Photo: Instagram, edited by Kevin Rothrock.

Three years ago, Olga Borisova decided to join the St. Petersburg police force. Eighteen years old and, by her own description, a petite, fashionable young woman, she wasn’t your average cadet.

After a little more than a year, she quit, and has since become an active member of the Russian democratic opposition.

Earlier this month, Borisova wrote for the website Batenka.ru about her experiences as a police officer.

RuNet Echo is publishing her text, translated into English, in three parts. This is the final installment. You can read her full story here in Russian.

March 2014 came along, and I left the city for a TsPP (professional training center). When I got there, the men in charge made my drunk, insecure bosses look like loving parents.

Future cops from all over the city are made on the parade grounds. You’ve got to look sharp. The man in charge walks up and down the line with his hands behind his back. They assign you courses and they put you into a squad. You get a schedule of classes. On the one hand, the first day is a lot like the first day of school. Everyone looks good, and everyone is a bit nervous. On the other hand, it’s probably what the first day in the army looks like, too. They select the squad leader from the more experienced staff. Our leader was a man named Vitya. He was plump as a pastry.

The whole experience was pretty fun. There was flirting and there were flings. You made friends and passed notes in class. It was all like being in school. Police academy. Firearms training, drill instruction, tactics in maintaining public order, physical training, legal training, medical training, psychological training. In psychology, we once watched the film “The Major” with Yuri Bykov. Some future riot police officer brought it in on a flash drive.

Morning formation, daytime formation, and evening formation. Lunchtime formation. Marching in lockstep. If somebody in the squad “stepped” badly, the whole squad could be left to march until eight in the evening. That’s how they developed discipline.

Don’t ask questions. Just take orders.

You’re not allowed to paint your nails. You’re not allowed to wear jewelry. Once, I showed up to formation with long press-on nails painted aqua blue. Then the course officer somehow noticed me, a short woman four rows back, as if he could sense my panic.

“Junior Sergeant Borisova!”

“Present!”

“Step forward!”

“Yes sir!”

Coming to the front of the formation and marching two steps forward, like they taught us, I turned and faced the squad.

The colonel then walked up to me, grabbed my hand, and showed my manicure to everyone in class, saying “What is this?!”

The whole class waited to hear what my punishment would be.

I didn’t flinch, making “big eyes,” I turned to him and said, “But, comrade colonel, it’s the color of the uniforms.”

I watch as a hundred police cadets tried to contain their laughter. The colonel was in a good mood, and he liked my joke. He smiled and said, “I expect those to be gone by tomorrow.” And I answered, “Yes sir.”

But there were also times when he spent a half-hour chewing out somebody in front of everyone for one little mistake in their uniform. Showing everyone who’s boss.

And so, well after all your classes had ended, you spent 40 minutes standing still, in melting heat or freezing cold, and you wait for the colonel to finish his ego trip, so you can go home.

During my training, one of the cadets lost his mind. He was living in the barracks and one day he just didn’t get out of bed and come to class. First, the squad and even the squad leader tried to rouse him. Then the colonel came. And then the center’s director. But even then, the guy just stayed in his bed silently, staring up at the ceiling. They took him to a hospital, and then to a mental ward. They dismissed him for health reasons, and now he’s registered with a psychiatrist.

His story turned out to be pretty cliché, too: his father was a police officer, and he insisted that his son follow in his footsteps, to keep up the family trade. The guy had no wish to be in the academy. In our class on tactics in maintaining public order, he got four straight D’s. He worried that he wouldn’t live up to his father’s hopes, but being a cop wasn’t the life he wanted for himself.

I liked the practical exercises in firearms training the best. I was a good shot.

Once the colonel-instructor looked at my target, and called to the riot police cadets, who liked to flaunt their skills more than anyone, and he said, “Look over here and learn something, boys!”

Apart from being able to handle a weapon and knowing the necessary laws and regulations, the most important professional skill you’re taught is obedience. I was struck by how they rewarded the dumbest guys who couldn’t recite a single criminal statute, just because they were loyal to the bosses—for ratting out other cadets, for being ready to carry out any order, for “offering to be of service.”

Classes go for four months, then there are final exams, then you take the oath, and poof now you’re a certified cop. And you head back to your own precinct.

In the meantime, a lot of good people had left. But there were still some, like my partner Andrei, who never took a bribe, who did his work honestly, but the captain saw him as weak and he saw himself as strong, taking every opportunity to humiliate him. I worked with Andrei most of all. We’d talk often, and I’d ask him—a 23-year-old young man, who’d aged nearly a decade after just five years on the force—why he put up with it all.

“Eh, big deal. That’s the cost,” Andrei told me.

That was the moment I understood that “professional deformation” isn’t just developing the habit of noticing anyone walking around with open cans of beer (I still can’t turn it off); it’s also learning to “swallow” personal injustices and later injustices aimed at others. Those who don’t learn to swallow it don’t last long. And [President Medvedev’s] police reforms, because they added to the number of inspections, gave cops like my boss even more levers for filtering out the “defiant” ones.

To summarize, here’s the conclusion I drew two years ago: the people on the force can be divided into two categories: rats and wimps.

My story in the police, which lasted one year and three months, ended with my realization that I didn’t want to become a wimp. Many people observe the injustices perpetrated by the authorities, but too many people don’t understand how much injustice goes on inside the system itself on a daily basis.

So I quit.

***

Two years passed, and I found myself in Montenegro, working on an art project together with my friend Masha Alekhina [of Pussy Riot]. By now, I had some experience doing election work for the opposition; I’d helped with dozens of trials against opposition activists and artists; I’d put together my own political art performance; and I’d helped organized a signature campaign to help my friend in the opposition get on the ballot.

I stepped onto the balcony, and fired up my iPhone screen. I had a new message on Vkontakte. It was from “Sweetie.”

“Olya, please forgive me for everything. If you’re ever in Petersburg, come visit, and I’ll tell you the news about how I’ve got my own office now. They got rid of the precinct chief, and now it’s that other one. And remember Yulia from criminal investigations? They’ve brought two charges against her. It’s half her own fault, but, you understand, I can’t discuss the details here.”

I looked at the screen and saw that there was still more.

“Every day, I go to bed and think that today there was a little less bad than good. Of course, every day doesn’t turn out that way, but still. And if you’re mad at me for any reason, I’m sorry,” he wrote.

“I don’t get offended that easily,” I answered, and I dropped the phone back into my pocket.

This text was translated from Russian by RuNet Echo’s Kevin Rothrock. Read the first installment here and the second here.

Source: A Russian ‘Lady Cop’: Part Three · Global Voices

Photo: Instagram, edited by Kevin Rothrock.

Three years ago, Olga Borisova decided to join the St. Petersburg police force. Eighteen years old and, by her own description, a petite, fashionable young woman, she wasn’t your average cadet.

After a little more than a year, she quit, and has since become an active member of the Russian democratic opposition.

Earlier this month, Borisova wrote for the website Batenka.ru about her experiences as a police officer.

RuNet Echo is publishing her text, translated into English, in three parts. This is the first installment. You can read her full story here in Russian.

“Remember, you don’t have holidays. Holidays aren’t for the police.”

They gave me a uniform, and I stopped coming to work dressed in new Reeboks and a pink jacket. My dad drove me to the warehouse where I was issued my uniform. I’d never have been able to carry back home all those things myself. It was all on iron hangers that were ice-cold to the touch.

There was a parade uniform, a winter uniform, and a summer uniform. Dark blue. My favorite color. I ended up having to buy a lot myself at the commissary. (They didn’t make an extra small for police officers.) I brought it all home. I tried on the “vole”—the patrol-guard uniform: a dark-blue shirt, pants, and ankle boots. I took a picture of myself, posted it on Instagram, and wrote, “Hiya.”

“VODKA AND ORANGE JUICE, WELCOME TO THE FORCE, YOUS,” the section commander told me. When someone got their first paycheck, they had to buy everyone drinks.

They called the two-story patrol-guard building “base.” On the first floor, there was just a watchman. On the second, there were offices and a large hall, where we presented our reports about completed assignments. There was also a rec room with a green leather couch and a refrigerator. People brought oatmeal and purée from home. The main thing people did there was drink and have all kinds of parties.

Sergeant Valya used to go around in denim miniskirts and she drank a lot. She was something of an assistant manager there. She gave me my pair of handcuffs, my rubber stick, and my service book. The stick attaches to the belt on your waist, but the stick was so long that it looked pretty ridiculous on someone my height. It almost dragged on the ground. I had to go to the commissary myself and buy one a little shorter.

So I became a junior sergeant. There were two gold bars on my uniform’s shoulder straps. The police academy admits cadets every three months, so you just start working, if you’ve finished basic training, but admission isn’t yet underway.

When you’re just starting out, you’re very shy. A representative of law enforcement should, I thought, display a certain severity. But I didn’t have it.

“Police Junior Sergeant Borisova, your documents,” my partner Andrei would say, teaching me how to address people. “Now your turn. You’ll get it.” I imagined that I was playing some role.

“OLYA, YOU’RE A COP. YOU’RE A COP,” I told myself, and maybe thanks to some experience in theater, it worked.

“You are committing an administrative offense,” I said as confidently as possible, moving on to the next happy group of people drinking beer in the subway.

You’ve got to grasp that you have the right to demand things legally; you have the right to detain people. Now you are a representative of the authorities. Time passes and you get used to it. You start to feel more confident. You feel a duty to “maintain order” not just at work, but in your private life, too.

I wasn’t afraid to walk around outside at night: I knew all the “boys in blue” who were working the various beats, and I knew that at any moment I could call them. I knew that I wouldn’t be without protection.

I think the moment you put on the uniform and feel the authority, that’s when the “professional deformation” starts. They can make you work overtime, and you get used to the idea that you have to do it. You can be standing outside at your post in the rain, feeling like a stray dog, but you keep working, putting up with all of it, because that’s what you’ve got to do.

Patrol officers go down into the subway to warm up.

“I swear to endure the hardships associated with law-enforcement service, to be an honorable, brave, and vigilant member of the force, and to safeguard all state and official secrets.” You knew where you were going.

If you work the day shift, you report to your unit at 7:30 a.m., and change into your cop uniform. Then everyone goes together to headquarters, arriving by 8 a.m., where you retrieve your service weapon. The captain then reads out a summary of the previous night’s patrols, while you take notes in your service book. Overnight, somebody stole a bike, so you write down the color, the bike’s model and series, the full name of the person who filed the police report, and the case number. Then everyone is dismissed, and you head for your station, or your beat. You can take lunch whenever. When you take lunch, you jump on the radio and tell the other on-duty officers. Every police station is linked to its own routes and there are clear boundaries.

Finally, you make it to your precinct. There it is—your territory where you’ve been charged with maintaining the public order.

Then some drunk in custody, or better yet a minor brought into the station because he was caught smoking in school, walks up and says, “Cops are shit. You should all be burned.”

I can’t even count how many times I heard people tell me, “Hey you, bitch, you got nothing better to do?”

If you work “on the ground” (meaning, if you’re working outside), you represent the police and are its very face. From talking to you, people will form their opinions about law enforcement. And I liked being an exception for some people. I was never rude to people in police custody, even when they said to my face that I should be set on fire for being a cop.

Sometimes, you stand outside in the rain for 14 hours, and then you go inside a store to get warm, because you’ve lost feeling in your hands and your nose from the cold. You’re ready to curse everything to hell, but then somebody smiles at you, and thanks you for helping them with directions to some place. And things become easier again.

We would go into the subway to warm up, rubbing the blood back into our feet, while sitting on the stairs, like a bunch of bums. I didn’t have any children waiting for me back home, but those who did explained that their mom or their dad had the same kind of work.

On New Year’s, May Day, International Women’s Day, yes and even the Day of the Police, I was working at the station. In moments like that, you remember why you took the job. You remember what it’s all for. And it’s not the uniform, or the ability to make “lawful demands” of people. It sounds corny, but the truth is that I was there because it brought me pleasure to help people.

I drank a lot of Nescafe “3-in-1” coffees and ate a lot of muffins. There was a little store that had pastries just outside my precinct, which was tucked away in a typical Petersburg courtyard.

Nearby there was a subway station that was a big thoroughfare for people—especially non-locals. In the middle of the day, guys would often come around and park somewhere around the corner and start “earning some dough.” They’d check the documents of anybody who didn’t look Slavic. If they saw anything that looked fake, they put the person in the back of their patrol car.

“No sweat, buddy. Now you’re going home. Where ya from? Tajikistan? Wanna go home? No? Well what are we gonna do, then? You got any suggestions?”

Later, one of these “cops” told me, “My little Marina has a bday coming up, and I’ve got to get her something, but payday isn’t anytime soon.” They thought Andrei, my older partner, who never took any bribes, was simply no good at the job.

You’ve probably never seen how cops cry.

With every day on the force, I came to realize that there was even less justice within the police than there is on the streets. I saw how they abuse both the honest and the dishonest cops simply “because they could.” It was a display of intoxicating power. It’s the opposite of how they lure you in, and smile so you’ll stay. There aren’t enough staff, they say. “There’s a shortage.” Someone is on vacation leave. Another person is taking sick time. Somebody’s on maternity leave.

The head of my unit was a 27-year-old senior lieutenant who we called “Sweetie.” He had this nickname on Vkontakte and among the staff sergeants, who all hated him. I heard a story about how, just a few months after his son was born, he burst into a bordello completely drunk, and lost all his documents in the mess. Afterwards, Sweetie started to “jerk me off”—that’s a term in the police. It means he started criticizing everything I did.

Once, after a station inspection, he ripped into me about the loose stitching on my service book. (Issuing stitched service books, incidentally, is the sergeant major’s job.) He claimed that I undid the threading myself. Then he left, and I went out back with a colleague and started crying, not understanding why he was yelling at me.

After one of these encounters, I called the senior lieutenant a piece of shit in the presence of his assistant. Naturally, he reported me. And that evening I got a phone call from a not-very-sober senior lieutenant, who was trying to understand why he was a piece of shit. I told him that I didn’t understand why he behaved the way he did. “You’re not supposed to understand anything,” he answered. “You’re supposed to take orders.”

“Why have you detained so few people?”

“Because there’s no quota system in Russia.”

For an answer like that, they’ll cite you for a broken locker in the next inspection, and the next thing you know a report is sitting on the senior lieutenant’s desk. A couple of reports like that, and it’s “goodbye, duty to the Motherland.” Because there’s no quota system in Russia.

Other than the usual arrests, like detaining somebody in the subway for walking around with an open can of beer, there was one time I took part in a controlled purchase. It was a methadone prostitute named Katya with a decent sense of humor. We moved in and detained her just as she dug out the “stash.” Then she decided to “phone a friend” [and snitch on her supplier]. She didn’t do any time, and a couple of months later her kidneys gave out and she died.

There was also one time when we rescued an elderly sick woman who’d fallen out of her walker and lost consciousness inside her locked apartment.

And there was another time when we responded to a fire alarm, cordoning off a building. They evacuated the burning building, and it was our job to make sure that nobody got past the police tape. Don’t let anybody in, where it’s dangerous. I saw a woman begging to be let across. She was nearly blind, and she kept crying, “My dog is still in there. I need to go back for her.” She started writhing around hysterically, and begging on her knees. We needed to calm her down, so I decided to find out what kind of dog it was. It turns out it was a dachshund—a brown one. So I went inside behind the tape and Tanya the scared dachshund lept into my arms, and I returned her to her owner.

There was one time we couldn’t save a man. He’d taken out a big loan for his business, and then he couldn’t pay it back. He wrote a note and went out onto the stairwell balcony, hopping the fence. We tried to talk him down “from below” with a megaphone. I wasn’t there, but I followed it on the radio. I listened to a conversation between two on-duty officers:

“So what’s going on over there?”

“We’re talking.”

“Got it.”

Twenty minutes later, I heard this:

“Now what’s going on?”

“He jumped.”

His wife is still paying off his debts. In the police report, his suicide was recorded as “fell from a great height.”

Source: A Russian ‘Lady Cop’: Part Two · Global Voices

Photo: Instagram, edited by Kevin Rothrock.

Three years ago, Olga Borisova decided to join the St. Petersburg police force. Eighteen years old and, by her own description, a petite, fashionable young woman, she wasn’t your average cadet.

After a little more than a year, she quit, and has since become an active member of the Russian democratic opposition.

Earlier this month, Borisova wrote for the website Batenka.ru about her experiences as a police officer.

RuNet Echo is publishing her text, translated into English, in three parts. This is the first installment. You can read her full story here in Russian.