One in 10 Russians have experienced police torture, says new report

Torture can break some men; it can make others.

For Igor Kalyapin, a businessman who in 1992 was wrongly arrested and beaten in custody, the trajectory was as stark as they come. From tormented, he became the police tormentor – founding and for several years personally funding an NGO fighting torture at the hands of Russian law enforcement.

Kalyapin says the Committee for the Prevention of Torture was born out of a simple if terrifying fact: Russian authorities were turning a blind eye to torture. Not a single officer was being brought to justice, he tells The Independent. Hundreds of official complaints were dismissed by prosecutors in the same way.

Some of his complainants were missing ears, but it was always the same conclusion: no case to answer.

On Wednesday, a day that coincides with the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, Kalyapin’s committee published a new poll, jointly conducted with the independent Levada Centre, documenting Russians’ experience of torture. The survey of 3,400 Russians across 53 regions suggested as many as one in 10 had experienced torture personally.

Perhaps as shocking was the lack of outrage at that fact. Three in 10 says torture was acceptable “in exceptional circumstances”. Four in 10 says they believed it helped to solve crimes.

The Kremlin, which just two weeks ago admitted malpractice in the jailing of investigative journalist Ivan Golunov, has refused to accept the figures. Speaking in his daily conference call with journalists, spokesman Dmitry Peskov says the survey needed “careful deconstruction”.

“There are about 30 people on this call now,” he says. “Have any of you suffered torture? If so, name yourselves.”

Russia does not keep official statistics on torture in custody, so it is difficult to evaluate either the poll figures or Peskov’s assertion.

There is no separate article under the criminal code. Instead, all complaints about police torture are filed under a much broader crime: “abuse of official authority”. A campaign to change the law and introduce a new crime of torture has been supported by the Kremlin’s rights ombudsman Tatyana Moskalkova but is resisted by the security bloc.

Kalyapin says his committee deals with about 150 of the worst cases every year – a figure, he says, they have to keep down in order to manage workloads.

In the rare cases of successful convictions, compensation is usually miserly. In April 2007, for example, Artur Ivanov from Novocheboksarsk, central Russia, lost his hearing after being beaten on the head. He was awarded 20,000 roubles (£250). In 2015, 37-year-old Dmitry Demidov was found in a detective’s office with a bullet in his head. Once a medical expert ruled that Demidov could not have shot himself, a judge decided on the matter of compensation. His mother asked for 4m roubles (£50,000). She received 150,000 (£2,000).

Torture is often regionally specific, Kalyapin says. Often practices can differ between police stations and officers in the same district. Large cities like Moscow far from immune from the problem. Indeed, the capital actually is a leader in complaints of police violence — this may be because Muscovites better understand their rights.

In terms of the torture repertoire, things often start with a punch, but electroshock torture is becoming particularly widespread. The worst cases concentrate on victims’ back passages.

The last few years have seen any number of shocking and widely reported stories of torture. From 2017 onwards, several hundred gay men were tortured and worse at the hands of Chechen law enforcement. In February of this year, there were credible claims of extreme violence deliberately administered against Jehovah’s Witnesses in Siberia.

But it is another case, from 2015-16, that Kalyapin says he had most difficulty working on.

Twenty-one-year-old Artyom Ponomarchuk had been arrested by police in the Black Sea resort town of Anapa. The charge he faced was serious enough – assault – but what came next was inexplicable. First, the young man was deprived of air using a gas mask. Then officers applied electroshocks to his rear. And then he was raped with a truncheon so deep that his intestines severed.

Despite a case of evidence compiled against them, the police officers responsible have not been charged, and continue to work. And in a grotesque parallel development, prosecutors continue to push charges against Ponomarchuk.

Kalyapin tells The Independent that law enforcement is, if anything, becoming more brazen in its behaviour. Before, he says, police tried not to leave obvious marks; now they aren’t as careful. Work is also getting harder in the most dangerous regions of Russia, he says. In the republics of the North Caucasus, for example, his group continues to work in mobile groups to reduce risk. But fewer and fewer people are coming forward, for fear of retribution.

“In Chechnya, people are not only scared, but they also face a 100 per cent guarantee their families will face retaliation,” he says. “They know their young men will be arrested and probably tortured too, so they think twice before complaining.”

In 2016, Kalyapin’s own staff were targeted when masked men torched a bus they had been using to show journalists around Chechnya. The attack was blamed on Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya’s irascible leader who has been accused of countless human rights abuses.

Kalyapin, who says his group continues to receive viable and serious threats, describes the level of danger as a “professional risk”.

“Pilots, firemen, the police all face risk. It’s part of the job,” he says. “I’m not going to hide or give up. Sooner or later something will change. It’s slow, but we’ve already brought 144 police officers to justice. Without us, that wouldn’t have happened. That’s already success.”