Putins Russia
BACK TO MOSCOW Province. It is the morning of May 4, 2002. Army Unit 13815, in the village of Balashikha. Two boilerwomen working in the plant that provides heating for the unit hear cries for help from nearby. They rush out and see that a trench has been dug in the middle of the courtyard, in which a soldier has been buried up to his neck. The women dig down, cut the rope binding him hand and foot, and help him out of the pit.
At this moment an army major appears in a towering rage. He shouts at the women to leave the soldier alone. He is teaching Private Chesnokov a lesson, and if they do not go back to the boilerhouse immediately, he will have them sacked.
Private Chesnokov, having escaped from the pit, deserted from the unit.

THE RUSSIAN ARMY has always been a fundamental pillar of the state. To this day, it is mostly a prison camp behind barbed wire where the country's young are locked up without trial. It has prisonlike rules imposed by the officers. It is a place where beating the hell out of someone is the basic method of training. This, incidentally, is how Putin, when he first took the Kremlin throne, described the way he would deal with enemies within Russia.
It may be that the president finds this state of affairs agreeable, with his lieutenant colonel's epaulettes and his two daughters who will never have to serve in such an army. The rest of us--apart from the officer caste, who revel in their status as petty gangsters above the law--are deeply unhappy about the situation. This is especially true of those who have sons, and all the more so if the young men are of conscription age. These families have no time to wait for the military reforms they have been promised for so long. They fear that their sons will leave home only to be sent straight to a training ground or to Chechnya or to some other place from which there is no return.