Russian Women on Front Line in Identification of War Dead

One by one, the unidentified corpses rolled by on the video: distorted faces, burned bodies, limbs missing. Valentina Kadashnikova studied each soldier, each scar and mole, looking for her son in the last place she hoped to find him.

For three years, Kadashnikova had searched for her Vasily, missing since February 1995, early in the Chechen war. Finally, she had come from her home in Kamyshin on the Volga River to the end of the line: the army laboratory where medical examiners work to identify the remains of Russian soldiers recovered from the battlefields of the separatist republic.

Kadashnikova, 62, watched the macabre video for hours as, one by one, 214 mangled bodies appeared on screen in agonizing detail. With each new face, she braced herself in fear--and exhaled in relief when she saw that it was not her son.

And then there was Vasily, unmistakably corpse No. 215. Both legs were missing; one eye was closed; the face was twisted. But she knew. She watched the close-up of his torn body seven times, sobbing, rocking in her chair and calling out her grief to the woman who had accompanied her, Lyubov Kalmykova.

“A great sorrow has befallen me,” she wailed. “Why am I so unlucky? Why do I have to suffer like this? Why does God hate me so much?”

Kalmykova asked quietly, “Why does God hate so many mothers?”

The search for more than 1,200 Russian soldiers missing in action in Chechnya has sparked a citizen activism in Russia, contributing to the rise of the country’s largest grass-roots organization, the Soldiers’ Mothers Committee.

In more than half of Russia’s 89 republics and regions, the group’s volunteer mothers counsel young men on how to avoid the draft, help deserters avoid court-martial and assist families in their hunt for missing soldiers. The group, a constant annoyance to the authorities, enjoys broad support from the public.

It is no coincidence that the task has fallen to mothers: Russian women have traditionally cleaned up after their men, and the Chechen war is no exception.

Nearly every day, mothers come to Rostov-on-Don to visit the 124th Forensic Medical Laboratory. Some are searching for their sons; some have been summoned by the lab to identify a body. For days or weeks, they stay at the army’s modest Star Hotel at the military’s expense, waiting and hoping for word of their loved ones.

The lab, about 400 miles from Chechnya, has received 991 remains from the Chechen war and 543 have been identified, said Col. Vladimir Shcherbakov, the lab’s director.

“Can you imagine how a mother must feel looking for her son here?” asked Kalmykova, 45, the chairwoman of the Mothers Committee in Kamyshin who had traveled with Kadashnikova 15 hours by bus to help search for Vasily. “She comes with a hope that she will find him and bury him--and a hope that he is still alive. They go out of their minds once in a while. It’s an emotional test a normal human being cannot endure.”

While the two mothers studied the videotape of corpses upstairs, soldiers in the basement prepared remains for forensic examination.

One of the soldiers’ jobs is to remove tissue from leg bones so doctors can estimate the height of the dead soldiers. In a small, windowless room, rows of skulls that have been boiled clean sit on shelves waiting for identification.

“Even though it’s emotionally difficult, at least we’re doing something useful,” Pvt. Alexander Tomilin said as he scraped the flesh from a thighbone onto a scrap of cardboard littered with cigarette butts.

Russia’s unidentified war dead are kept frozen in 12 refrigerated train cars on the outskirts of the city. When a family member identifies a corpse on the video, it is thawed overnight for viewing.

The day after Kadashnikova found Vasily in the video, she went to the morgue and nearly fainted when she saw the body. But she immediately recognized her son’s face, the small scar on his neck, his chipped front tooth and the moles on his chest.

The lab’s experts had no doubt it was her son, but to make sure they ran blood tests, compared his fingerprints with his mother’s and matched photos taken before and after his death.

“If a person has been called up and died for the state, the state has to bend over backward to give him a name and return him to his family,” Shcherbakov said.

The summer before the Chechen war began, Vasily dropped out of college to get married and was immediately drafted. He was 20. He was very nearsighted, so his commander made him a flamethrower operator--where pinpoint accuracy would not be a necessity.

“He was wearing spectacles as thick as your finger,” his mother said. “He was half-blind. How could they send him to the slaughter?”

The coffin containing his corpse was shipped home to Kamyshin, and he was buried a week after his mother identified the body. “For as long as I live, I will reproach myself for not having found him earlier,” she said. “My life is finished now.”