east side of the Ural mountains from her village outside of Yekaterinburg. For just four days?

The next time Sychyova saw her 19-year-old son, it was at a hospital in Chelyabinsk. Doctors had amputated one leg, then the other, then his genitals, then the tip of his right ring finger.

On New Year's Eve, her son said, his Army mates tied him and forced him to squat for more than three hours, beating him repeatedly on the legs. Gangrene spread through his lower extremities and was now threatening his kidneys, lungs, and brain. He breathed with a respirator.

The Russian Army is legendary for being almost as dangerous in peacetime as it is in war. Last year, 16 soldiers were officially listed as killed in brutal hazing incidents, while 276 others committed suicide.

But many believe those figures are misleading. A number of the 1,064 servicemen who died of various ''crimes and incidents" were also victims of abuse, and many ''suicides" are faked to disguise fatal beatings, or occur because soldiers can no longer endure the torment, according to military analysts and human rights organizations.

Nearly every army in the world has initiation rites and means of informal discipline, some of it violent. In Russia it has evolved into an entrenched system known as dedovshchina, or the ''rule of the grandfathers," in which senior soldiers force new recruits to conduct menial chores, give up their food, and undergo sleep deprivation and humiliating rituals.

The punishment is beatings or, in a few cases, sexual abuse. So miserable has conscript service become that last year only 9.2 percent of the 1.7 million 18-year-olds subject to the draft were actually inducted. Families with money or connections won exemptions through educational, health or family waivers.

Human Rights Watch in 2004 concluded that ''hundreds of thousands" of new recruits face ''grossly abusive treatment" that kills dozens of conscripts every year.

In Chelyabinsk, an industrial city of 1.3 million in the southern Urals, Zinchenko said her group gets about 300 hazing complaints a year, ranging from a young soldier who was hired out to dig graves while his supervisor pocketed his wages, to soldiers who are beaten or driven to suicide.

In the town of Chebarkul, about 50 miles west of Chelyabinsk, a 24-year-old serviceman was reported to have suffocated from carbon monoxide in a military garage on Oct. 11. ''But his uniform was covered with blood," said Lyudmila Zinchenko of the Soldiers' Mothers Committee. ''He was murdered, and the military called it suffocation."

Sychyov was assigned to a tank academy in Chelyabinsk. His mother visited him in August, when he got a two-day leave and they strolled through a park together. He talked about his studies, about work details cleaning up the base and washing cars. He was thin, but ''he said everything is normal . . . he never complained," she said.

After the conversation about the New Year, she said, she called him again on Jan. 4, and found that he was on his way to the clinic. ''He said, `I have a very bad pain in my left ankle.'"

By Jan. 6, Sychyov had been transferred to a civilian hospital in Chelyabinsk. A doctor from the hospital phoned his mother the next night. ''He said my son is in extremely bad condition, that his left leg is amputated, and after these words, I went into hysterics," she said. ''And he said to me very sternly, `Please, leave your hysterics behind, listen to me.' He said, `I'm giving you the address of the hospital, and you need to come. Because your son may not survive until morning."

Sychyov has improved since then, and his life is out of danger. When he could talk, he said he and others had been beaten by older soldiers, and by one sergeant in particular. Within days, the commanding general of the tank academy was dismissed, and 12 servicemen are now facing criminal investigations. President Vladimir V. Putin, calling the case ''horrible," said the Defense Ministry will take measures to improve discipline in the armed forces.

But at the academy, some servicemen appear defensive. ''Nobody touched Sychyov. Maybe a little bit, but they have just blown it all out of proportion," said one soldier, who declined to reveal his name.