2 Policemen Jailed, Senior Official Fired for Brutality, Soviet Magazine Discloses

Soviet policemen beat a man unconscious to extract false confessions, cracked another’s skull with an iron ball, and choked a third by clamping a gas mask on his face, the magazine Ogonyok said Monday.

In a graphic account of police brutality in the autonomous republic of Karelia bordering Finland, Ogonyok (Banner) said the area’s interior minister was fired after the incidents and two policemen were sentenced to 3 1/2 and three years’ imprisonment.

The report was remarkable, even amid the increasing frankness about abuses of power in Soviet society that has developed in the official press since Kremlin leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev took power in March, 1985.

Ogonyok quoted one factory worker as saying that, when police interrogated him in July, 1985, in the Karelian capital of Petrozavodsk, a policeman named Kapashinov gripped him by the throat until his tongue hung out and his eyes rolled.

After further beatings, he confessed to having stolen two wheels from a car in a garage. Ogonyok made clear the worker had committed the offense, but it said the police then tried to extract false confessions of other thefts.

Doctors examined the worker and reported that he had a ruptured spleen that required removal, stomach and pancreas injuries and about 3 1/2 pints of clotted blood in his abdominal cavity from repeated beatings.

Another man held at the same Petrozavodsk district station, Konstantin Galashov, said that policemen acting on the advice of a “doctor” took a gas mask from a safe, clamped it on his face for two minutes and closed the valve.

“I lost consciousness. Then they opened the valve so I could gulp some air,” Galashov said. He reported that he was also punched in the stomach and kidneys and said he recalled one police assailant from the boot with which he had pushed him in the face.

A witness to the police beatings, Yevgeny Motin, came under pressure not to testify and was taken to the same station, where a policeman cracked his skull by hitting him with an iron ball, Ogonyok said.