"Parents are terrified of receiving back not their child but a zinc coffin from Chechnya instead. They can get the same from a military base" where their children are serving as conscripts, the popular Moskovsky Komsomolets daily said.

Seven soldiers have been detained so far at the Chelyabinsk tank academy in the Ural mountains for beatings meted out during the New Year holidays that left 19-year-old Andrey Sychev fighting for his life and eight other conscripts seriously injured, military prosecutors said.

The conscripts had been victims of more senior soldiers acting "with the connivance of commanders and officers who failed to fulfil their duties," the prosecutors said.

The prosecutor's office said it had to overcome a code of silence among military officers in its investigation and criticised the defence ministry and army commanders for being slow to react to the incident.

"In more than 20 years of service I have never seen a more cynical or brazen crime against a military serviceman or more inhuman treatment by commanders of their subordinates," Russia's chief army prosecutor, Alexander Savenkov, was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying.

Sychev, a first-year conscript from the nearby Sverdlovsk region, was forced to crouch down for hours and repeatedly kicked, causing inflammation and gangrene in his legs and sexual organs, prosecutors said.

The conscript was in a "stable but serious" condition in hospital, Russian media said Thursday.

Meanwhile Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov ordered an inquiry into the incident and the deputy chief of Russia's general staff said the academy would be shut down.

"We will not hide anything," Ivanov was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying.

There was defiance however from the head of the academy, Viktor Sidorov, who told the Izvestia daily that "90 percent of what is being said now is not truthful."

"He was looked at by a doctor. There were no bruises. Sychev had some problem with his legs from before," Sidorov said.

The incident heightened attention by the media to a long-standing problem with Russia's vast army, which has struggled to adapt since the Soviet Union's collapse and is frequently accused of abuses within its own ranks.

"Victim of an older soldiers' party," ran the headline in Vremya Novostei, which called the incident "the latest major hazing scandal to hit the Russian army."

Newspapers reported that although Sychev had complained of pains in his legs after the beating, he received no medical aid until three days after the incident.

"It's a standard practice, it's how the older officers 'educate' the younger ones," Sychev's sister Marina was quoted as saying.

Human rights activists say widespread hazing practices -- known as "dedovshchina" ("rule by elders") in Russian -- cause a high number of peacetime deaths in Russia's armed forces and push many young men to do everything to avoid serving the required two years of conscript service.

Izvestia on Thursday said 16 soldiers had died as a result of hazing in 2005.

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