In the Volga River city of Nizhniy Novgorod in 2002, for instance, Dmitry Ochelkov, 26, said police had covered his face with a gas mask with the air supply cut off, according to the human rights group Committee Against Torture, a U.N. body. Activists say this is a fairly common interrogation practice known as the "little elephant."
In the republic of Tatarstan in 2003, a number of juvenile offenders reported being submerged in water from toilets while others said they had rags shoved down their throats. And in Moscow last year, a man the police suspected was a terrorist was beaten so badly while in custody that his wife was subsequently unable to identify his corpse.
"Such cases are typical and widespread," said Olga Shepeleva, a lawyer at the Demos Research Center for Civil Society in Moscow, which monitors police abuse. "There is nothing exceptional about them."
Murder 'Victim' Turns Up
In September 1998, Alexei Mikheyev confessed to the rape and murder of a 17-year-old girl in Nizhniy Novgorod after what he said was nine days of torture, including electric shock, in a local police station. In an interview, he said he felt as if his body was exploding when the wires, which were attached to his earlobes, were turned on.
When Mikheyev was brought to the prosecutor's office after that, he retracted his statement. He was then sent back to the police station for further questioning on the instruction of a prosecutor. Faced with more physical abuse, he said, he threw himself out a third-floor window, breaking his back; he now walks with the aid of crutches and sometimes uses a wheelchair.
The girl he allegedly killed returned home the day after his suicide attempt. She had disappeared with a group of partying young people.
In the intervening years, prosecutors were reluctant to press charges against the police officers involved. They dropped 23 preliminary investigations and reopened their probes only after Mikheyev's lawyers exposed legal irregularities in the decisions to drop the case, according to Igor Kalyapin, chair of the Committee Against Torture in Nizhniy Novgorod, which took up Mikheyev's case. "Prosecutors sabotage these cases," he said.
The investigation was reopened for the 24th time late last year, after the European Court of Human Rights agreed to hear the case.
"When the European Court intervened, an order came down from the prosecutor general's office to investigate the case and charge somebody," said Kalyapin. Four policemen are under investigation, he said. Requests to the prosecutor's office to provide someone to discuss the case did not lead to an interview.
"I want them punished," said Mikheyev, who rejected an out-of-court settlement. "I want this country to accept responsibility for the actions of its police. And I don't want this to happen to anyone again."
Hard numbers on how many officers are charged with illegal use of violence are not publicly available; that category of offense is not among the crime statistics published by the Russian Interior Ministry. But violence and other criminal activity is on the rise among the 4 million police officials in Russia, according to federal officials.
"Between 2001 and 2004, the number of crimes amongst police rose hugely," Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov told a gathering of prosecutors in January. "Ordinary citizens know and feel the actual situation for themselves."
Public opinion surveys suggest that the problem is endemic. According to three nationwide and three regional surveys conducted between the spring of 2002 and the summer of 2004, up to 5.2 percent of Russians have suffered violence at the hands of the police.
"The prevalence of abuse suggests that roughly 6.2 million Russian adults are victimized by police violence in a two-three year window," Theodore P. Gerber of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Sarah E. Mendelson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington wrote in a draft paper scheduled for publication this fall. "These numbers are in fact quite staggering and imply that police abuse is indeed widespread even commonplace in contemporary Russia."
