Rule #3: "Do Not Kill or Torture Prisoners"
- From the United States Marine Corps Common Skills Handbook, Core Principles of the Law of War
Late January 2022
Things are mostly packed and ready for the yearly journey to Africa. More and more frequently, my daily work occurs with "Comprehensible Russian" podcasts and Ukrainian news playing in the background.
Included in these is Bellingcat's investigative series on Flight MH17. This Malaysian Airlines flight was shot down by a Buk surface-to-air missile in 2014, as it passed over a then-freshly-ignited conflict area in East Ukraine. 298 civilian passengers died in the crash. An international Joint Investigation Team found that the missile originated from the Russian Kursk-based 53rd Anti-Aircraft Brigade, and it was fired from Ukrainian territory held by Russian-backed rebels. Three Russians and one Ukrainian national have since been given life sentences by Dutch courts, and Holland is in the process of taking Russia to the European Court of Human Rights for its role in the downing of MH17.
My old favorite Russian songs of my teens have been resurrected as workout tunes. Later, when the war starts, I'll come to be surprised at how many of my favorite bands make risky anti-war statements. And what about the Russian friends I danced with? Will they protest the war? This will remain a persistant mystery. Even back in 2021, my letters to Russian acquaintances had begun to go unanswered. I'm probably just writing to the FSB now.
A favorite of mine, "Prosvistela" ("Whistled by") comes on. I realize I've never paid enough attention to the lyrics to understand them. I listen now, and pick out a confusion of something falling on the table, a hug, heaven, being prisoners of the motherland. It doesn't really make sense, so I finally google the meaning. It turns out my favorite song was written by Yuri Shevchuk, after a visit to soldiers fighting in Chechnya. Scarred by the horrors he saw, Shevchuk penned an unsubtle composition about a grenade falling into an armored personnel carrier. Everyone inside is killed, but in heaven they reunite with friends, find freedom and happiness, and reflect on the meaninglessness of the war. I'm shocked that this song, which blended seamlessly with the teeny pop discoteca sounds of my youth, had such a deep and dark meaning. You can listen to it here, and a translation of the full lyrics is below: Prosvistela/ "Whistled By", DDT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inG69xYWROw
During my first few days in-country, southern Russia sees an oppressive August heat wave. My host family retreats to the beach, and I promptly become very ill with food poisoning. My host mother sees me through with a treatment of two shots of heavily salted vodka, followed by bed rest.
By the time my second week in Russia rolls around, it is time to return to school. I'll be accompanying my host sister to the equivalent of a K-12 public school. At 14, she is two years younger, and immensely more worldly than I. "Irina" (name changed for her safety) has it all planned out: on her 15th birthday, she'll try Ecstasy; on the 16th, she'll lose her virginity. At the end of her 16th year, she'll enroll in college, preparatory to Law School. I'm placed in Irina's grade, and she helps me understand the lessons, which are of course all in Russian.
The heat wave, if anything, has grown more intense on our first day back at school. The class swelters, as the teacher conducts what I come to realize is a surprisingly in-depth review of World War II history. My host sister knows far more than the average American college student about 20th century European wars. I half-follow vaguely familiar battle names and dates, thumbing through my trusty, moldy dictionary.
Before math class, I join my host sister and her friends outside, politely declining their proffered cigarettes. Sweating and swatting at flies, we seek refuge under the shade of a tree, but don't stay too long. They must not have taken out the trash since spring; the air stinks of rotting meat.
We return to class, math this time. Suddenly, a woman comes in and draws the teacher from the room. A growing wave of whispering begins: "Samo-ubitso!" I feverishly flip the pages of my moldy dictionary, seeking this new term which has caused such a stir.
It means "suicide".
In the next two hours, I will be introduced to the real Russia, and the reality that, in most of the world, the strong devour the weak. In the next week, at 16 years old, I'll build two key emotional foundations. One is for dealing with Americans who turn a willful blind eye to the evils of the world (as with many future ugly international realities, my American compatriots cope with the alien violence and ugliness of this first day of Russian school, by simply refusing to believe in it). The second foundation is for recognizing and navigating the special mix of 'anything-is-possible and nothing-is-real', which underpins every tug of the marionnette strings, by which the Russian government controls the Russian population.
Our math teacher comes back inside, and acknowledges that there's no chance of us paying attention to the lesson. He releases us, and we join the entire student body outdoors. Kids from age five up through sixteen form a ring around the shade tree, where we had smoked earlier. The body hanging in the tree was discovered shortly after we left. The next group of smoking girls looked up, after it dripped on one of them. It had probably been hanging, twenty feet up in the large oak, for the entirety of the hot weekend.
I saw my first body at age 14, when I discovered my mother had passed away from a mixture of cancer-induced hypercalcemia and pain medications. That was a peaceful and expected relief from pain, and I closed her eyes with more relief for her than grief.
This second body was much messier. The breeze spun him on the rope around his neck. At each of his slow rotations, his face was visible above us. It was plum-purple and bloated, and an impossibly swollen tongue stuck obscenely from his mouth. The military showed up with a pickup, and made a great show of obtaining his passport and reading his name out loud, then showing the passport around to the group of students. One of the soldiers then told the circle of assembled students to back up. He jabbed me in the abdomen with his AK when I was slow to respond. My host sister came to my rescue, saying I was "an Amerikanka, I didn't understand". I really wished she hadn't done more to make me stand out; even at sixteen I instinctively understood that what what happening here was outside the bounds of Rule of Law. Anything could happen. Overtly being an American here wasn't the best idea.
The soldier who had climbed the tree to get the dead man's passport proceeded to tie a rope around the waist of the corpse. The crowd of students parted to allow a pickup truck to drive in. One arm covering his nose, the soldier in the tree reached out and sawed though the rope around the corpse's neck. The circle of students, small and large, stood immobile, barely glancing at the soldiers' AKs. They gazed upward, rapt, wordless. Neck-rope severed, the dead man described a slow-motion arc backwards. His torso came to an abrupt stop at its perigee, impossibly purple face now upside down, and oriented our way. An unexpected amount of what looked like black, clotted blood gushed out of his mouth and into the pickup bed below. I felt fortunate that my parents had enrolled me in many dissection and veterinary classes in grade school. Today's scene was no way to introduce oneself to the ugly side of mammalian biology.
The soldier in the tree undid a hitch, and slowly lowered the body, now essentially hanging upside-down, into the truck. With no further formalities, the soldiers left the scene and classes resumed. Being sixteen, abroad, and not having experienced the aftermath of a grisly suicide at school before, I accepted this as the normal process here. I told my dad about it next time we talked, and otherwise went on with life, and my observations of this very-different-from-American culture. It felt odd to compare the complete lack of response from the Russian school system, to what would have happened at home in America. A scene like that on the grounds of a US school? The school would have been closed for a week, and mandatory counseling given to all students! But, this was Russia. Counseling? Compared to watching the body of one's mother slowly destroyed by cancer, this really wasn't a big deal. As long as you're lucky, healthy formative-years coping mechanisms get built, and life goes on.
Only in retrospect, listening to Bellingcat and Prosvistela, did I begin to appreciate some of the political undercurrents of that day. Even in Russia, where life can be cheap, the man in the tree, so long ago, was probably not just a suicide. The army had taken far too much care- to make sure all the students watched, and to make the name on his passport known. The man in the tree must have been someone... a political dissident, a rebel, an enemy of the mafia. He must have been someone worth making an example of. My dad, of course, believed every word of the story. The convenient denial of the other Americans- the other Exchange Program students and managers- was the first of many, many times that I would cope with this failing of my own culture. Outgoing President Obama would sum it up well in a 2015 speech: "If the American public cannot, or will not, differentiate fact from fiction, than we are in deep trouble".
Well, I'm just one member of that public. But, at sixteen, I surely appreciated my first lesson on what the breakdown of rule of law does to a society. My eyes and mind were wide open. I had expected that Russia would be challenging, romantic, sweet, and world-changing for me. It was all that. It was also ugly, corrupt, and violent.
So, twenty years later, when it came- Russia's wholesale violation of the Law of War in Ukraine, violation of "Do not kill or torture prisoners"? It was absolutely no surprise. Not after what I saw during my year in Russia.
Learning the nature and structure of Russia's ugly parts, and how to recognize their equivalents in other societies (including my own) was the greatest lesson of my time in the Russian exchange program.
