23 August 1999
Senior Lieutenant (Medical Corps) Sergei Moiseyenko holds a glass laboratory dish between the palms of his hands and carefully raises it to his eyes. With a nod towards the corner of the office he indicates several bones lying on the floor, but keeps his eyes on the dish. Seven human teeth, discoloured as if they have not been brushed for a long time lie scattered there, together with small pieces of someone's lower jaw.
"Do you see?" says 25-year-old Moiseyenko, who, despite his youth, is considered one of the most gifted specialists at the renowned Rostov laboratory of forensic medicine. "That's not a filling in this tooth here, but part of a bullet . . . Together the teeth and those bones are body No 1007 according to our classification. An unknown soldier. He died in August 1996 in Grozny. My job is to establish who he was. There are already some indications. I think we'll get a result."
"Lord only knows how! You've got nothing but scraps of bone and some teeth. And that bullet, of course . . ."
The conversation moves on. We talk about the frustration felt by all at the laboratory, and the reason why they are still swamped with work though the war ended three years ago. Soldiers in Chechnya carried no metal identity discs or documents. Their superior officers cared little what became of them once they were dead. As a result, body No 1007 today fits into a small plastic bag.
"If they send back bodies from a new war without ID disks . . ." It was the evening of 17 August. Moiseyenko did not yet know that two days earlier, on a Sunday morning, the laboratory head Vladimir Shcherbakov had already received a disturbing call from the Ministry of Defence in Moscow.
"How many 'credo' bags do you have there?" someone shouted down the line.
"I'll find out immediately," replied Colonel Shcherbakov.
"Send them all to Makhachkala.9 Quickly! Can you get a hundred?"
Shcherbakov put down the receiver. His shoulders gave an involuntary shudder, as if from a chill, although it was 32°C in Rostov that day. For those who don't know, the "credo" bag is one of those large black plastic envelopes, closed with a zipper (you've all seen US police films) in which they pack up dead bodies. The sort of container the army always needs when its men start getting killed.
Neither did Lieutenant Moiseyenko know that on 18 August, the very next morning after we talked, the bodies of soldiers killed in Daghestan would begin to arrive. They arrived in "credo" bags, under the code name "cargo 200", at the main reception and treatment centre in Rostov (which serves the entire North Caucasus Military District). And once again, they were without ID discs or documents.10 Body 1007 would have to squeeze up and make space on the senior lieutenant's table for bodies 1015, 1020 and 1030. It looked as if the entire laboratory was fated to start from scratch all over again, although it still had 277 bodies to identify from the previous war.
Morgues are never cosy places, but wars are bound to happen and you need dissection rooms. There aren't any decent wars either. But they all leave us with a choice: we can either draw lessons from a war or ignore what it teaches us.
What lessons have been learned over the last three years, from August 1996 when General Lebed helped to negotiate an end to the war in Chechnya, to the present fighting in Daghestan? Why have ordinary soldiers again not left behind even a single drop of their blood to aid their rapid identification? What was Colonel Shcherbakov up to all that time? Why didn't he persuade the generals that they should never wage another war like that in Chechnya?
Body 549
"What was I doing?!" The colonel is indignant. "I was telling them just that. It's the reason I was in such disfavour." He explains:
"The more I pushed, the greater the pressure on me. I was accused of every failing in order to shut me up. Finally, when I could see no other way out, I drafted a law: "On Forensic Registration and Identification in the Armed Forces and Other Paramilitary Formations." And what do you think? It's been lying unheeded at the Duma for almost a year. Where was public opinion? And the human rights activists who are today shouting that the Daghestan campaign is a repeat of the Chechen war? They said nothing.
"The Ministry of Defence, on the other hand, and the presidential staff, accused me of playing 'political games' to the detriment of the job in hand. But I started to push things further, and demonstrate it was essential to have a database for the identification of all who are in the armed forces. Then they began a campaign to discredit me. Supposedly I was not fighting for identification, but only to create a nice cosy job for myself; I was exploiting these remains to push ahead scientific research. I was personally blamed because the laboratory was identifying no more than four or five bodies a month. But that was simply the reality!"
Body 549 reached Laboratory 124 from Grozny on 20 August 1996 with the label "unknown" attached to the stretcher. It had also been set on fire after death (someone had burnt the soldier after he was shot). The tissue was already in a state of total disintegration. The corpse was therefore impossible to identify visually; it had evidently lain under the southern sun for several weeks. There was no ID disc or any information about his unit. Two distinctive features: the top joint of the left thumb was missing and, by some miracle, a tin cross of the Old Believers still hung around his neck.11
In September 1996 when the lab's officers could see that no one was coming to claim Body 549 – neither those who had served with him nor his relatives – they sent out thousands of letters, requiring military registration offices throughout Russia to track down any of 549's surviving fellow soldiers. (It was known which units had taken part in the August battles in Grozny, and so they had a good idea which military registration offices had provided their conscripts.) It was 18 months before they received any replies. That's how things work in our country. Only many months later did the following letter reach the laboratory:
"From 24 June 1996 I served in Chechnya with unit 21617. On 9 August we were ordered to advance. We went about a kilometre and, after the company in front of us had gone ahead, we came under fire from both sides. I was hit by shrapnel, first in the foot and then in the arm. I fell down and they fired at me again. When the shooting ended I got back to the armoured vehicle. Private Ozhigov was sitting there. Perhaps they would not have noticed him, but he began to make a tourniquet above my elbow to stop the blood. Suddenly he fell across my knees. A sniper had got him. Then our side gathered all the wounded and loaded them on to the armoured vehicle.
"Again the Chechens started firing at us, this time with mortars. I fell down and passed out. When I came to, the platoon leader and our driver-mechanic Khazanov were lying next to me. They said I should keep down because a sniper was watching us. We lay for four hours, pretending to be dead, until the helicopters started bombing the nine-storey building where the sniper was. Then we crawled into some cellar where our commander found us with one of the scouts. We were put in an armoured vehicle . . ."
Private Artur Kamaleyev, from the Volga republic of Bashkortostan, then spent many months in military hospitals: Vladikavkaz, then Rostov and Ufa. Only in spring 1998 did the district military registration office find him, at the laboratory's request, when he was discharged as unfit for further service. It was then that they discovered he had been saved by Private Ozhigov, who did not have the upper joint of his left thumb.
The laboratory sent a formal request to the military office in the Altai Region, for blood samples, plus thumb and palm prints from the parents of Ivan Ozhigov. His mother and father also sent a photograph of Ivan which Major Boris Shkolnikov, a forensic craniologist, compared to the skull of Body 549 – the same test carried out on the remains of the Romanovs. After five more major scientific investigations the experts could say without doubt: "This is no longer an unknown soldier."
On 3 August 1999, three years after he died, Ivan's family received his remains, and a short while ago the body of this 19-year-old private, who had died trying to save his wounded comrade, was buried in a village in Siberia.
A shocking story? Yes, but all the more so because it is no exception, but a typical and everyday example. The majority of cases at Shcherbakov's laboratory are of this type. He cannot help "spinning out" the identification procedure.
Perhaps you imagine that Moscow – i.e. the Ministry of Defence and the presidential staff – drew the same conclusion from the history of Private Ozhigov? Nothing of the kind. "For three years you've been messing around with one body!" That was the accusation thrown at Shcherbakov. The colonel's retort was just as sharp: "Don't blame me for your mistakes; all those who could have been recognised by simpler methods have long ago been identified. From now on we can only work in this way. We shall be forced to continue doing so, moreover, until you take urgent measures to finally create a database of identification samples for all soldiers and officers who are sent to areas of conflict." Keep your voice down, they told Shcherbakov: You're the one making a good living out of these corpses, it's your people who are writing dissertations and won't listen to anyone else. So now we are declaring war on you.
Slander
The campaign against Shcherbakov was headed by Victor Kolkutin, the chief forensic expert at the Ministry of Defence, and Konstantin Golumbovsky, head of the president's working group on the exhumation and identification of soldiers killed in action. They are highly respected and well-known people. However, it is difficult to describe the weapon they unleashed against Shcherbakov as anything other than public defamation. In Moscow, journalists, Duma deputies, and the Ministries of Heath and Defence were supplied with deliberately distorted information about the colonel. It was claimed, for instance, that Shcherbakov was openly disrespectful towards the remains he worked with, separating skulls from bodies simply because that was easier for his research purposes.
How can you check? The only way is to sit there, among the skulls at the laboratory, in the section headed by Major Boris Shkolnikov and read through dozens of files on unidentified soldiers. Here are the bullet wounds in the skull and here is the file. As you read, it turns out that each of these skulls represents a body: at best a few, individual bones are added to the skull and even then it's not clear to whom they belong. Lengthy molecular-genetic investigation is needed before they can be proved to come from the same person. Something else of major importance became clear to me then – the soldiers were already in this state when their remains, delivered by Golumbovsky's team, reached the laboratory.
The other accusation was that, for the convenience of research and the writing of dissertations, the army privates who serve as lab assistants are forced to boil up the bones of the deceased soldiers in the laboratory courtyard in full view of the unfortunate parents. Mothers supposedly had to pass by bubbling cauldrons full of skulls before they could view the remains of their children. It's a blood-chilling scene and makes one want to demand the immediate arrest of Shcherbakov.
How do you check this story? You must venture yourself into that devil's kitchen. There it is, exactly as described. Surrounded by filth and an unbelievable stench, soldiers are boiling the bones until the rotting flesh falls off them. It is also quite true that they do this in large vessels more usually employed for boiling clothes. But you must ask why. The reason is that money to purchase autoclaves was not allowed for in the budget estimates. Even the laundry pans were bought only recently. Before that the bones were boiled up in large tins that previously contained jam or herrings. They have no choice. Genetic investigations with contaminated remains are strictly forbidden since they will give no results and damage the equipment. What were they to do? Warn Moscow that all identification work is henceforth halted until autoclaves are provided? They might wait for years. And how then could they look mothers in the eye when they came demanding, if not their sons then at least a coffin?
As a result, the six months before the present fighting began in Daghestan have been spent squabbling, not working. The laboratory got on with its job, but in Moscow they intrigued and spread rumours and Shcherbakov had to fight back. The idea of creating a database for identification of all soldiers sent to areas of conflict has not advanced one iota. The army entered the present war in the same barbaric state as the Chechen war of 1994–6, while Colonel Shcherbakov, a unique specialist whose knowledge is now desperately needed, is a thoroughly harassed and exhausted individual. He is bound, hand and foot, by numerous investigations that do not cease from one week to the next. He is a workhorse, he says, that Moscow has driven to its limit and will soon finish off.
Graves or Monuments?
Who benefits from this outrageous squabble over bones? The immediate and obvious causes are entirely traditional. People, as always, are fighting for wealth and fame. The Moscow authorities are determined that Shcherbakov must be neutralised so that they can decide who is in charge, throughout the country, of identification research and procedures.
Novaya gazeta has learned that very recently – just as they were preparing for the war in Daghestan, in fact – a decision was taken at the highest level by the government and the presidential staff: the unidentified "Chechen" bodies still in Laboratory 124's refrigerators must be rapidly laid to rest. The reason? The soldiers' mothers were making too much of a fuss, and it was proving too expensive for the State to pay its respects by identifying and burying everyone. A site had already been chosen in the Rostov City northern cemetery and the builders were given until 25 August to prepare the monument. When, in future, the mothers complain that they wanted to bury their children themselves the blame will be shifted entirely to Shcherbakov. It was he, they will be told, who dragged out the identification process. Any future court cases should be brought against him.
This conveniently kills two birds with one stone. Our authorities hate to be held responsible by the living, whether they are the families of missing soldiers or that tiresomely demanding Shcherbakov. But they adore all kinds of ceremonies in commemoration of the dead – don't worry about feeding people, but be sure to place a wreath on their graves. Having proved unworthy of their soldiers and officers, politicians and military officials love annual visits to the Grave of the Unknown Soldier where they can shed a few restrained masculine tears for the benefit of the television cameras. As the Duma elections approach, the need is urgently growing for some kind of memorial to the unknown dead of the Chechen war. Politicians and the military need somewhere they can demonstrate their penitence in public. Today this is the most important and fundamental point of disagreement between Shcherbakov and the authorities. He will not hear any talk of such a monument and whenever he meets people in authority he does not fail to warn them that the State could not bring greater shame on itself than by this hurried burying of the problem. Each time he repeats the same quotation. It comes from the rules of the US Military Pathology Institute's medical examination directorate (the American equivalent of Laboratory 124):
The goal that all of our employees strive to attain is simple. We must not permit any American serviceman or woman to be buried beneath the inscription: "Here lies an American soldier who covered himself with glory and whose name is known to God alone."
Shcherbakov follows these words with a demand for money in order to continue the expensive identification research. The more he insists, the more our authorities dream of the peace and quiet of the Grave of the Unknown Soldier.
20 August. Deliveries of "cargo 200" from Daghestan are never-ending. Shcherbakov is worn out. The laboratory has no more resources than before. As we leave, Lieutenant Moiseyenko tells us: "If they drive such people as Shcherbakov out of the army, I shall also resign."
ROSTOV-ON-DON
*
On 7 August 1999 a convoy of vehicles and armed men crossed into Daghestan. It was led by the Chechen commander Shamil Basayev and a veteran opponent of the Soviet forces in Afghanistan, the Saudi-born Khattab. They had come supposedly in support of local Wahhabites. Army and police units were sent to repel them.