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BLAGOVESHCHENSK, Russia - In this town in central Russia, last Dec. 10 was a cold, snowless Friday opening the holiday weekend when Russia celebrates its constitution. The rights enshrined in that document, as well as many residents of Blagoveshchensk, were about to take a beating.
At 11 p.m., the main street, a long drag of crumbling apartment blocks and street-level stores, seemed eerily quiet to Anastasia Rozhenkova when she emerged from a friend's apartment. In the darkness, Rozhenkova, 19, hurried to a store to buy some cigarettes while her husband lingered over his farewells.
"From nowhere, people wearing black masks grabbed me and twisted my hands behind my back," Rozhenkova recounted in an interview. "They pushed me onto the ground and kicked me."
In those first moments, Rozhenkova said, she didn't know if she was being mugged by thieves or kidnapped by terrorists: "I was in shock, terrified." But as she was dragged to a nearby bus, her lip and nose swelling from the kicks, her calves and thighs burning from baton strikes, Rozhenkova realized she was not in the hands of bandits.
She had been arrested.
Between Dec. 10 and Dec. 14, hundreds of Blagoveshchensk residents were arrested and beaten by local police and masked special forces from the regional Interior Ministry, according to people and officials here. The sweep, designed to crack down on what the authorities said were assaults on police officers and a spiking crime rate in the town of 30,000 people, turned into a police riot.
The violence ranks among the most graphic illustrations of the failure of Russian police to embrace the rule of law since the fall of the Soviet Union, and the state's inability or unwillingness to impose it on them. The abuses have fueled a profound crisis of public confidence in the criminal justice system, at a time when the government of President Vladimir Putin seeks to galvanize citizens to fight terrorism, crime and corruption.
The events in Blagoveshchensk have drawn widespread condemnation, led to the dismissal of three senior police officers and a prosecutor and prompted local and federal investigations. Nine police officers have been charged with abuse of power.
"The necessity of conducting such an operation was not in doubt, but the way the operation was executed was really bad," said Ruslan Sharafutdinov, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry in the Republic of Bashkortostan, where the city is located. "What I mean to say is that they overdid it."
The regional prosecutor's office has accepted more than 200 complaints from residents and so far has found that 120 residents are "injured parties" entitled to legal redress, according to the Interior Ministry. Most of those detained, like Rozhenkova, were held for one night.
For human rights groups and legal scholars, Blagoveshchensk is unusual only for its scale and the fact that the regional Interior Ministry admitted to widespread violations. Every year, in huge numbers, Russians are beaten, tortured and sometimes killed by the police, according to reports by human rights and government agencies, opinion polls and revelations from high-profile cases.
According to a nationwide survey published this month by the Levada Center in Moscow, 71 percent of respondents said they didn't trust the police at all while 2 percent thought the police act within the law. That number approaches zero when people working in law enforcement and their families are factored out of those likely to have been surveyed.
In a separate poll this month by the Public Opinion Foundation, 41 percent of Russian respondents said they lived in fear of police violence.
"The violations are so gross and the problem is so deeply penetrated that it's going to take years to correct," said Vladimir Lukin, Russia's ombudsman and a former ambassador to the United States.
Police brutality extends well beyond the breakaway republic of Chechnya, where widespread human rights violations have been documented in 10 years of armed conflict.
In the Volga River city of Nizhniy Novgorod in 2002, for instance, Dmitry Ochelkov, 26, said police had covered his face with a gas mask with the air supply cut off, according to the human rights group Committee Against Torture, a U.N. body. Activists say this is a fairly common interrogation practice known as the "little elephant."
In the republic of Tatarstan in 2003, a number of juvenile offenders reported being submerged in water from toilets while others said they had rags shoved down their throats. And in Moscow last year, a man the police suspected was a terrorist was beaten so badly while in custody that his wife subsequently was unable to identify his corpse.
"Such cases are typical and widespread," said Olga Shepeleva, a lawyer at the Demos Research Center for Civil Society in Moscow, which monitors police abuse. "There is nothing exceptional about them."
Hard numbers on how many officers are charged with illegal use of violence are not publicly available; that category of offense is not among the crime statistics published by the Russian Interior Ministry. But violence and other criminal activity is on the rise among the 4 million police officials in Russia, according to federal officials.
"Between 2001 and 2004, the number of crimes amongst police rose hugely," Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov told a gathering of prosecutors in January. "Ordinary citizens know and feel the actual situation for themselves."
Public opinion surveys suggest that the problem is endemic.
According to three nationwide and three regional surveys conducted between the spring of 2002 and the summer of 2004, up to 5.2 percent of Russians have suffered violence at the hands of the police.
"The prevalence of abuse suggests that roughly 6.2 million Russian adults are victimized by police violence in a two-three year window," Theodore P. Gerber of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Sarah E. Mendelson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington wrote in a draft paper scheduled for publication this fall. "These numbers are in fact quite staggering and imply that police abuse is indeed widespread, even commonplace, in contemporary Russia."
Much of the abuse is driven by the need for confessions or testimony to support prosecutions that are otherwise lacking in evidence, human rights activists said.
"Our estimate, based on interviewing judges who hear cases, is that at least one-third of all convictions, and probably more, are based on evidence that was extracted using physical force," Kalyapin said. "Police can beat suspects in any country, but in Russia the problem is simply massive."
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