Issue #24/79, December 12 - 26, 1999  

It was the great Huey Newton who first noted that mainstream America didn't consider drugs a problem until the children of rich white people started getting addicted. These days the Oliver Stone generation thinks it's outgrown its prejudices and learned to see emerging social problems in monochrome-that we don't ignore the problems of the lower classes anymore. We here at the eXile would like to think that that's true. But a quick review of the way the bear trap story has been handled by American reporters in this city proves we still have a long way to go.

By now, almost everyone in town has heard the tragic story of Brett Merkerson, the newly-arrived U.S. Embassy Marine guard who was maimed last week when he reached his hand into a steel bear trap outside the Leninsky Prospekt

The trap that caught Merkerson: measured against a meter-stick

Metro station, while waiting on line at a kiosk for tickets to the upcoming David Copperfield magic show. Merkerson had been induced to lower his hand into the trap by the sight of an apparently-discarded copy of the Russian adult magazine "Mister Iks," which was opened to the centerfold and which the civic-minded marine had hoped to return to its owner. No sooner had he touched the magazine, however, than the apparently professionally-made steel hunting trap snapped shut just below the marine's shoulder. Despite heroic efforts by surgeons at the American Medical Center, Merkerson's arm as well as both of his legs eventually had to be amputated on order to preserve his life. He was later flown back to the States and is now recovering in the care of family physicians in his hometown of Anusburg, Pennsylvania.

The American press reaction to the Merkerson incident was one of universal shock and horror. In one article entitled "U.S. Protests Marine Trap Maiming," Baltimore Sun reporter Kathy Lally wrote that "...[Merkerson] was victimized, ultimately, by the innocent nature that failed to grasp on time the grim realities of life in a society still struggling to overcome a moral handicap caused by 70 years of socialist indoctrination." Fred Hiatt of The Washington Post, meanwhile, noted that "the bear trap incident came out of the blue as a shock and an embarrassment to a city and a country that were just beginning to recover its reputation internationally following last year's economic collapse." The Associated Press, meanwhile, ran a lengthy feature about the bear trap incident on its wire ("Copperfield Sends Condolences, Offers Benefit Show on Behalf of Stricken Marine", November 24) which described in detail the outpouring of American public sympathy for Merkerson but offered little in the way of background on the actual story.

The fact of the matter is that Russians have been dying and suffering serious injuries in crudely-set urban bear traps in huge numbers for more than a year now. The phenomenon first began in the provinces, specifically (according to most Russian press reports) with an incident in the Siberian town of Nakhodka almost two years ago, in which three prostitutes were caught in homemade traps at a bus stop early one morning. After the Nakhodka incident, there were isolated and apparently independently-occurring incidences of bear-trap maimings in late 1998 in Perm, Novokuznetsk, Kirov, and in two remote villages in rural Udmurtia. Reports started filtering into Russia around that time of widespread trap maimings in Western Ukraine; in one well-known incident, four members of the Lvov municipal Soviet were maimed in the space of one week in apparently-related trappings.

Since then, the problem has grown to epidemic proportions. According to Interior Ministry statistics, some 657 people in Russia were maimed (45 fatally) by bear traps in the first three months of 1999 alone. According to that first quarterly report, most of the traps were set in urban areas, particularly in those cities struggling with high levels of alcoholism and/or unemployment. By this past summer the Russian government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin, was appealing to the IMF for emergency aid to cope with the problem--to no avail. Current estimates place the total number of victims over a two year span at about 2,500, or roughly the same casualty rate Americans suffered in the early part of the Vietnam War.

Nonetheless, the American press roundly ignored the crisis until the Merkerson incident. Worse, not one of the major Western news outlets called attention to the many Russians who fell victim to the crisis before Merkerson's tragic trip to the ticket window last week. Only The Moscow Times, which noted dryly that "authorities said Merkerson's were not the worst trap injuries seen in Moscow this year," gave any hint that the phenomenon was anything but new in this country.

The Russian people have enough reasons as it is to distrust the Western presence in this country; they don't need one more. By no means is the eXile saying that we shouldn't all feel sorry for Brett Merkerson. We should. But if we want Russians to believe we see them as people, we have to show them that we feel sorry for them, too. And so far, we haven't.