Disbat
In February 2006, the then Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation Sergei Ivanov said that disciplinary battalions are an anachronism and, they say, there are no such formations in any army in the world (although this is actually not the case - there are disbats, say, in the USA and France). If a serviceman has committed a crime, let him be within the framework of the penal system,” the minister said. It was decided to disband the disbats. But it was not there! “Diesel”, as the disbats are called, is the most alive!
First, let's look at what a disciplinary battalion is, what conditions of detention there are and internal regulations. There are currently five diesel engines in Russia. The internal structure is as follows - five companies: two with serious charges, three with not so serious ones. The state is limited to no more than 800 prison soldiers. They end up in “diesel” by decision of a military court for crimes, both military and ordinary, of minor gravity, when criminal prosecution can be avoided. The term is given from 3 months to 2 years (in Soviet times the maximum was 4 years). Convicted soldiers wear green shoulder straps. The same color is on the belt plaques.
While on duty, soldiers are not deprived of the civil right to participate in elections (ordinary convicts cannot do this). The most common offense for which they end up in disbat is, of course, hazing (40%, according to the Ministry of Defense). In addition to hazing, AWOL, theft, drug possession. Recently, people have become increasingly convicted of robbery - when soldiers go on leave, they often return back with cell phones taken from children.
The servicemen are dressed in regular “camouflage”
Convicted soldiers have the right to see their relatives twice a month for 4 hours. The disciplinary battalion looks like the most ordinary military unit with all its infrastructure: barracks, parade ground, first-aid post, bathhouse, leisure room. However, part of it is surrounded by barbed wire, and along the perimeter there are towers with armed chaoovs (conscript soldiers). Prison soldiers must move by marching or running. This is written in the charter.
Daily routine in disbat
This is the daily routine. Rise at 6 am. Before lunch - two hours of lessons on memorizing the charter. Then two hours of drill training and, finally, two hours of running and various physical exercises. After lunch everything is the same, still the same six hours. And every 50 minutes there is a formation and verification. Compared to a regular colony, everything there is much more democratic.
In disbat
Due to such monotony of the day, many soldiers lose their nerves. Hence the clashes, conflicts, swearing. For this, a completely terrible punishment is a battalion guardhouse, an analogue of Zonov’s punishment cell. They can put you there for up to 30 days! Apart from 8 hours of sleep, the inmate of the guardhouse the rest of the time does not even have the right to sit down! If we compare it with Zonov’s punishment cell, then almost all of them now have wooden floors, on which you can lie for a whole day. So life is more difficult for the soldiers - “diesel drivers”.
Why was Ivanov’s idea forgotten? The next Minister of Defense, Anatoly Serdyukov, personally visited several disciplinary battalions, as well as a couple of general criminal correctional colonies. And he admitted that the conditions in the disbats are better than in the zones.
Application for parole
This is controversial for the reasons described above, but oh well. The Ministry of Defense explained the rejection of Ivanovo’s idea by saying that in the colonies, soldiers who stumbled could be drawn into a criminal environment. Staying in disbat is not considered a criminal record. The time spent in it is simply calculated from the term of service, and after serving the sentence, the military man is obliged to continue serving (although usually they try to send such a soldier home as quickly as possible so as not to spoil the atmosphere).
Difference from a guardhouse
Another type of punishment for violation of discipline is imprisonment in a guardhouse. This is also a prison, but people are placed in it for relatively short periods - from a couple of days to a month. Violators of the regulations and those suspected of committing criminal offenses are kept in the guardhouse until the court finds them guilty.
In disbat, those for whom the court has already made a decision serve their sentences. The term of imprisonment in disbat is no more than 3 years. When committing serious crimes with long terms of imprisonment, criminals are transferred to regular correctional facilities.
Stories from the disbat
To amuse the reader with the help of black humor, I will give a story just about the disbat. I quote it almost verbatim, only removing, so to speak, idiomatic expressions. This is the story of a former “guard” of the disciplinary battalion:
“It’s melancholy, everyone wants to go on vacation, but vacation in the disbat is an unrealistic thing. There is one option for guaranteed leave - to shoot a prisoner while trying to escape, which in itself is unlikely; they rarely escape. Petya Shnigel served in the second platoon - a German from Altai, a single-celled creature, red-haired, cross-eyed. I dreamed about vacation terribly, cried, wanted to go home. The way home lay only through a machine gun burst into the back of a fleeing prisoner, if one happened. In the zone there was a healthy, scary fireman - a lawless man, a thieves to the point of horror, generally a badass. But the bathhouse was outside the zone, and in order for the fireman to get clean linen, he had to drag himself to the checkpoint, go through inspection, and make a detour of two kilometers; in short, hemorrhoids.
And the bathhouse is actually next to the firehouse, just behind a fence with two rows of barbed wire. Petrukha was “doing duty” (on duty) at the fourth post, on the tower, right next to the stoker: sunshine, sleepless night; In short, I got stuck. The fireman looked - the sentry was sleeping, and yelled at the bathhouse attendant: “Moldavian, throw the laundry over the fence, the cop is kemarit!” The bathhouse attendant threw a bundle of clean linen, but it caught on a thorn, came untied and scattered along the pre-zone between the fence and the thorn. The fireman sees a joint, but Petrukha is asleep, and the fireman decides to crawl in and collect his underpants and T-shirts. He crawled under a thorn, crawled along the pre-zone, collecting rags. Of course, at this moment our warrior wakes up and is stunned - here it is, the long-awaited vacation, ten meters away an attempt to escape, everything is honest and concrete!
Petro jerks the bolt, starts shooting in long bursts at the fireman without any of the obligatory “Stop, back!”, “Stop, I’ll shoot!”, but since he’s cross-eyed, he can’t hit. The fireman rushes around the pre-zone, forgot about his underpants and rushes through the thorn back to the firebox. Petrukhin shot the magazine, excitedly inserts a second one and continues to knock the leave out of the fireman.
Convoy in disbat
He nevertheless climbed through the thorn and runs to the firebox, and Petro, in the heat of the moment, is already firing around the zone, and this, in general, is impossible. The fireman flies into the firebox, and then the last bullet in the store ricochets off the asphalt and pierces his lung. He falls in the doorway, Petrukha is happy to death and then realizes that he shot the prisoner not in the pre-zone, but in the zone, and will not go on vacation, but to the neighboring disbat, and they will definitely end him there when they find out where he served.
He jumps off the tower and drags the wheezing, almost blind man by the legs into the pre-zone - they say, he soaked him there according to the regulations. When we heard gunfire in the guardhouse, we grabbed AKMs, ran, and looked: little, frightened Petrukha was dragging the bloody carcass of the fireman by the legs from the area to the fence. We drive in, what happened, and start laughing. A consultation is meeting: what to do? In short, they somehow got rid of Petrukha, they patched up the fireman in the hospital and told him to remain silent, otherwise we’ll shoot him specifically.”
Rapists in the army
And now a word from the former investigator of the Leningrad prosecutor’s office, Oleg Babushkin, who once sent a soldier to a disbat for a heinous crime: “At the age of 26, I ended up in the armed forces of the Soviet Union (from 1986 to 1988). Served in Bashkiria. Since he worked in civilian life as an investigator in the prosecutor's office, he ended up in the same position in the army - only in the military prosecutor's office. She deals with crimes committed by military personnel. And so, very soon after my arrival, a loud and vile crime occurred in Ufa - the rape of a grandmother!
The victim lived on the outskirts of Ufa. In an old wooden house located in a remote place. There was a military unit nearby. Granny was 89 years old! One day, two young men broke into her house and raped her. The grandmother wrote a statement to the police. They didn’t really believe her, they thought the old woman had gone completely crazy, but the appropriate examination confirmed her testimony. The granny hardly remembered the faces of the attacking gerontophiles, but she noticed something really important - the rapists were in military uniform! Therefore, the police transferred the case to the military prosecutor's office.
Disbat
That's how I learned the details of the crime. To be honest, I had never even heard of who gerontophiles were, like probably many Soviet citizens. I couldn’t wrap my head around how much pleasure you could get from sex with an old woman. The chief military prosecutor, let's call him M. (Bashkir), was a very experienced worker and, what is important for the investigator, had instinct. He, too, was not very familiar with the tactics and psychology of gerontophiles, but assured that they could return to the scene of the crime. And therefore he ordered me, together with the traffic police officers, to patrol the outskirts where the house of the raped old woman was located. And so we, in the UAZ, patrolled day after day, driving in circles along the dusty streets.
Finally, after about a month and a half, we got lucky. While on patrol, we saw two construction battalion members heading to the house of a raped old woman! These bastards came to her to have fun again (as it turned out later during interrogations)! To be honest, we detained the soldiers harshly and “received them with partiality.” In short, we loaded two unconscious bodies into an UAZ, and within half an hour these monsters were within the walls of the military prosecutor’s office. However, they refused. Grandma couldn't identify them either. The situation turned out to be stupid. The criminals have been identified - there is no evidence.
And then I had to decide on non-trivial actions. And I decided to use a raped old woman. To do this, you need to be well aware of the different behavior options of victims of rapists. This is a very psychologically difficult crime to bear. And everything here depends on the individual. Some try to squeeze what happened out of their memory. They do not want to communicate during interrogations, going into painful details. Others are burning with a sense of revenge, they themselves are pushing the investigation, they are ready to give him any assistance. As for our grandmother, she really wanted the perpetrators to receive the punishment they deserved. I decided to take advantage of this desire of hers.
The arrested construction battalion members were not kept in a regular bullpen, but in a prison cell. From the guardhouse to the building of the military prosecutor's office it was only about three hundred meters, but in accordance with the Charter of the USSR Armed Forces, suspects were required to be escorted in handcuffs and accompanied by two machine gunners. On that decisive morning for the investigation, I just watched as the soldiers escorted the gerontophiles. They were escorted to my office. There the young men stumbled upon... the corpse of the old woman they had raped!
Disbat
The phrase of one of the soldiers was key: “She should have stayed alive!” All that remained was a matter of technique. While they had not yet come out of their stupor, I pounced like a kite: “This is wet, guys! You see, morons, this is a “wet” article! You will be shot! Easily! Write how it went! Write a confession! Now you need to save your filthy life!”
The young men “floated”, differed: “We didn’t want to kill, we just did this…” In short, they wrote confessions, where they told in detail how they raped the old woman in turn. Apparently they weren't given enough bromine. When the appearances were documented and the interrogation was completed, the old woman’s “corpse” calmly stood up from the couch and said: “Thank you, Oleg. Now at least I’ll die in peace, let these little darlings sit.” Then, turning towards the soldiers: “And you, assholes, will dream about me all my life. In nightmares."
And I agreed with my grandmother that she would play the corpse, surprisingly easily. She only said: “I’m going to die soon anyway, I’m already being given absenteeism at the cemetery. So at least I’ll help you one last time. Otherwise these monsters can do such things.” We discussed her role carefully. The old woman showed zeal, she felt like she wanted not only to take revenge, she wanted to protect the future victims of these scum.
Disbat
By the way, granny was wrong to become poor when she talked about her imminent death. While I was serving in Ufa, she was still cheerful and regularly brought me strawberries from her garden. As for the rapists from the construction battalion, they were convicted by a military tribunal and received 4 years in prison to serve their sentence in a disciplinary battalion.”
Disbat Mulino
One of the most famous disbats in Russia is the 28th separate disciplinary battalion in Mulino - one of the two disbats remaining in Russia. The second is near Chita. But even in those days when there were more disbats throughout the country, the Mulino disbat was considered one of the most prosperous, if the words “well-being” and “disbat” can be put side by side. I think the few hours spent inside this impressive establishment turned out to be extremely useful. A source of knowledge of life of rare power.
Disbat Mulino
A disciplinary battalion is not a prison, but a military unit. There are two types of personnel serving in military unit 12801 - permanent and variable. Variable military personnel are those who are inside the protected perimeter. They end up inside for varying periods of time, from three months to two years. At the moment, there are 170 “guests” in the unit out of a possible 800.
Disbat Mulino is located in the Nizhny Novgorod region, where the village of Mulino is located among forests and swamps. In fact, the term “village” is not entirely correct - it is simply a large military town, in which the small civilian population is represented only by retirees and family members of military personnel, and the city-forming enterprises are numerous military units. High fences hide behind them barracks and parks of armored vehicles, almost exclusively green-painted trucks drive along the rough roads, and the sounds of machine-gun bursts and cannon salvos are heard every now and then from the neighboring training ground.
Disbat Mulino
Among other military units there is the Mulino disbat. Outwardly, he hardly stands out from the crowd of others, but enjoys a well-deserved and formidable reputation - in the Armed Forces of the country there is not a single soldier or sergeant who does not know about his existence. This is a Separate Disciplinary Battalion, one of two remaining in Russia. A nightmare for any conscript. For some of them, it becomes a terrible reality. Behind these walls and barbed wire fences there is a completely indescribable atmosphere - there are no smiles or sparkle in the eyes, no smoke breaks or friendly communication, no layoffs or gatherings in a “cap.” There is only Her Majesty Military Discipline - merciless, merciless, senseless and limitless. Eight hours a day - drill exercises on the parade ground, eight hours - cramming the regulations or (for the lucky ones!) hard physical labor in the reinforced concrete products workshop, and, finally, eight hours of sleep.
Disbat Mulino
The only outlet in a series of endless routines is short breaks for meals. Movement, whether on the parade ground or in the barracks, is possible in only two ways - marching or running. Any negligence, any mistake entails penalties, the most severe of which are solitary confinement in a stone bag of a guardhouse for a period of 10 to 30 days, or a military court and a new term.
Riot in the Mulino disbat
There have been riots in the history of this military unit. The most significant one was in 2003. 28 prisoners were fed up with their conditions of detention and decided to stage an uprising. They suppressed it with the help of shepherd dogs, conscripts and heavy clubs.
Not only those who were guilty were punished, but also those who happened to be nearby. So that others in Mulino would not have the desire to rebel, everything was filmed in detail on a video camera. The video can still be easily found on YouTube.
