More than 400 Russian Policemen May Be Committing Suicide Each Year, Study Concludes

Paul Goble

            Staunton, January 6 – A study carried out by Volgograd State University and published in 2011 reported that from 200 to 430 Russian policemen may be committing suicide  annually (volsu.ru/upload/medialibrary/3d6/7_jggphmudmabgur.pdf), far above the number of deaths from this cause reported in the media.

            According to a new report by MBK’s Mikhail Shevelyov, only 56 suicides by policemen were reported in the media in 2019, a figure that he says represents a significant undercount because the interior ministry does not like to release information or give explanations and Rosstat does not maintain a count (mbk-news.appspot.com/suzhet/kolichestvo-suicidov-poli/).

            More generally, suicides are not something Russian officials like to talk about or that Rosstat keeps detailed records on.  The statistics agency’s most recent report on suicides in Russia was in 2017. In that year, it said there were 20,000 suicides in Russia; but Rosstat provided no breakdown on the background of those who took their own lives.

            The journalist cites the conclusion of Vladimir Vorontsov of the Police Ombudsman group that the two chief causes for suicides among police are overwork brought on by a shortage of personnel and the bureaucratic requirements of the job that give bosses a whip hand over their subordinates and limit the ability of police to work according to the rules.

            Maksim Pashkin, head of the Moscow policeman’s union, says that the authorities also try to keep silent about such things out of fear that if Russians read about problems of this kind on the force fewer of them will decide to become part of the law enforcement system (zona.media/article/2018/03/21/suicide).

            Sometimes, Shevelyov continues, police commanders simply do not report about these deaths at all; but on other occasions when there are too many in one place in too brief an interval of time as in Bashkortostan earlier in 2019 when ten officers killed themselves, commanders say the deaths had nothing to do with their work (ufa1.ru/text/health/66301084/).

            The 2011 study blamed conflicts between frontline officers and their bosses and failures in meeting goals for most of the suicides. It added that according to medical records, “only 16 percent” of policemen who killed themselves were suffering from psychological or psychiatric problems.