A man on the ground, forced to ingest his own severed ear. Another receiving electric shocks to the genitals. Since the attack on Crocus City Hall in the suburbs of Moscow a week ago, social networks have been flooded with videos appearing to show the torture of the four main suspects in the attack. The men, arrested after the murder of 143 people in this Moscow concert hall, appeared at the hearing very physically exhausted.
Three of them were covered in blood and the fourth, unconscious, had to be transported in a wheelchair. A staging of violence which raises questions in a country which continues to glorify its use of brutality. Between insults on Russian television and decriminalization of domestic violence, Moscow seems increasingly inclined to encourage the use of force. Ksenia Poluektova-Krimer, Russian historian living in Berlin since March 2022 and guest researcher at the Andreï Sakharov Center for Contemporary History, agreed to answer questions from 20 minutes on this subject.
The four main suspects in the terrorist attack on Crocus City Hall on the outskirts of Moscow were visibly tortured. Is this surprising?
Surprising, no. Shocking, obviously. This shows extreme violence and extreme cruelty that has continued to intensify in recent years. As a reminder, one of the suspects in the attack showed up with a makeshift bandage and one ear missing, while another was completely unconscious! This extreme violence shows that in Russia, brutality is reaching new heights. Or rather that the country had never fallen so low.
However, Russian prisons are already known for their violence…
Today’s Russian prisons are clearly the descendants of yesterday’s gulags. In these jails, as a prisoner, you are no longer considered a human being. Over the years, numerous cases of torture in the prison system have been reported. At a prison hospital in Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia, prisoners were tied to beds without being able to get up or shower until their skin rotted. Detainees are often denied medical care and have their humanity taken away.
This was already the case before. Nadya Tolokonnikova, a member of Pussy Riots, served 18 months in prison in 2013. She explained that she was forced to sew between 16 and 17 hours a day. And sometimes, the prisoners were forced to work completely naked, to humiliate them. But repression has increased further since the invasion of Ukraine.
So you believe that violence has increased in intensity in the country?
Yes, but not only. What is very telling about the torture of the suspects in the Moscow attack is the display that is made of it. There have previously been journalistic investigations, or even a massive leak of videos, which proved the extent of torture in prisons or police stations. But the idea was to say: “out of sight, out of mind”. People didn’t feel concerned because they weren’t in prison, in the army or in a psychiatric hospital, for example. The violence was massive but hidden. There, they are highlighted and broadcast. This shows that violence is the new normal in Russia.
Does this mean brutality is encouraged?
Violence is celebrated in Russia! I rarely watch Russian television, I avoid propaganda, but the last time I did, I listened to Margarita Simonyan, the head of Russia Today. She accused Ukraine of the attack on Crocus City Hall and violently insisted that all Ukrainians had to be destroyed and eradicated. This is the language of the time of the Great Purges organized by Joseph Stalin [dans la seconde moitié des années 1930]but it doesn’t worry anyone and it goes on in a loop.
Is Russian language representative of this increase in aggressiveness?
When I was young – and I’m not that old (laughs) – if someone used vulgar or crude language in the street, passers-by would comment. This is no longer the case for young people today. In the same way that everyone was shocked when, in 1999, Vladimir Putin promised to “shoot the terrorists right into the toilet.”
But today, no Russian is shocked when, on television, a propagandist says that the Ukrainians must be exterminated. This is a turning point which dates from the early 2000s, and which was instigated by Vladimir Putin himself because he uses this language. The Russian president also dubbed “Russian song”, this type of music which is odes to criminal life and contains very aggressive lyrics. At the beginning of 2022, he quoted a necrophiliac song and, addressing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said “whether you like it or not, my darling, you will have to endure”.
Apart from the influence of Vladimir Putin, from his language to his propaganda, how can we explain this upsurge in violence?
War systematically increases the level of violence in a society. It triggers all kinds of problems, from alcoholism to family problems. However, the Russian state has partially withdrawn from the family sphere. Domestic violence was decriminalized in 2017. One of the Russian memes on this subject is that of a woman who goes to the police to ask for protection from her abusive husband, and the police respond: “Call back us when he has killed you. »
By emancipating its population in the intimate sphere, the Russian state can maintain control over everything else, which it particularly needs in times of war. The idea being: “you do not have the right to protest, to have democratic representatives or to express your opinion publicly, but you can abuse your wife or your children”. It’s twisted but emancipatory.
The situation is unlikely to improve as many veterans of the war in Ukraine have returned to the country. This is a problem experienced by all societies that see men returning from the front. But in Russia we add the bankruptcy of the State, the absence of NGOs which have seen their resources cut in recent years or which have been qualified as foreign agents, and the “ghosts” who are former criminals. The latter regularly make headlines by attacking people when they return from the front… Enough to further normalize violence, which is already enormously so in Russia.