Bitter Battle to Lay Sons’ Lost Souls to Rest

The zinc-plated coffin was sitting in the living room when the Ventsels came home one day. Their son, Yevgeny, had returned from the Chechen war in a casket that was sealed shut.

Crushed by their loss, Alexander and Valentina Ventsel buried the coffin three years ago in the village cemetery a short walk from their house. Their neighbors named a road after Yevgeny and put up the Siberian hamlet’s first street sign in his honor. Nearly every day, Valentina visited the grave and talked to her son.

But peace did not come to the little village of Uryupino.

More than a year after Yevgeny died, another mother who lost her son in the 21-month war arrived with a disturbing question: Who is really buried in Yevgeny Ventsel’s grave?

Lyubov Tumayeva, searching for her son, Sergei, had become convinced that the army had mistakenly sent his remains from the separatist republic to this village on the Asian steppe. To the Ventsels’ dismay, Tumayeva launched a campaign to persuade the military to exhume the body and--if she is proved right--to bring the coffin home to Nizhny Novgorod, 1,500 miles away.

In her crusade, the single-minded secretary has traveled thousands of miles and shed countless tears, berating generals, pleading with prosecutors and threatening to set herself on fire in protest.

“There are cases where parents lose their minds when looking for their sons, or die because of the emotional strain,” said Tumayeva, a graying, round-faced woman of 48. “These are true parents. I want to be a true parent, one of these parents who never stop helping their child until the parent is dead.”

Tumayeva’s obsession with finding her son has drawn national attention to the plight of more than 1,200 families whose sons, brothers and fathers are still listed as missing in action nearly two years after the fighting in Chechnya ended. An estimated 80,000 people died in the war that humbled Russia and won the small mountain republic its de facto independence. Like Americans after the Vietnam War, many Russians are still searching for soldiers held captive in Chechnya, buried on the battlefield or lying unidentified in refrigerated railroad cars at a makeshift morgue in Rostov-on-Don, northwest of Chechnya.

Tumayeva’s supporters contend that the military is stalling in resolving her case because hers is not the only one: At the height of the war, they maintain, many families were sent the wrong bodies--or just bricks and dirt--in sealed coffins.

The once mighty Russian army, defeated in war and decaying in peacetime, has proved unable to uncover the truth in Uryupino. The army acknowledges that some families were shipped the wrong corpses, but officials say they cannot order the exhumation of Yevgeny’s grave without his parents’ permission. The grief-stricken Ventsels refuse to allow disinterment of the body who they believe is their boy and risk losing him a second time.

War Is Over, but New Struggle is Born

In the end, the war that brought so much misery to Russia has left this enduring image: two anguished families, whose sons died side by side, quarreling over who should possess one corpse recovered from the battlefield.

“They have pitted two mothers against each other, and they are watching us fight,” Valentina Ventsel said bitterly. “What is my guilt? What am I to blame for? That I gave birth to a son and raised him to be strong and healthy?”

When Lyubov Tumayeva arrived in the Altai region of Siberia in the summer of 1996, it seemed that she and Valentina Ventsel had so much in common. They greeted each other as sisters and walked together to the grave.

Their sons had both fulfilled their dream of serving in Russia’s elite airborne troops. Both went to Chechnya in the first days of the fighting--and tried to keep their mothers from knowing where they were. Strong and athletic, they served together and were killed together as they tried to storm the presidential palace in Grozny, the Chechen capital. Sergei Tumayev was 19. Yevgeny Ventsel was 18.

“When Tumayeva first came and I met her, we cried together,” Valentina Ventsel recalled. “I never could have imagined that events would take such a turn. But I cannot say anything against her. She is acting like an ideal mother. She is looking for her son.”

Father Returns From Search a Broken Man

Tumayeva saw her son for the last time on the television news. It was Jan. 7, 1995, and in a snippet of combat footage, she saw him walking behind his commanding officer in a line of soldiers.

He died the next day, but Tumayeva did not learn of it for nearly 18 months.

Worried because she had not heard from him, Tumayeva telephoned his regiment two weeks after the broadcast and was told that he had been wounded. He was taken to a hospital, an officer said, but no one knew which one.

Her husband, Vladimir, a retired warrant officer who had fought in the Afghan war, immediately left for southern Russia to search for him. A month later, Tumayeva said, he came home a broken man. He never told her what he found but would sit on the couch watching television while tears poured down his cheeks. Eight months after Sergei disappeared, Vladimir, 46, died of cancer; the doctors said stress was a major factor.

“I think the people who unleashed this war should be damned,” Tumayeva said. “They brought so much pain and sorrow upon us. All the sacrifices were absolutely senseless. This war has taken everything from me.”

During the war, the Russian government tried to defuse public protest by maintaining that its soldiers were in Chechnya voluntarily. But the claim backfired and prompted mothers from all over Russia to go to the war zone, find their sons’ regiments and take their boys home. After the war ended, other mothers combed battlefields and villages, hospitals and morgues to find their missing sons.

In the fall of 1995, Tumayeva decided it was her turn.

Her first stop was the military headquarters in Moscow, 250 miles west of Nizhny Novgorod. Learning little from her son’s commanders, she headed south to Rostov-on-Don and the military laboratory that has become a beacon for Russia’s bereaved war parents.

At the 124th Forensic Medical Laboratory, sandwiched between apartment buildings in a residential neighborhood, army doctors try to identify more than 440 bodies remaining from the war. It is here that Russia’s anguish over the Chechen war is most evident, where parents face their worst fears and, sometimes, learn the fate of their sons.

The forensic methods of the Russian army are primitive. DNA testing is prohibitively expensive. Dental charts and fingerprint records are nonexistent. So the doctors compare enlistment chest X-rays with those of cadavers. They search for similarities between the fingerprints of corpses and the relatives of the missing. And they try to match old photos of soldiers with skulls in the morgue.

Often, this means grisly work to prepare the bodies. In the lab’s courtyard, enlisted men boil the heads of unidentified soldiers one at a time in 10-gallon caldrons over an open fire to remove remaining tissue. Later, key features of the skull are marked and then superimposed by computer over photographs of missing soldiers--the same method scientists used to help identify the remains of Czar Nicholas II and his family.

For the parents, the worst is studying the lab’s gruesome videotapes of the corpses. Tumayeva spent days watching the videos of hundreds of bodies but never found any sign of Sergei. “If you have to find your son, you’ll do anything in this world to find him,” she said.

Back in Nizhny Novgorod, she kept calling the officers of his regiment until one finally gave her the addresses of soldiers who had served with Sergei. She wrote to each of them, asking what had happened to her son.

Three soldiers wrote back and gave the same account: In the attack on the presidential palace, Sergei and Yevgeny were trapped by enemy fire with their lieutenant, Andrei Zelenkovsky. The three were carrying explosives; nearby, a damaged armored personnel carrier was leaking fuel. When a shell landed near them, the explosion and fire were so intense only one body was found intact.

The soldiers said they identified the charred corpse as Sergei because they recognized his chipped tooth and a small patch of sweater that was not burned. But the unit’s medic told the soldiers that he had seen Sergei’s name on a list of wounded and insisted that the body belonged to Yevgeny Ventsel. Later, they discovered that the hospitalized soldier was not Sergei but someone with a similar name.

“I don’t understand why the officers from the unit did not inform you of this,” wrote former Pvt. Viktor Afonchenkov. “Sergei’s corpse was sent to the Altai territory and buried as Ventsel’s.”

Afonchenkov apologized for delivering the bad news but concluded: “It is better to know the bitter truth than to believe sweet lies. Do not believe what they tell you at the unit. They are just . . . trying to save face.”

Vladimir L. Kravchenko, the medic accused of misidentifying the corpse, still says he is positive that he identified the corpse correctly but agrees that the body should be exhumed so there will be no question.

“I am sure that was Ventsel in the coffin and we made no mistake,” he said. “I am sorry for Tumayeva. She is trying to clutch at a straw to find her son’s remains.”

After receiving the letters, Tumayeva asked the military prosecutor’s office, the agency that investigates misconduct in the military, to dig up the body and determine who it was. The prosecutor’s office agreed and sent a young lieutenant and two soldiers with her to carry out the exhumation.

Family Refuses to Allow Exhumation

Uryupino lies 1,750 miles east of Moscow, not far from the industrial city of Barnaul. Its 200 families support themselves by growing wheat and potatoes. In winter, horse-drawn sleds are as common as cars on the frozen dirt roads.

Like many people in the Altai region, Alexander Ventsel is of German descent and could have immigrated with his family to Germany after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. But with his job as chief engineer of the village farm and Valentina’s post as school director, they chose to stay--and their son went off to war.

After Tumayeva and her entourage arrived, the mothers’ initial friendship quickly deteriorated. Tumayeva insisted that the body be exhumed, and Valentina Ventsel refused.

“At first I thought: ‘Let’s do it. Let’s open the grave and exhume the body. It will be easy,’ ” Ventsel recalled. “And then I looked at the picture of my son [on the tombstone] and he was staring at me, asking me: ‘Mom, what are you doing? You never protected me when I was alive, and you are letting me down when I am dead.’ And I couldn’t do it.”

For the Ventsels, the stakes were high. If the coffin did not hold Yevgeny, they would face the challenge of starting their own arduous search. Dozens of relatives and friends gathered at the grave to help the family block the exhumation.

The Ventsels proposed to Tumayeva that they leave the body there and share the grave, even adding Sergei’s name and photograph to the monument. But Tumayeva refused.

“How can you carry on living when you know your son is lying somewhere far away, and strangers are taking care of his grave and his body?” Tumayeva asked. “When he finds out that I as his mother did not bring his body back, he will be very much offended.”

Tumayeva, on leave from her job at an aviation factory, stayed more than two months trying to get the body exhumed, living with a local family and surviving on the generosity of strangers. Officers and local military prosecutors regularly came to the village, ostensibly to help, but she became convinced that their real goal was to block the exhumation.

“They wanted to hush the case up and turn it into a conflict between two parents over one body,” Tumayeva said. “On several occasions they had buried empty coffins, and if I find the real body, all this would surface.”

Since that first meeting, Tumayeva has gone back to the region three times, but the Ventsels won’t budge. They told Tumayeva that they will give her the coffin only when she finds Yevgeny’s body.

And so in December she began her second grisly search--this time for the Ventsels’ son. She went back to the lab in Rostov-on-Don and viewed the videotapes again. From a newspaper photo, she identified the corpse of another lieutenant who had died attacking the presidential palace and had been lying in the morgue for nearly three years. But she didn’t find Yevgeny.

Col. Vladimir Shcherbakov, a doctor and forensic specialist who heads the lab, said his experts have worked closely with Tumayeva but that the case is one of the most difficult that they have tried to unravel.

So far, the lab has stumbled onto six cases of soldiers who were misidentified by field medics and buried under the wrong names, Shcherbakov said. In each instance, the lab identified a body only to find that the soldier’s family had already received a coffin. The first corpses were exhumed, properly identified and sent to their real families for reburial.

Speculation Abounds on Casket’s Contents

Tumayeva’s case is more complicated, he said. There is a question not only about who is buried in Yevgeny Ventsel’s coffin, he said, but also what is buried in the grave of Zelenkovsky, the lieutenant killed alongside the two soldiers. Some members of the unit say his casket is empty; others say it contains legs and feet from all three victims.

“We cannot rule out that in Tumayev’s case there is an instance of mistaken identity and false burial,” Shcherbakov said. “It’s possible that Tumayev’s body is buried as Ventsel’s body. It’s also possible that part of Tumayev’s body is buried in Zelenkovsky’s coffin.”

Sergei Ushakov, a spokesman for the military prosecutor, insists that his office favors exhuming the body in Ventsel’s grave but is unable to proceed because the family will not give its consent.

“We are as much interested in finding out who is buried there as the mother [Tumayeva] herself,” Ushakov said. “But an exhumation will not make the sufferings of the mothers any easier. One of the sons will still be missing, which means that one of the mothers will still be distraught with grief.”

In February, Russian Prosecutor General Yuri Skuratov personally promised Tumayeva that he would take over the case from the military prosecutor’s office and conduct his own investigation. But an aide said later that it would be many months before the matter is resolved.

In Uryupino, the Siberian days are getting warmer and the ground is starting to thaw. In her “mother’s heart,” Valentina Ventsel says she knows that it is her son in the coffin. But soon, she worries, Tumayeva will return to the village in the hope of digging up his grave.

“Have you ever hunted?” Ventsel asked. “I have. There are certain seasons for hunting different animals. They are brief periods, but they come every year. Summer is approaching, and I am beginning to feel that the hunt is coming for me.”