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NIZHNY NOVGOROD (Russia): In a dank, peeling corridor of the First City Hospital, rosy-cheeked, 24-year-old Vladimir Korochkin mops the ageing red linoleum floor with methodical gusto.
On the floor below, 23-year-old Alexei Lebedev and 20-year-old Ivan Matlakhov deftly navigate a heavy iron stretcher through an overcrowded ward cluttered with wheelchairs and patients’ belongings.
The three young men received a their army call-up papers from the draft board last year.
But unlike generations before them, they and 17 others in the Volga town of Nizhny Novgorod, 500 kms east of Moscow, have been allowed to fulfil their patriotic duty in green hospital smocks — not army fatigues.
Nizhny Novgorod, long a bastion of post-Soviet liberalism, has become the first city to allow young men with religious or pacifist beliefs to choose an alternative to military service.
“It’s difficult, both physically and psychologically. It can be horrible,” Matlakhov said of his hospital job, with a hint of pride.
Countless reports of non-combat deaths, bullying and beatings in Russia’s crumbling post-Soviet armed forces have turned the political spotlight onto the issue of conscription and alternative ways of paying “the patriotic debt”.
“I don’t want to carry guns. When I said this to the draft board, they told me to serve with the Emergencies Ministry,” Matlakhov said, fingering his green orderly’s cap.
“But I said no. One day I would be saving lives with the Emergencies Ministry, the next I would be shooting people.”
“You can’t trust our laws,” he said, adding he had feared that even recruitment into the Ministry’s paramedical regiment could not prevent him from later being drawn into the armed forces.
GREY AREA: While the right to an alternative is enshrined in Russia’s 1993 constitution, there is no law setting out the conditions of non-military national duty, leaving many conscripted men at the mercy of ad-hoc court decisions.
Only the determination of Nizhny Novgorod’s town’s mayor, Yuri Lebedev, has allowed the 20 young men in the city’s hospital to overcome the lack of legal guidelines.
Thanks to a local law, since January they have been emptying bedpans, changing soiled sheets and scrubbing floors — as well as doing any heavy work the nurses cannot do themselves — for the 500-rouble (16 dollars) monthly salary of a hospital orderly.
But with no legal framework setting the length of duty, alternative recruits — or “alternativshiki” — have little notion of how long they will have to serve, and only a vague idea of what they have committed themselves to.
“I am not afraid (of the army), I just didn’t want to carry a gun,” Vsevolod Kurepin, 24, said in the corridor of the department dealing with gangrenous patients where he works.
“I told (the draft board) I didn’t want to serve in the army, but that I still wanted to serve my country.”
LITTLE CHOICE: Natalia Zhukova of the Nizhny Novgorod Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers — a network of women lobbying the government to speed up plans to abolish conscription — said a four-year alternative duty would provide boys with no choice.
Since Russia’s human rights declaration was adopted in 1991, the issue of formalising an alternative to Russia’s obligatory military duty has been the subject of endless bickering.—Reuters
