In December 2019, police officers visited Ruslan Shaveddinov’s Moscow apartment, sawed through the door and placed him in handcuffs before whisking him away for forced military service in the Arctic.
Denied access to a cellphone — a breach of the rules, the 25-year-old opposition advocate said — he had to correspond with his loved ones via handwritten letters that took weeks to arrive.
“They sent me as far away as possible,” the ally of jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny said.
Sequestered for one year to a military post accessible only by helicopter and surrounded by roaming polar bears, Shaveddinov said that he and the other four soldiers at the base even had to melt snow for drinking water.
“It was like I had been exiled, with no connection to the outside world, in unlivable conditions,” he said.
While military service is mandatory in Russia, with more than 250,000 men aged 18 to 27 conscripted each year, many Russians get out of it through medical or educational exemptions. Some also simply ignore the summons or pay bribes.
However, for those harboring opposition sympathies, avoiding service is a more complicated endeavor.
Opposition and rights advocates have said that conscription in recent years has become another weapon in the authorities’ arsenal in their drive to silence dissent.
In Shaveddinov’s case, the authorities had taken an interest in him that summer when Navalny’s aides organized protests in Moscow demanding fair elections.
Protesters also riled authorities that autumn by launching a voting strategy that saw Kremlin-linked candidates lose races in local polls.
Shaveddinov said he provided proof that he was medically unfit for military service, although his appeals were shut down three times.
However, Shaveddinov said that he did not think that his advocacy could result in forced conscription, in what he likened to the Soviet Union-era practice of exiling dissidents to the Gulag network of labor camps.
“It was impossible to imagine that such a practice would return to Russia,” he said. “That politically undesirable people would be sent into exile.”
Shaveddinov is one of three prominent Navalny allies who have been sent to the army against their will in the past five years. Four others have been prosecuted for evading military obligations.
Years before Shaveddinov’s case, human rights defender Oleg Kozlovsky was arrested in 2007 and sent to a military base in central Russia, despite being exempt as a full-time student.
“My case was a dangerous precedent. These methods began to be used over and over again,” the 36-year-old Amnesty International researcher said.
Describing conscription as “punishment without crime,” Kozlovsky said that it was “a way of isolating a person, cutting them off from contacts,” and is used “when it is difficult or impossible to fabricate a criminal case.”
The researcher believed that cases involving well-known opposition advocates were just the “tip of the iceberg.”
He pointed to Moscow rallies in the summer of 2019, when the Russian Investigative Committee, which probes major crimes, said that it had identified “134 cases of military evasion” among detained protesters.
This year, after rallies in support of Navalny in January and February, the committee’s head, Alexander Bastrykin, ordered investigators to probe if any had evaded service.
The Russian Ministry of Defense did not respond to requests for comment.
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