One Sailor’s Fate Exemplifies Russian Military’s Grim Reality

Sailor Marat Miftakhov was looking forward to finishing his 18 months of mandatory military service and spending his 20th birthday at home with his family.

“Mama, please cook as much food as you can. I will come home and eat everything,” he wrote from his ship in the port of Severomorsk.

Marat died May 16, six days before his birthday. His commander told Marat’s father that the boy had hanged himself. Marat’s body was sent home to Chelyabinsk in a sealed zinc coffin.

However, the Miftakhovs are ethnic Tatars, whose religious law requires them to wash a body before burial. They forced open the coffin. When they saw the marks on Marat’s body, they felt sure their son had been murdered.

A severe bruise on Marat’s forehead had been covered with makeup, according to the letter demanding a criminal investigation that Marat’s father, Rashit Miftakhov, wrote to the public prosecutor. The boy had a puncture wound in the back of his head, a wound to his ear, strangle marks on his neck and scratches all over.

What is most horrifying about Marat’s case is that it no longer even shocks most Russians. Since glasnost lifted a corner of the curtain of Soviet military secrecy in 1989, families of slain soldiers have been protesting the hundreds of deaths that the military has ruled suicides even though the evidence screams foul play.

The family’s request for a criminal investigation has been granted, but Rashit Miftakhov does not think he will ever learn the truth about why Marat died. And he believes those responsible will never be brought to justice. “There is this military machine that thinks that everything is permissible,” he said.