Mascis:
Petr Dmitrov has served in the Russian army for nearly two decades. During his time in service, he has participated in Russian invasions of Georgia, the Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, and parts of northern Mongolia. In addition, he claims to have participated in secret, small-scale invasions of Finland, Romania, and eastern Poland—invasions the Russian government refuses to acknowledge. It has been an era of relatively unchecked military expansion for Russia, thanks in large part to the firm grip that President Boris Solovyev has on his army of over 140 million soldiers. But that grip may be starting to loosen. And soldiers like Dmitrov are the reason why.
Mascis (narrating):
We found Dmitrov and his entire army unit here, in an undisclosed town near Dubrovnik in Croatia. They were not sent here by the Russian government. They were supposed to be stationed outside of Odessa. Instead, three months ago Dmitrov, who is the leader of this unit, decided to bring them here in act of collective desertion.
Dmitrov:
Our last mission, before we decided to defect, was to infiltrate a small Romanian border town, the name of which escapes me at the moment. I think I’ve managed to forget it out of sheer will.
Mascis:
What were your orders?
Dmitrov (sighing):
We had gotten to the point where we didn’t need to receive explicit orders to know what we were supposed to do. They simply named the next target and we went.
Mascis:
What were the unspoken instructions?
Dmitrov:
Scout the town, ascertain resources in it that would be of value to the cause, and then devise a plan for resource collection.
Mascis:
You call it “resource collection.” But really it was pillaging, right?
Dmitrov:
That’s exactly right.
Mascis:
What resources were you asked to collect?
Dmitrov:
Food, fuel, water, and men. And not necessarily in that order of priority. Most of the towns we scouted were located on bodies of water: lakes, rivers, creeks. Wherever there was freshwater.
Mascis:
You said “men” on your list of things that needed to be collected. Kidnapping?
Dmitrov:
That’s correct. Women were also on the list, but for far more temporary use.
Mascis:
What happened to the men that were kidnapped?
Dmitrov:
They were sent to the farms.
Mascis (narrating):
“Farms,” which could accurately be described as slave-labor camps. The Russian army is the fastest-growing military entity on earth, and a steady supply of labor is needed to produce food and clothing for every ageless soldier, so the army can continue to pillage, to kidnap
more
men to make more food and clothes in the farms, to help sustain an even larger army. As the army has grown, so have the farms.
Mascis:
Did you enjoy your work?
Dmitrov:
No. I didn’t. But I knew that I had very little choice in the matter. I come from a family that had nothing. Anything we made often had to be turned over to the town
mafiya
or to the police. Really, they’re the same thing. It’s just a matter of dress. There was a policeman who came to our house one day and took my grandmother. She was sitting at the kitchen table, making bread, and he wouldn’t even let her wash the flour off her hands. He just grabbed her, and poof! she was gone. I never saw her again. And I knew, after my grief had settled, that I could not suffer the same fate as her. I knew I had to be on the side that had all the power. So when I got the conscription notice, there was no hesitation.
When you’ve served in the army for as long as I have, it becomes clear that you are not really serving your country, but that you are serving the very small group of men who control that country. You serve at their pleasure. I knew that to survive I had to do whatever they said, but some of the things they asked of us . . . We were forced to go to some very, very dark places.
Mascis:
Killing the elderly?
Dmitrov:
Yes. Anyone who was too old or too sick to be of use, particularly if he or she had gotten the cure, was considered a drag on the nation’s future. At first we were ordered to shoot them.
Mascis:
Did you personally shoot them?
Dmitrov:
Some of them, yes.
Mascis:
Why?
Dmitrov:
Because I would have been shot if I had disobeyed.
Mascis:
Wouldn’t it have been more noble to refuse and die?
Dmitrov (laughing):
Nobility sounds wonderful as a concept. But nobility tends to go out the window when you find yourself forced to choose between life and oblivion.
Mascis:
How many people did you shoot?
Dmitrov:
Not many.
Mascis:
Do you remember their faces?
Dmitrov:
Every wrinkle. Every strand of hair on their head. I try not to think about it, because what good does it do me? I’m just relieved that I wasn’t forced to shoot more of them. After reports of the shootings began to leak out, Solovyev decided the water purges would be much more effective. He learned about them from Ndiaye in the Congo.
Mascis (narrating):
Water purges like the one executed in the small town of Dunsk, which has no water supply of any kind. In 2032 over fifty thousand elderly people were transported to a small, walled-off section of town, then left to die of dehydration.
Mascis:
Were you part of herding people to Dunsk?
Dmitrov:
Yes, I was.
Mascis:
Did that bother you?
Dmitrov:
It did, but I was caught up in this bizarre mentality where, as I said before, I was just glad that I didn’t have to shoot people directly. Obviously, there’s not much difference in shooting someone and leaving them out in the middle of nowhere to die. But somehow it felt less severe. “It’s not murder if you’re supposed to be dead.” That’s what our superiors told us, over and over again, whenever we sent the old geezers off to Dunsk. After a while, I took it as gospel.
I remember one time I was going into a house to claim an old woman to get her on one of the trucks, and her family was hanging on me, clawing at me, desperately begging me to let her go. And while they were doing that, all I could think about was my grandmother. She had been taken from us by the police. And now here I was. I was the guy who stole my grandmother now! That was me! (
laughs
)
Mascis:
You’re laughing.
Dmitrov:
Well, how else can you react? Laughter helps to cover it all up. I don’t know how else to deal with the memory.
Mascis (narrating):
After performing mission after mission, Dmitrov grew weary of his job—of the ugliness of his orders, and of his unit’s payoff for successfully carrying those orders out.
Dmitrov:
We noticed that our food supply was growing smaller and smaller. Our supply of vodka was growing smaller and smaller. We were continually asked to go and find these resources, and once we found them, they were immediately taken and given to people up the chain of command.
Mascis:
You didn’t feel like you were getting a good cut.
Dmitrov:
We felt like we weren’t getting a cut at all. And there we were, doing all this dangerous work, sacrificing our very souls, yet the payoff was less and less. All the water. All the coal. All the women. All of it was going to government officials or the
mafiya
. Just like my childhood. It occurred to me that, while we were sending people off to the farms, we were part of the farms as well. We were servants just like the Latvians or Ukrainians we brought in.
When we were sent to that small Romanian town, our plan was, as usual, to burn the village down and take anything and anyone useful with us. So we began the collection, and right in the center of town was this very small girl. She couldn’t have been more than four years old. But she was beautiful. Gorgeous. With the brilliant blue eyes and everything. I saw her, and I knew we would have to claim her. And she was very still as I approached. She had a small wooden train car in her hand, and she sat there calmly, as if she knew what was coming and had accepted it. That’s when I knew I couldn’t do it anymore. I didn’t want to be part of this process where a child who is only four years old has already given up, has already accepted that her life will be thrown away into prostitution or organ harvesting. I went and picked her up, and I ran with her to the west edge of the town, gave her all my food, gave her a pistol, and told her to go. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Romanian terrain, but the woods there are darker than any woods I’ve ever seen. The forest doesn’t even have a floor. Between the trees, there’s just this black void. So when this little girl ran into the forest with my pistol, it was like she had vaporized. Like she never existed. And I thought, better for her that way. To have never existed.
Mascis (narrating):
After pillaging that small Romanian town, Dmitrov gathered his men, and together they agreed to defect. They spent the next year, between missions, planning their escape. When they were again sent into the Romanian woods in the winter of 2057, they fled into the forest, disappearing from sight.
Dmitrov:
We decided, as a group, that it was worth the risk to defect and go into business for ourselves, so to speak. To be our own bosses.
Mascis:
Do you think they’ll come after you?
Dmitrov:
Well, they have the men to do it, don’t they? But no, I think they have a desertion rate that they deem acceptable.
Mascis (narrating):
But that desertion rate is growing. The occurrence of RMUs, or rogue military units, is rising in Russia. Long a problem for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Russian military is now feeling the sting of entire battalions going AWOL and becoming armed, unaffiliated gangs.
David Miles:
I don’t think Solovyev will tolerate the problem for very long.
Mascis (narrating):
David Miles, professor of Russian history at Georgetown University Online, estimates that over fifteen hundred Russian RMUs are at large in eastern Europe, China, and the Middle East.
Miles:
You have to understand that, while Solovyev is cruel and a dictator, he is also a visionary of sorts. He knew he had to win the so-called bodies race, so he immediately hatched this plan to increase and revamp his country’s population. And he knew that in order to control such a massive population, dictatorship was not an option but a necessity. And while he has killed
millions
of people in the process, his nation is growing at a manageable rate. Its military hasn’t suffered greatly under the weight of overextension and desertion, as ours has. Violent gangs are a foreign concept within Russia’s borders, unlike here and in Mexico. The population is under control. Oppressed, for certain. But under control. Whereas we just throw more and more people on death row, yet crime is worse than ever. Solovyev knew that the cure would lead to mass tragedy, so he had the foresight to engineer that tragedy in his nation’s favor. And he’s succeeded, which is a terrifying thought.
RMUs are a natural by-product of an army as large as Russia’s. But when someone suggests to me that Solovyev will tolerate
any
RMUs in his midst, particularly ones that reveal themselves publicly, I say no. No, he won’t abide that. He will seek out threats to unity, and he will crush them.
Dmitrov:
If they do decide to come for me, fine. We’ll have it out. And if I die, I’ll at least know that I died a free man, and not as one of Solovyev’s farm crops.
Mascis:
Have you killed anyone since deserting?
Dmitrov:
It hasn’t come to that yet. Many people assume we still have the backing of the Russian army, and so they lay down their guns when they see us.
Mascis:
But you’re still marauding. You’re still taking what isn’t yours, by threat of force.
Dmitrov:
But that’s the world now! You take or you get taken from. That’s what we have to do, until the day someone decides to stop us. We’re going to take what we need to survive—and then maybe we’ll take a little more.
Mascis:
How is that a better life than when you were in the army? How is that any more ethical?
Dmitrov:
It isn’t. But at least what we take will be ours. Mine. I deserve that after all these years. I deserve what I take to be mine and no one else’s. That’s the very least this world owes me.