Ex-Soviet Army Abused Recruits, Investigator Says

MOSCOW — The 3.7-million-member former Soviet armed forces were condemned Friday as a breeding ground for bullies who killed tens of thousands of recruits.

One of the world’s biggest military powers was a leader in brutality to draftees, said Anatoly Alekseyev, head of a Russian presidential panel on troops and their families.

The armed forces lost far more young recruits in barracks violence and torture than they did in combat against Afghan guerrillas, he said.

Alekseyev, a former navy officer, told a news conference that since World War II, 310,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen had died violently--mostly at the hands of their colleagues.

The total, equivalent to nearly 26 army divisions, includes 14,000 servicemen killed in 10 years of the Afghan war.

He said the high command of the old superpower’s forces, now under the joint control of the Commonwealth of Independent States, had failed to tackle widespread abuse within the ranks.

Commentators say bullying and intimidation of recruits in the mainly conscript army reflected national, social and ethnic tensions among the 15 republics that made up the now-collapsed Soviet Union.

Alekseyev, a member of the Congress of People’s Deputies, Russia’s supreme legislature, said military violence caused 5,500 deaths in 1991. Just under 100,000 servicemen were so badly injured they became invalids, he said.

Alekseyev, whose committee was appointed by President Boris N. Yeltsin to monitor human rights in the services, said average annual losses of the U.S. Army did not exceed 1,800 servicemen.