COLUMN ONE : Red Army: Killing Its Own? : It reportedly is losing more conscripts to violence in its own ranks than it lost in 10 years in Afghanistan. Draft dodging and desertion are on the rise. Hazing and ethnic animosity are cited.

Although the last Soviet soldier was pulled out of Afghanistan almost a year and a half ago, Soviet mothers are still getting their sons back from the army in metal boxes.

Bruises and bullet holes have been covered with makeup. Coffins are kept closed so parents will not see their sons’ mutilated bodies. And the only glimpse that some have of their sons is through a little window in the coffin that shows only the face.

The metal caskets hide horrible stories of young men killed in peacetime--the victims of brutal bullying by fellow conscripts.

“Why, when there is no war, do the healthy boys we send to serve their country come back in coffins?” Lyubov Levina, 49, a grocery clerk from Kishinev in the Soviet republic of Moldavia, asked with tears in her eyes.

In the weeks before his death, Levina’s 19-year-old son, Vitaly, told her in letters and telephone calls about brutal beatings that he suffered from older soldiers in his army unit near Vladivostok, in the Far East.

“He told me, ‘If we complain, they will kill us,’ ” Levina said, recalling a telephone call from her son a few days before he died.

The commanding officer claimed that Vitaly killed himself. “He did not want to live and hanged himself,” the officer told her in a brief telephone call.

But Levina was not satisfied with that explanation. Six months after Vitaly’s death, she had his body exhumed. An independent autopsy showed signs that he had been raped and badly beaten before death--and that he had a fatal stab wound in his neck.

“My son loved life very much,” she said, sobbing. “He wanted to go into law, and an application to a law school was in his pocket when they found him. How can they say it was suicide?”

Despite the evidence gathered by Levina and other parents whose sons perished as conscripts, the parents say that the military legal system in the Soviet Union remains so tightly controlled and so determined to preserve the armed forces’ image that there is almost no hope of seeing justice done.

But the Red Army reportedly is losing more soldiers to the violence in its own ranks than it did during the entire 10 years it was fighting in Afghanistan.

“How can it happen that in peacetime alone, during the last four years, 15,000 men died in the army--as many as we lost in Afghanistan over 10 years?” a group of prominent politicians, scientists and military officers wrote in an open letter to the government published earlier this month in the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda.

Twenty percent of those deaths were suicide, according to the letter, which the group said was based on statistics supplied by the Defense Ministry. The percentages of murders and accidental deaths were not mentioned.

Officials at the Defense Ministry, however, refused to discuss the subject. “I know it’s an important topic,” said Vladimir S. Nikanorov, a spokesman for the Defense Ministry, rejecting a request for an interview. “But my bosses say it is not time to talk about it.”

Soviet mothers disagree. As the peacetime deaths in the armed forces have increased, they have taken to the streets to protest the danger their sons face while serving their compulsory two or three years of military service.

The young men themselves are also fearful. Draft dodging and desertion appear to be increasingly common, even though offenders can be punished with up to seven years in prison.

In Armenia, the southern Soviet republic that remains troubled by ethnic strife, fewer than 10% of conscripts showed up for the national draft this spring, Gen. Valentin Varennikov, a deputy defense minister, said earlier this month. Only 50% reported for the draft in the secessionist Baltic republics of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia.

Desertion from the armed forces has also become a “widespread phenomenon,” the military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda reported, saying that 20% of deserters left their units because of dedovshchina, the Russian term for hazing.

The hazing sometimes is so brutal, deserters say, that even the threat of years in prison cannot keep them in the army.

“If we didn’t desert, we would be cut up and sent home in a coffin,” said Sasha Boredulya, an 18-year-old deserter from a tiny Byelorussian village, explaining why he and a friend fled their unit in the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan.

The young men said they were the prey of a gang of Chechens, a small nationality group in the Caucasus Mountains that constantly demanded money from them, beat them and threatened their lives.

“Bring the money by Sunday,” Bogdan Sukhodola, 20, the other deserter, said they were told by the Chechens. “If there is no money, it would be better for you to hang yourself.”

Boredulya added: “There is no order or discipline in the army. The officers are too afraid to control the gangs.”

Much of the hazing is the work of conscripts in their second year of service who force the new recruits to do their work and to give them their food, money and any valuables they might have.

The new recruits are exhausted from working double shifts and hungry and angry, but if they talk back or refuse to take the older conscripts’ orders, they are beaten.

Army officers have explained that dedovshchina has been tolerated because it teaches new recruits to follow orders, but they have acknowledged in recent public discussions that it can go too far.

In one such gathering, the young deserters sat and listened to wrenching accounts from mothers whose sons had been killed.

Elizabet N. Nekrasova visited her son on New Year’s Eve at his base just outside Moscow. They celebrated the holiday and talked about where he should study after finishing his two years of service.

But three hours later he died from what his officers called “natural causes.”

“I left him at 6 in the evening, and by 9 he was not alive any more,” said Nekrasova, 58, with a stunned expression. “He was a perfectly healthy 19-year-old when I saw him last. They just say he died, but he was never sick in his life. Is that possible?”

When she last saw him, his appearence was normal. But when his body was returned to her, she said, the right side of his face bore a large bruise.

After some time had passed, Nekrasova’s older son told her that he had noticed a bullet hole on his younger brother’s forehead at the funeral, but he had not told her earlier because she had been already too grief-stricken.

That was 4 1/2 years ago, and Nekrasova has been fighting the army ever since, trying to get to the truth about her son’s death.

She returned to the base and talked to his fellow recruits, who told her that six other young men had also died under strange circumstances at that base during a year’s time.

“I want this crime to be uncovered,” she said, her voice taking on an edge. “Why should the murderer go without punishment while my son lies under the ground?”

The military’s doctors are part of what she and others see as a conspiracy to cover up the killings.

“The doctors are all intimidated,” she said. “They hide the truth and defend the army to the end, just to protect their own rank.”

Nekrasova had her son’s body exhumed, and although she was not allowed by the authorities to view the remains, friends who were allowed to do so told her that they saw a bullet hole in the head.

During her long battle with the authorities, Nekrasova, a retired house painter, has met dozens of other mothers whose sons were also killed in circumstances never fully explained.

They have now formed a group to reform the system that they believe has continually lied to them.

“The army has become like a concentration camp,” said Oleg A. Lyamin, a lawyer who represents the parents in 30 such cases. “The situation is so unbearable that people are emigrating just to save their sons, because they are sure their sons will not come home alive.”

Many of the killings result from dedovshchina being taken to an extreme, Lyamin said, but ethnic hostility is also a leading cause.

Officers hide the crimes because they do not want the public to know how far military order and discipline have collapsed, he added.

One woman was told her son committed suicide, even though his body was badly beaten and his chest riddled with machine-gun bullets, the lawyer said.

“Murders are often called suicides in the army,” Lyamin contended. “The mothers look at the bodies and see all the traces of violence, but even so, the military prosecutor’s office tells them: ‘You don’t understand these things. Your son committed suicide.’ ”

Some former soldiers agreed that the hazing at times can be so harsh that it could drive some young men to suicide.

“Those who are morally strong can take it,” said Oleg V. Chernyaev, 22, a medical student who recently finished his military service. “Those who cannot, slit their wrists or run away.”

One recruit committed suicide in Chernyaev’s unit after being hounded day and night and abused physically and mentally by older recruits, nicknamed dedi.

“They can do worse things to you psychologically than physically,” Chernyaev said.

For some of the victims, the physical brutality has driven them past the breaking point.

In 1987, a Lithuanian youth serving in the internal troops in Leningrad was victimized mercilessly and then gang-raped by other soldiers while on a train. When he recovered consciousness, he grabbed the rifle of one of the soldiers and opened fire, killing several and wounding others. He has since been committed to a mental hospital.

The mothers whom Lyamin represents protest at most pro-democracy rallies in Moscow, bearing placards with large photographs of their sons in military uniforms--and in coffins.

They clutch at other participants and passers-by to tell their stories, not seeking sympathy but wanting others to know what could happen to their sons.

A month after the last soldier left Afghanistan, Zinaida R. Ledneva, 50, a factory worker, received a telegram with the news that her 19-year-old son was dead. When she and her husband rushed from the small Black Sea town of Armyansk to the base where he was stationed, they were shown his body.

“His face was all beaten, his body was all bruised. We saw it all,” Ledneva said. “But the medical experts hid what happened. They said it was a suicide.”

The dead soldier’s commanding officer said the boy hanged himself with his belt from a sitting position in the latrine--the belt attached not more than a meter off the ground.

Like many of the mothers, Ledneva strongly doubts that her son could have beaten himself so severely and then hanged himself.