Charges of Brutal Hazing Put Russian Military on Defensive

[Rose Siding]

snip>
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 had spread through his lower extremities and was threatening his kidneys, lungs and brain. He breathed with a respirator. His eyes only flickered when his mother peered anxiously into his face and repeated his name.
....
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, money and cigarettes 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% 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 faced "grossly abusive treatment" that killed dozens every year.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-hazing10feb10,0,2690746.story?coll=la-home-headlines&track=morenews

[pocket]

1. do they kill gays like the US army?

.

[Igel]

2. This isn't new.

It was also the basis of scandals in the '80s and '90s. Oft reformed, seldom fixed.

There's a reasonable body of more-or-less scholarly literature on the matter. I recently heard of a university course on it.

"Dedovshchina." "Rule of the grandfathers" isn't the translation I'd choose; I'm not sure how to translate it and carry the various nuances that come to mind (and I'm not even a native speaker).