ARCHANGEL, Russia ARCHANGEL, Russia -- They were 20 years old, just setting out on their adult lives, when the darkness of the Russian legal system settled over them, intent on their destruction.

In the ensuing six years, the two young firemen and their forestry-student friend learned some terrible lessons: If the Russian police want you, they can get you; they will beat you and torture you until you confess; they are all-powerful; you are helpless, and only a miracle can save you.

While Russians have achieved a sort of democracy, many of their institutions remain despotic. One of the most menacing, the one that fills the average innocent Russian with dread, is the inaptly named justice system.

"God save us from this Russia abandoned by God, truth and conscience," says Anatoly Pristavkin, who observes the worst of the system as chairman of the Presidential Clemency Commission in Moscow. "Where are you heading, Russia, with so many scoundrels, thieves, beasts? I'm trying to find the answer. Where is Russia going?"

What happened to the three young men from Archangel offers Pristavkin only the gloomiest of answers about the evolution of Russian justice.

On a school day in October 1993, Galina Gavrilenko returned home from her job as a kindergarten teacher to find her two young daughters murdered.

Anya, 11, and Olesya, 9, apparently had surprised an intruder when they came home from school. They were bludgeoned to death. The horrified citizens of Archangel, a city of about 400,000 people 100 miles below the Arctic Circle, demanded action.

Fifteen days later, Gavrilenko's brother, Mikhail Yurochko, was arrested and charged with murder. Yurochko was a much-beloved young uncle to the girls and had lived with the family when the children were smaller. Their father was away at sea for long periods, and Yurochko stood in as surrogate father. From the beginning, Gavrilenko refused to believe that someone who had loved her girls so deeply could have killed them so brutally.

"When the investigation against my brother started, we realized they were making a mistake," Gavrilenko says, "but our attitude toward the police was still one of respect and hope that they would admit the mistake. We didn't realize how aggressive they were."

The police accused Yurochko, who owed a small debt, of breaking into the apartment to steal money. They said the girls stumbled onto the scene, so he killed them. His fingerprints were on a hammer -- no matter that his sister said he had used it to make a repair in the apartment. They found it easy enough to get a confession. "When they arrested me, the state of my soul was very bad," Yurochko says. "It was only a few days after the crime was committed. The tragedy affected me very much."

Yurochko was held for two weeks before his family knew what had happened to him. They were in agony, thinking he simply had disappeared. During that time, he says, he was questioned for hours at a time, deprived of sleep, threatened and beaten. He was not allowed to see a lawyer. The physical and psychological pressures were unbearable. He finally came to believe there was only one way to survive. He signed a confession.

Even that wasn't enough. The police decided they needed two more defendants, says Diederik Lohman, director of the Moscow office of Human Rights Watch, who later investigated the case.

"Witnesses said they had seen three men on the roof of the building that day," says Lohman. "And they thought one man couldn't have done it alone. They tortured Yurochko again."

Yurochko was put into a cell where police knew he would be raped, his sister says. Then, the police threatened to make the rape public. Yurochko signed a statement implicating two of his closest friends in the crime.

That's when the young men began the journey to death row, the dark heart of the legal system from which few witnesses have emerged.

Prison life in Russia is unremittingly harsh and punishing. The accused can spend years awaiting their day in court, warehoused in the notorious pretrial prisons.

The prisons are terribly overcrowded, often with 120 prisoners in a cell built to contain 30. The prisoners have to sleep in shifts, no one can ward off the lice, the prison gruel threatens starvation, and tuberculosis is at epidemic proportions.

Those who receive a life sentence rather than the death penalty -- which was liberally used until President Boris N. Yeltsin declared a moratorium three years ago -- say many convicts would gladly choose a bullet to the back of the head.

Sentence of death

Here, a life sentence means death arrives in slow-motion, say human rights advocates, with prisoners dying of tuberculosis and malnutrition instead of the swift action of a gun.

When he accused his friends, Yurochko says, he did not understand the enormity of the danger. He was sure no case could be made against them because he knew they weren't guilty. But the two newly accused men also confessed quickly, even though both had alibis.

Dmitri Yelsakov, 20, was at his job as a firefighter, and his chief testified he had not left the station that day. The mother of Yevgeny Mednikov, also 20 and a forestry student, said he was home with her.

The records reveal little forensic detective work. One child held a bit of hair; it was never tested, says Gavrilenko, their mother. Blood-stained sheets (one of the girls had run to her bed) were not collected until six weeks after the crime, she says.

The police weren't very interested in evidence, Gavrilenko says, because they didn't need it. The shoddy police work born of the Soviet era has not acquired the professionalism required by a democracy. Many police officers work as if under the old system where official accusation was proof enough of guilt.

'A lot of torture'

"This is a system where there's a lot of torture," Lohman says, "and it's a system where if you're accused you're almost always guilty. They don't want to admit a mistake."

The confessions were repudiated as soon as the men got lawyers. Evidence of torture was swept aside. It didn't matter.

After he recanted, Yelsakov says, he was sent to a cell where another prisoner, working for the police, drank vodka with him, trying to get him to reveal his guilt.

"When I didn't say anything, they began to beat me really badly," he says of his fellow prisoners, who were directed by the police. "They threw boiling water on me.

"I was taken to the hospital with bruises and burns. But the final documents they issued on my medical state ignored that. You know, the medical experts are on their [police] staff."

In Russia, the prosecutor is the chief officer of the court. The judge defers to him, and during Soviet times so did the defense attorney. The prosecutor and police work as a team and are almost never subjected to public scrutiny.

Russians have a great deal of contact with the police -- an astonishing 35 million living Russians have been jailed at one time or another -- about 24 percent of the population, Pristavkin says.

Yet public complaints about police methods are rare, and no one flinches when a suspected criminal gets a sound whack on the head or a swift kick to the stomach. Such protests are left to foreigners.

Several weeks ago, Mary Robinson, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, toured a pretrial prison in Moscow. After confirming widespread accounts of torture reported to her by U.N. investigators, she discussed the accusations with Russian officials.

"Another issue I raised was the serious problem of beatings and other forms of torture by police very soon after an arrest," she said, "usually trying to secure a confession."

Perpetrators of injustice

Pristavkin finds the enthusiasm for harsh treatment unsurprising, even though so many innocent people were put to death during Josef Stalin's reign of terror and even though so many others were unjustly imprisoned in later years. The hundreds of thousands of victims of injustice are outnumbered by the perpetrators of it, he says in a chilling comment on the Soviet inheritance.

"The tracks of the Stalin years were left in the souls of the prisoners in the camps and their relatives," he says. "But imagine. The camps were guarded by hundreds of completely different people. Remember the informers who sent the prisoners there. And those who built the camps. They hated those in prison and in the camps, and their numbers were in the millions."

On May 19, 1995, a judge and two citizen deputies, relying on the repudiated confessions, convicted Yurochko and Mednikov of murder. They were sentenced to death. Yelsakov got 15 years for helping them.

Sleeping on concrete

Conditions are considered better in the camps where sentences are served. But prisoners sentenced to death linger on in a wing of the pretrial prisons while their appeals are carried out. The worst of the punishment cells are reserved for them.

"There was no window in the cell," says Yurochko, a slight young man who finds it difficult to smile. "The air came through a narrow pipe. There was a [concrete] bench to sleep on. We used newspapers to make it drier.

"As for the food, of course the staff of the prison didn't spare food for those sentenced to death. What we got depended on the season. For about a month and a half when the administration didn't have money or didn't get around to buying food, we lived on a thin porridge. Sometimes we had an edible soup.

"I listened to the radio. There was nothing else to do. As any person would, I prayed to myself. I tried not to lose hope. This is the essence, perhaps, of a human being."

Mednikov had been the second of the three arrested. He and Yurochko had been friends since they were 10 years old. He had married just before the arrest. In his third year in prison, while on death row, his wife divorced him.

"Psychologically, it was very difficult on death row," says Mednikov. "As time went on, I got used to it. It was solitary confinement. I had nothing to do. I wasn't allowed to take any walks in 1995. From May 19 to Nov. 9, 1995, I never left the cell. In the death-row cells, there is no light at all."

He was allowed a visit from relatives twice a year. His cell was about 14 feet long. It was so narrow he could stand in the middle and touch both walls. He slept on a brick bench covered with concrete. At other times, he had a thin mattress placed on metal slats. Sometimes there was only rotten cabbage to eat.

"At first I felt despair and that my life was over," says Mednikov. "Gradually, I came back to my senses, and I began to hope."

Though all of Archangel thought them guilty, the men's relatives and lawyers believed in them and fought on. Eventually, they reached the Supreme Court with their appeals.

"They didn't expect we would fight," says Gavrilenko. "Many people are not strong enough to fight back. At the Supreme Court, the judge was eager to listen to our evidence. We had rights as [relatives of the] victims that we wouldn't have had as relatives of the accused."

In 1996, the Supreme Court vacated the convictions for lack of evidence and sent the cases back for investigation, giving prosecutors the opportunity to drop the charges. They refused.

"We don't have trials that acquit," says Yelsakov, the third defendant. "They started another investigation against us. One investigator was even promoted. During the first trial, he was a major. By the second, he was a colonel."

On Nov. 30, 1997, the court in Archangel convicted them a second time. Yurochko and Mednikov returned to death row.

'Slow, horrible death

The majority of death-row prisoners were terrified of life sentences and their promise of slow, horrible death, says Mednikov.

"They would rather be shot."

In April 1998, the Supreme Court vacated the verdict a second time.

By that time, the men had been in prison nearly five years. They saw daylight only when taken to court. But the Archangel police and prosecutor were not ready to let them out and kept them in jail while their lawyers argued that they could not legally be held unless another trial began immediately.

On July 9, 1998, Yurochko and Yelsakov were freed, though the case against them remained open. Mednikov stayed in his cell another year, tangled in technicalities. A few weeks ago, he, too, was released.

Yurochko emerged with tuberculosis and spent three months in the hospital. Today he is back at his job as a firefighter, trying to forget all that he has endured. He wishes he had the money for psychiatric counseling.

Hard, unhappy demeanor

Yelsakov went into perpetual motion, working incessantly. Today he owns a barbershop and a tailoring shop. Despite his success, there's something hard and unhappy about him. He sees a psychiatrist every day.

Mednikov, handsome, both soft-spoken and well-spoken, has been rendered impotent. His warm brown eyes have a vacant look, as if unused to freedom.

They are 26 years old, and those years in prison are lost to them forever.

In February, the Constitutional Court issued a decision prohibiting use of the death sentence until jury trials are available throughout the country. Because universal availability of jury trials is years away, the death penalty has been effectively banned for years to come.

But nothing has really changed in the system that arrests a person and consigns him to a life of hopelessness, misery and suffering, and Yelsakov can't imagine it will.

"The police have all the power," he says. "Citizens have no rights. It will take 200 years to change. The children are taught by their fathers."

Abdulamzhan Atabiyev, the prosecutor at his trial, dismisses all allegations of torture, mistreatment and miscarriage of justice.

"It is clear they are guilty," he says. "Unfortunately, the case had to be closed."