Torture as an Administrative Procedurein Russian New-Empire
Violence in the ‘Russian World’ megaproject is not an aberration or a breakdown of discipline; it is a feature of the Sistema. The widespread reports of torture, sexual violence, and summary executions point to a systemic policy designed to break the will of the population, eliminate potential resistance, and enforce compliance with the new order. The infrastructure of violence is established almost immediately upon the occupation of new territory.
Investigations by international bodies and human rights organisations have documented that torture is applied systematically across all occupied territories. The term ‘torture chamber’ (kativnya) has become synonymous with Russian occupation administration. These facilities are not hidden anomalies but central nodes of local governance. The consistency of methods – electric shocks (often using field telephones or specialised stun batons), beatings with pipes and batons, mock executions, and sexual violence – across different regions (Kyiv, Kharkiv, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia) indicates a centralised directive or at least a standardised training and culture of abuse.
Russia’s effortless withdrawal from the European Convention against Torture in September 2022 revealed what decades of impunity had already demonstrated: torture functions not as a systemic failure but as a deliberate instrument of governance, deeply embedded in state practice from police stations to military units to penal colonies. This normalisation extends beyond institutional mechanisms into a broader cultural pathology where the population has internalised its own subjugation – accepting brutality as inevitable, even necessary – creating a society that paradoxically venerates the very apparatus that systematically dehumanises it, whether through hazing rituals (dedovshchina), prison hierarchies (vory v zakone), or the casual violence permeating everyday encounters with state authority.
