Dear CCI Readers,
Regarding the article we posted, “Poll claims 10% of Russians have been tortured by the State,” we’ve had a large number of responses to this piece from Americans and Russians alike. None of them give the poll any validity at all.
The response below is from a Russian-American reader. I assume you will find it interesting. It underscores how dangerous it is for people to use one or a few words out of context to create a case of noxious slander. Millions of ordinary readers believe this disinformation, since they have no facts with which to judge. When propagandist writers are permitted or encouraged to write such pieces, it goes against everything our Founding Fathers intended for our nation.
I seriously question whether the Levada Center gave the information in this particular form and think it was more likely the twisting of words by the UK’s Independent, Moscow Times and the RFE/RL, who have been anti-Russia and propagandistic for decades. The Levada Center in the past has been more fact-based than this article. Thank you Igor Brusil!
Sharon Tennison
Center for Citizen Initiatives
Igor Brusil’s response to Sharon’s email, followed by the Levada Center’s reply to Igor’s inquiry into what was meant as “torture” in the context of that survey:
Dear Sharon,
I am responding to your recent post (or a re-post) regarding the most recent pole by Levada Center in Russia. Since Russian is my native language, I read the “report.” I put the “report” in quotation marks because it is not a report – it is an opinion piece, where numbers obtained in a survey are mixed with opinions of the authors (for which no authoritative support is cited).
The 10% torture figure probably comes from the following: according to the report, 356 individuals (out of 3447 total respondents) said they had been tortured.
I looked for the definition of “torture” in that report and found none. What I did find was a reference (several paragraphs on page 44) to what the authors of the report seem to regard as “torture.” According to the authors, “torture” may include verbal abuse (the most frequently cites type of “torture” according to the authors), “direct violence or threat of direct violence,” as well as “threats, blackmail and extortion.” That is what the author appear to mean by “torture” in the context of that report.
The danger of the headline “10% of the Russians are tortured by their law enforcement” is that the American public probably has a different perception of the word “torture.” To us, it likely conjures up bloody images of needles stuck under finger nails, sleep deprivation, broken bones, etc. A lewd, obscene or denegrating remark by a cop, a demand for a bride by the prosecutor, or threat by blackmail would probably not count as “torture” in the US. But it does, apparently, to the authors of the report.
So, how many Russians get really beaten up by their law enforcement, and how many “get away” with an obscenity or a demand for a bribe (both are viewed as “torture”)? The report does not break down “torture” into individual types of it.
The devil, as always, is in the details.
With kind regards,
Igor
IGOR A. BRUSIL, Esq.
The Brusil Law Group, Ltd.
The Levada Center’s summary of responses to Igor’s inquiry:
Dear Sharon,
Yesterday and today I received three emails from the individuals involved in the Levada Center’s survey on torture. These emails clarified what was meant as “torture” in the context of that survey. However, it became clear to me that the key question – “what exactly happened to you that you consider to have been torture” – was not answered by the survey. In fact, such a question was not even posed to the responders.
First, according to Levada Center, it approached the survey from the standpoint of “torture” as this term is defined in the UN Convention Against Torture, which may be found at https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/cat.aspx. In that document “torture” is defined in Article 1 as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.”
Second, it appears that another, more expansive, understanding of “torture” was at play, as described on page 44 of the Levada report. According to page 44, “torture” includes verbal abuse, threats of extortion and other non-physical acts, as well as threats directed at third persons.
Third – and more important – is that those respondents (all 356 of them), who said they had been “tortured” relied on their own understanding of torture. Even more interesting is that Levada did NOT ask those 356 individuals what exactly happened to them that the respondents regarded as “torture.”
I find it curious that those 356 individuals could not even agree on what acts constitute torture. For example, as shown in Table 32 on page 56 of the report, of those “tortured” respondents only 54% regard the use of electrical shock, wet towels and cellophane bags as torture; 73% regard acts like “rape and physical violence that leads to trauma” as torture; and 41% regard verbal abuse as “torture.”
Considering that there may have been up to three understandings of torture at play (one – UN Convention, two – explanation on page 44, three – whatever the respondents thought), the study would have been stronger, in my view, if Levada had asked its respondents to list specific acts of their alleged torture and then applied the same definition of torture to those acts. However, as the survey stands now, it suggests that about 10% of those who had “a conflict” with law enforcement subjectively regard at least some of the acts of law enforcement as torture, but we do NOT know what those acts are.
You may print my initial comment on this survey and follow it up with this summary of the responses I have received from Levada. I think that any intelligent analysis of a survey requires that we know the survey’s methodology and assess its validity in light of the limitations of the methods used.
Kind regards,
Igor
IGOR A. BRUSIL, Esq.
The Brusil Law Group, Ltd.
Natylie’s Place
July 4, 2019
By Natylie S. Baldwin
On June 26th – 27th, the western-owned Moscow Times, The Independent (UK), and the U.S.-government funded RFE/RL all published articles about a poll put out by the independent (i.e. western funded) Levada Center claiming that 10 percent of all Russians have been tortured by Russian authorities.
I’m not suggesting that Russia is Candyland or that police there don’t abuse their authority. I’m aware that there are problems in their criminal justice system – as there are in many other nations, including in the west. If the claim would have been that 10 percent of all prisoners in Russia had been tortured, it would have certainly been in the realm of the plausible. But 10 percent of the entire population of Russia smelled fishy to me.
Now, I’m no math whiz, but I really can’t surmise how one can make the numbers work.
Russia has an overall population of just under 145 million people. 10 percent of that would equal just over 14 million people. It sounds like the Levada poll is claiming that 14 million Russians have been tortured. According to prisonstudies.org, just over a half million Russians (552,188) were being criminally detained in Russia as of January of 2019. That figure includes pre-trial detainees and remanded prisoners. Additionally, the incarceration rate in Russia has been steadily declining since 2008.
It’s extremely unlikely that every Russian who has ever been detained in Putin-era Russia has been tortured, so considerably more than 14 million people had to have been detained by the authorities. Again, how does this add up?
Unfortunately, I don’t read Russian so I can’t read the original poll that was linked to. I’d be interested to know who was included in the sample population and how torture was defined, among other things.
If any readers have specialized knowledge of the Russian criminal justice system and can help me to understand how this could be accurate, please feel free to leave a comment or contact me.
From what I have studied of the Russian criminal justice system, this doesn’t fit the gradual trend in the Putin era of trying to clean up the system and provide more protections for prisoners and the accused. That’s not to say that more doesn’t still need to be done, but there is a trend toward improvement.
Until I see credible evidence making this add up, I’m going to have to consider this claim to be very dubious.