Tuesday
As Ukrainian forces liberate more villages and cities from the Russians, they continue to encounter mass graves and reports of torture, which takes my mind to Boris the Manskinner, from Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. A Stalinist agent battling the Japanese during World War II and after, Boris is one of the most frightening literary villains I have ever encountered. Like Putin, he uses terror as a weapon to ensure submission.
Before you read further, however, a warning: today’s post is not for the faint of heart.
We hear about Boris from Lieutenant Mamiya, who first witnesses the Russian’s brutality while on a scouting mission in Russia-controlled Mongolia during the war. Later, he encounters Boris again when interned in a Russian prison camp. During the first encounter, he watches Boris order one of his fellow Japanese comrades to be slowly skinned alive. He himself is thrown down a dry well and barely manages to escape alive.
Boris works for Lavrentiy Beria, an actual person who headed Stalin’s secret police and was a serial rapist and killer. For a while, all goes well for Beria and Boris, although they have to scramble after the war is over:
Stalin and Beria had to cook up their internal-conspiracy theory, covering up their own responsibility for having failed to predict the Nazi invasion in order their positions of leadership. A lot of people died for nothing while being cruelly tortured. Boris and his man were said to have skinned at least five people, then, and rumor had it that he proudly displayed the skiins on the walls of his office.
Ultimately, Boris is himself imprisoned for having tortured and killed the nephew of a high ranking Communist official. We learn that he “killed the man with torture, poking hot irons into every opening—ears, nostrils, rectum, penis, whatever.” Thanks to Beria, Boris is not hanged but rather sent to the same prison camp holding Mamiya. Given his fearsome reputation, Boris manages to seize control, after which he conducts a reign of strategic terror. One of Mamiya’s friends fills him in on Boris:
According to Nikolai (who was becoming increasingly reluctant to talk about anything), several Russians he knew had simply disappeared in the night. Officially, they were listed as missing or having been involved in accidents, but there was no doubt they had been “taken care of” by Boris’s henchmen. People’s lives were now in danger if they failed to follow Boris’s orders or if they merely failed to please him. A few men tried to complain directly to Party Central about the abuses going on in camp, but that was the last anyone ever saw of them. “I heard they even killed a little kid—a seven-year-old—to keep his parents in line. Beat him to death while they watched,” Nikolai whispered to me, pale-faced.
Speaking of kids, UNICEF estimated in August that close to 1000 Ukrainian children have died or been injured since the February invasion. And while shelling is probably responsible for most of these deaths, there are documented instances of children being raped and killed by Russian forces.
I don’t want to typecast all Russians here, and they are far from alone in committing war crimes. Murakami has a scene of a Japanese war crime (a Chinese prisoner is beaten to death with a baseball bat), and the United States has its own share of stories. The difference with Putin’s forces, however, is that barbaric cruelty appears to be a deliberate strategy, as opposed to an aberration. At the very least, we try and sentence American war criminals in the U.S. Armed Forces (including the man that Donald Trump praised and pardoned), whereas it appears that Russia encourages its soldiers to commit atrocities.
Boris the Manskinner, in other words, would feel right at home in the current conflict.