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The particularly horrible thing the Russian army did [in Chechnya] was the 'Slon', Russian for 'The Elephant' from the Soviet issue gas mask which ha… - John Sweeney
" "The particularly horrible thing the Russian army did [in Chechnya] was the 'Slon', Russian for 'The Elephant' from the Soviet issue gas mask which has a corrugated tube hanging down from the face mask to the filter which looks like an elephant's trunk. They would tie a Chechen captive's arms behind his back, place him on the chair, fix 'The Elephant' over his face, unscrew the filter and then squirt CS gas up the tube so the victim would start to drown in his own tears, vomit and snot. One Chechen victim told me for our BBC Radio 5 documentary, Victims of the Torture Train: 'Once the gas mask was on, they would choke you, so you were gasping to breathe. And they would squirt CS gas down the breathing hole. It was so bad just the sight of the gas mask in the room would make people confess to anything'.
Imagine my horror when I went to a police station in newly liberated Kherson in Ukraine twenty-two years later which had been used as a torture chamber. And there, in the basement, was an Elephant gas mask, without the filter.
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About John Sweeney
John Sweeney (born 7 June 1958) is a British investigative journalist and author who has worked for The Observer newspaper and for the BBC's Panorama television series.
Also Known As
Alternative Names:
John Paul Sweeney
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Additional quotes by John Sweeney
What was supposed to be a safety test at the number four reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in April 1986 was the sickest of jokes. The RMBK reactor was the Soviet solution to big oil prices. But it had a series of horrible design flaws. It couldn't tell its operators what was really happening in its guts. Operators could turn a valve by moving a helm-sized wheel and not know whether this would make things more or less dangerous. And the designers' safety test could could lead to a disastrous chain reaction which boiled the nuclear kettles. That had happened eleven years before in 1975 in Soviet Leningrad, now St Petersburg, when Putin was just starting his career inside the KGB in his home city. The secretive Soviet state covered up the huge leak of radiation. The exposed population were not told of the danger. The accident was not reported in the media. The Ministry of Medium Machine Building blamed the accident on poor construction, not terrible design. The commission investigating the incident made several recommendations. None were implemented. No one complained because no one knew. Welcome to the Soviet Union.
What was the value to the West of Ceausescu's dissent from Moscow's diktat? Was it of inestimable worth? Or was it, in fact, a marginal propaganda gain of little real substance? Ceausescu was an irritant to the Russians, but they never felt threatened by him. They did march their troops up and down near the Romanian border when Ceausescu was visiting China in 1971; but they invaded Czechoslovakia when the Prague spring got out of hand. The difference is clear. Dubček challenged the communist system. Ceausescu never did. He was not, then, a serious 'enemy of my enemy'. The West misread the cards.
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