Unfortunately, a few days later they took him away – not to release him but to transfer him to another filter camp. He was released, or rather swapped, only a month later, by which time he’d been through the horrors of torture. The morale in our cell remained positive even after he’d left. Some of the prisoners, whose belief in God would normally have been confined to uttering the formula of faith, earnestly persisted in reciting the surahs he had taught them right till the end.
12
The physical and psychological techniques used in this filter camp in order to extract accurate intelligence are a topic that merits digression. As I’ve noted before, the rumours about torture at the filter camp were so dreadful that the doctor at Khankala had behaved as if he were seeing me off to the guillotine. Of course torture did take place. I had to share a cell with people who’d been imprisoned there since the filtration centres first opened in February 1995. Through long talks with these people, using classic journalistic detective work, I managed to find out that torture methods were used there, including electric shocks. And they used to hold night-time beatings. People were brought out one at a time and smashed up. The OMON paramilitaries were particularly vicious. It would seem that they only picked people with a sadistic bent to work for the OMON. Their torture methods included both the ‘rack’ and the ‘swallow’. Attempted male rape and sexual abuse with objects were also used – indeed, perhaps there was actual rape – but such cases were extremely rare, and they tended to do this to prisoners who, according to some criteria of their own, they’d picked as falling into a specific category. Most likely, they degraded a man in this way when he elicited from them a reaction not of rage or hatred, both endemic in the camp, but of contempt. I happened to share a cell with a guy who came close to being raped. The system of raping prisoners – with the victim then becoming a pariah – was not invented in this filter camp; it was a practice common to all Soviet prisons and now to all Russian ones. But there were no crucifixions on the iron spikes nailed crosswise into the wall. Those spikes merely served for the structural support of the neighbouring cell wall. Nor did they hold prisoners for hours on end in the bus inspection pits filled with cold water. Those pits were simply left to pile up with rubbish. They were also mined in order to deter escape attempts. There were cases of prisoners being beaten to death; there were prisoners shot dead; there were mass burials. There were interrogations lasting many hours to wear down the subject to the point of exhaustion, where the prisoner was forced to watch other prisoners being tortured as a warning of what awaited him should he decide not to talk. They would cut prisoners’ ears off – although not often – and break their bones. They would put a prisoner up against the wall and fire just above his head. A great number of atrocities were carried out, but there were also a lot of stories dreamt up by people with sick imaginations. At night you could often hear the horrific screams of prisoners being tortured. This made such an impression that some prisoners, even before the interrogation, were ready not only to tell everything, but also to invent things they thought their captors might want to hear. But the screams were not always evidence of someone being tortured at night – though they usually were. I knew that sometimes they would specially turn on a cassette player with recordings of screaming and groaning. It was a psychological torture technique.
During the Second Chechen War, too, similar tales circulated that were, mildly speaking, somewhat exaggerated. I managed to talk with some friends who had made the journey from the village of Komsomolskoye to the notorious White Swan prison,[34] passing through the full programme of torture along the way, and who’d been left disabled. I have every reason to believe the stories told by these men. They knew me well and wouldn’t have made anything up or hidden the truth, just as I wouldn’t have hidden it from them. From their conversations it became clear that some people were getting carried away with their tales on the subject of torture. And the reason for such exaggeration was mundane enough. The Chechen command had consciously launched a rumour campaign, gently inflating the truth about the torture in the interests of propaganda, and the populace and the human-rights campaigners had eagerly taken up the cause. Here’s an example. During the Second Chechen War, one human-rights organization put out information about the mass rape of a group of Chechen men by Russian Army soldiers during a ‘cleansing operation’. When we investigated, however, we could find no evidence for the allegation and concluded that it was unfounded and the information disseminated by journalists had been erroneous. Such things often happen during war. I am certain that if this incident had been genuine, then a number of those men would have come and joined the resistance. Yet none of the supposed victims left for the forests. Looked at another way, it is plainly inconceivable for soldiers carrying out a ‘cleansing operation’ to sexually violate the men they were meant to be guarding. Rape did take place, but only in places of detention, whether temporary or permanent. And only against certain men, as has already been outlined. Perhaps someone in this organization had chosen to try to call the world’s attention to the unfolding genocide in this bizarre manner. Yet if the world community had already turned a blind eye to the massacres of civilians; to the systematic destruction of Chechen youth, carriers of the nation’s genetic stock; to the cultural, linguistic and physical destruction of a small nation that had been going on for many years, then that community was hardly likely to act upon such patently dubious allegations. Russia has powerful leverage over Europe: gas and oil reserves, a hefty portion of which comes from Chechen oil. And as long as Russia continues to possess such a persuasive argument, Europe will close its eyes to the ‘war against international terrorism’ taking place in Chechnya. But enough of my subjective views; let’s return to the filter camp.
Beatings in the filter camp depended entirely on the whims of the soldiers on duty. If they were in good spirits, the prisoners would have a relatively quiet day or night. If they were in a foul mood or had been drinking, as was often the case, then you would wait for the fun to begin. The prisoners made splendid punch bags for the release of emotional tension. Those prisoners who wept and begged the guards not to beat them would get a particularly long and lusty punching. But if the detainee said nothing and didn’t ask for mercy, they would quickly leave him alone. There were also plenty of methods of psychological torture. I’d already been through all the stages of psychological torture while in Khankala, so they didn’t put the screws on me too intensely here, though nor did they ease up the psychological pressure entirely. Rather they applied new techniques that were unlike the ones I’d already undergone. Now there was less of the stick and more of the carrot – though so far without success. All their psychological techniques essentially revolved around making a person feel utterly worthless and impotent, and that it was futile to try to hide anything. The belief that you’re entirely at the mercy of these men; that whether you live or die hangs solely on their whims and wishes; that if you do live, then it will be up to them what kind of life you have – all this will make any ordinary person feel doomed and that the only salvation lies in telling them everything he knows. The entire focus of their psychological assault was aimed at instilling such a belief in the subject. Psychological torture is one of the most brutal and barbaric forms of torment, because it assaults your most vulnerable point: your mind. The constant anticipation of something terrifying can drive a man insane, and while the prisoner is still deep in shock at his experience, such torture is all the more horrific. Fighters, after all, have good reason to be hugely nervous before a battle, and this is especially true of inexperienced ones. They can’t wait for the fight to commence. Because there is nothing more dreadful than waiting for combat. The fight itself, no matter what the outcome, is never as awful for the fighter as the wait before the fight. That is why just before the battle begins, the fighters will be highly excitable, and the less experienced they are, the stronger the effect. When a prisoner is subjected to psychological torture – humiliation, insults, various techniques of verbal harassment and the like – he finds himself in a similar state. At that moment his will is at its weakest and you can extract almost anything from him. The aim is to crush the victim’s will. And that is what makes it so truly barbaric.
34
In March 2000, a major battle took place in Komsomolskoye, with the Chechen resistance suffering heavy losses. Large numbers were killed, wounded and taken prisoner. ‘White Swan’, or Solikamsk Prison, is a Russian penitentiary in the Urals.