A SPOTTY moon face appeared at my car window. "Lady, can you spare 2,000 roubles (about 25p) for bread?" From his padded khaki jacket, I realised the speaker was serving in the Stroibat, the infamous construction unit of the Russian army.
What luck. I had long wanted to talk to one of these lads but whenever I saw them digging holes in the road, they were always being supervised by their officers. In Russia, only prisoners have fewer rights than the boys of the Stroibat. They are the lowest of the low.
The Stroibat takes conscripts who cannot be trusted to bear arms for the motherland. So they are given shovels instead. Mostly they are young men who have already managed to acquire a criminal record. A few are conscientious objectors who have insisted on their constitutional right to an alternative to military service. But Russia still does not pay much attention to its constitution and the army takes them anyway.
Although they do not wear chains around their ankles, they are virtually slaves. You see them being transported around Moscow in green open trucks marked "people", just in case you thought they were cattle. Russian television recently ran a report about Stroibat boys who were so desperate for cigarettes that they were offering themselves as male prostitutes outside the Ministry of Defence. The Russian press has also reported that lads from the construction unit have been used to build luxury villas for corrupt generals, who have siphoned off funds intended for housing for the lower ranks.
Now here was my chance for an uninhibited chat with a Stroibat boy. I rolled down my window and asked the spotty youth for an interview. "I'll have to consult my mate," he said and walked off to a kiosk where another conscript was looking longingly at the drinks. After a little hesitation, they waved me over. I bought them a bottle of vodka and some cigarettes and we went and sat on a climbing frame in a children's playground nearby.
"Are you a spy?" asked the spotty lad's friend, a gangly youth with a wolfish grin. "No, just a journalist who is interested in how Russians live." "Well then, you can call me Alexander. He's Boris. These are not our real names, of course."
The boys, both 18, said they came from the same Kursk region of central Russia, although they had not known each other until fate brought them together in the Stroibat. As teenagers, they had been in trouble with the law. "The excesses of youth," Alexander said, grinning. And so they had no chance of doing their military service in a more elite unit.
"But actually, it's OK," Boris said. "There is no risk of us going to Chechnya or another war zone. With luck, we'll come out of the army alive." He added that there was less bullying in the Stroibat than in more prestigious units. "We fight amongst ourselves sometimes, but mostly we are friends. We are the dregs, so we stick together.
The youth said they had slipped away for a few minutes from a construction site where they were working behind the Moscow Zoo. Each day they were brought in from their barracks on the edge of the city to do hard labour for the builders. "It's going to be fancy offices for important people," Alexander said. "Luzhkov (Yuri Luzhkov, the energetic Mayor of Moscow) is financing it."
But the Stroibat boys are given only pocket money - 18,000 roubles or just over $3 a month - for their work. They laughed in embarrassment when I asked about the television report of male prostitution but admitted that they regularly begged.
"I cannot say we are hungry," Alexander said. "We get ragout with cabbage every morning and buckwheat porridge at night, but there's no variety and we're always dying for a smoke."
Gen Alexander Lebed had tried to frighten President Yeltsin with talk of the Russian army being on the brink of mutiny. But rebellion seemed to be the last thing on the minds of Boris and Alexander. They just wanted to survive the 18 months left of their two«MDBO» «MDNM»year service. Alexander said: "Before we were conscripted, we split up with our girlfriends. It's the best way, so you have no longings. Life narrows down. You live from one meal to the next."
Are they learning any skills in the Stroibat? "No, it's a waste of time," Boris said. Is the army making men of them? "As we say in Russian, only the grave will straighten you out," Alexander said, laughing. What are their ambitions? To go back to the Kursk region, to find work.
They are lowly now and their prospects for the future are not much brighter. But lest fortune smiles, the Stroibat boys will always be at the bottom of the pile.