The four men accused of carrying out Russia’s deadliest terror attack in decades appeared in a Moscow court on Sunday night bandaged and battered. One entered with his partially severed ear covered. Another was in an orange wheelchair, his left eye bulging, his hospital gown open and a catheter on his lap.
Many people around the world, including Russians, already knew what had happened to them. Since Saturday, videos of the men being tortured during interrogation circulated widely on social media, in what analysts called an apparent retaliation for the concert hall attack they are accused of committing last Friday, which killed at least 139 people and injured 180 more.
One of the most disturbing videos showed one defendant, identified as Saidakrami M. Rajabalizoda, having part of his ear sliced off and shoved in his mouth. A photograph circulating online showed a battery hooked up to genitals of another, Shamsidin Fariduni, while he was being detained.
How the videos began circulating was not immediately clear, but they were spread by nationalistic, pro-war Telegram channels that are regarded as close to Russia’s security services.
Though the goriest clips were not shown on state television, the brutal treatment of the defendants was made clear. And the decision by the Russian authorities to showcase it so publicly in court, in a way they had almost never done before, was intended as a sign of revenge and a warning to potential terrorists, analysts said.
In Russia’s recent history, videos of torture were not shown on state television, said Olga Sadovskaya of the Committee Against Torture, a Russian human rights organization.
“There were two intentions” to circulating the videos, Ms. Sadovskaya said. “First, to show people who could plan another terrorist attack what could happen to them, and second, to show society that there is revenge for all that people suffered in this terrorist attack.”
She and other analysts said the flagrant display of the tortured demonstrated something else: the extent to which Russian society has become militarized, and tolerant of violence, since the war in Ukraine began.
“This is a sign of how far we have gone with accepting the new methods of conducting a war,” said Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russia’s security services.
International surveys have shown that societies tolerate violence against people they perceive as the worst offenders, including terrorists, serial killers and perpetrators of violent crimes against children.
Nevertheless, Ms. Sadovskaya said the videos being aired on TV represented a new low for the Russian state.
“This shows that the state and authorities demonstrate that violence is acceptable, that they normalize the torture of a certain subject,” she said.
The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, declined on Monday to comment on the torture allegations during a briefing with journalists. But former President Dmitri A. Medvedev, who currently serves as the deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, said, “Well done to those who caught them.”
“Should we kill them? We should. And we will,” he wrote on Telegram on Monday. “But it’s more important to kill everyone involved” in the attack. “All of them: those who paid, those who sympathized, those who helped.”
Ivan Pavlov, a lawyer who used to defend difficult national security cases before being forced to flee Russia, said torture had long been used in terrorism and murder cases, mostly out of sight. Once the news about torture filters through prisons, he said, it lets “other people know that if you are accused of terrorism, the special forces will torture you. So it works like prevention.”
