
Humans are nothing more than yet another resource,
like missiles, tanks and helicopters. When they are dead, they lose value.
So, just like with helicopters or tanks,
the Russian army is happy to leave them there. They don’t matter anymore.
[Romain Fathi]
Nearly one million Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded during the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation. The toll was taken from a study – relaunched by CNN in early June – published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a think tank in Washington, D.C. According to estimates, in line with assessments by British and American intelligence, the figure could reach one million this summer. According to the same study, “no Soviet or Russian war since World War II has come close, in terms of the mortality rate, to that in Ukraine.”
Of course, the first ones to pay the price for this carnage have been the Ukrainians, victims of war crimes and subjected daily to a surgical operation of annihilation that threatens their identity, the territorial sovereignty of their country, and their very existence.
We must not forget, however, that even in Russia, excluding mercenaries and those who voluntarily joined the so-called “special military operation”, many citizens have not really had the possibility of choosing, given the totalitarian nature of the Putin regime. For example, we can mention the conscripts sent to the front without training or equipment, or the citizens of the Far North and the Far East who have been attracted by financial benefits that can make a difference for the poorest communities and families and, secondarily, the North Korean prisoners and troops.
Putin’s “blatant contempt” for his soldiers, who are considered cannon fodder, is well known. It is more interesting, however, to outline the mechanisms of the construction of an ad hoc narrative, blessed by the Russian Orthodox Church and the State, which in recent years has tried to transform death for the homeland into a cult, a goal to be achieved in order to make life meaningful. As journalist and TV host Vladimir Solov’ëv, a well-known face of Putin’s propaganda, argued at the beginning of 2023, “life is highly overrated […] It is only worth living for something you can die for, that’s how it should be. We are fighting against Satanists. This is a holy war, and we must win it”. According to The Hill, after the propagandist’s speech, the guests in the studio, nodding in approval, recalled that Russians used to live day by day, but now they have “immaterial dreams” and “high goals,” namely war. Solov’ëv again: “Why fear what is inevitable? Especially when heaven awaits us. Death is the end of one earthly path and the beginning of another.”
In his essay The Last Show scholar Gian Piero Piretto highlights that
a new and worrying cult of death for the fatherland, very similar to the one based on the sacrificial deaths of the Soviet revolutionaries in the 1920s and even sadly evoking Nazi ideologies, has taken hold in today’s Russia. It is a petty attempt to justify the victims of the conflict and the mass recruitment operations of soldiers.
Furthermore, according to Piretto, the cult of death is also accompanied by the policy of denying deaths that leads the Kremlin to minimize the death toll among soldiers. This tactic serves not only in the pretension that everything is under control by denying death itself, but also for drastically reducing the compensation due to the families whose loved ones were killed at the front, resorting to the notification of “missing on the battlefield”.
The idea of “just deaths” has therefore returned in the Russian imagination and society, as opposed to the “useless and banal deaths of those who succumb to vodka or something else”. This is a concept that Putin has reiterated since the first year of the war during meetings with the mothers of the mobilized conscripts, whom he reminded that their sons’ lives were meaningless before going to war, inviting them to rejoice in their children’s heroic death.
According to Svetlana Stephenson, a professor of sociology at London Metropolitan University, these statements show Putin’s lack of understanding of Russian culture and tradition, because this concept is alien to the country’s culture, which portrays “the mother of a dead soldier as an inconsolably tragic figure”. Even during the Chechen wars, Stephenson again recalls, the right of mothers to try to save their children was recognized, and the respectful attitude shown at the time by the military authorities towards the Soldiers’ Mothers Committee is proof of this.
The concept of a mother rejoicing over the death of her son is taken from Nazi ideology, in which women are portrayed as procreators of children required by the state. According to Ksenia Turkova, a journalist and linguist,
The rector of the Church of the Great Martyr Varvara, Mikhail Vasil’ev [Editor’s note: Vasil’ev was killed in Ukraine in 2022], said that if women gave birth to more children, it would be easier for them to let them go to war against Ukraine. ‘By nature, the Lord has allowed every woman, in most cases, to be able to give birth to many children. If they did not resort to abortions, they would have more than one child. Then, it would not be so painful and terrible for them to part with him.’
This fascination with death and war, in a country whose civil society, between violence and repression, is now silenced, seems to find an unchallenged echo within the Putin apparatus. “War is victory, war is a friend, war is love”, as a middle-aged official defined it during a meeting aimed at young boys and girls. Back in 2022 Stephenson already noted that “the carnival of violence that for years has permeated the state-controlled Russian media has in recent months given way to a new tone of solemnity and calls for national heroism”; all accompanied by endless discussions by Putin’s propagandists on the destruction of cities in Ukraine or the use of nuclear weapons.
Even the Orthodox clergy have been blessing tanks for years now, while encouraging soldiers to defend their homeland with their lives.
According to Alexander J. Motyl, professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark, Russia has a long tradition of using uncontrolled violence and its own people as expendable pawns. This is demonstrated by the nation’s history: to name a few examples, just think of Muscovy expanding into Siberia, annihilating the local populations and their culture, or Imperial Russia adopting the same strategies in Belarus, Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and Central Asia. The birth of the Soviet Union led to the Gulag, the Holodomor in Ukraine, and the mass murders of the Stalinist terror.
The Putin era, which was inaugurated with the second Chechen war (which in the regime’s view was always an “anti-terrorist operation”), is no exception.
According to Alexander J. Motyl, professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark, Russia has a long tradition of using uncontrolled violence and its own people as expendable pawns. This is demonstrated by the nation’s history: to name a few examples, just think of Muscovy expanding into Siberia, annihilating the local populations and their culture, or Imperial Russia adopting the same strategies in Belarus, Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and Central Asia. The birth of the Soviet Union led to the Gulag, the Holodomor in Ukraine, and the mass murders of the Stalinist terror.
The Putin era, which was inaugurated with the second Chechen war (which in the regime’s view was always an “anti-terrorist operation”), is no exception.
According to Russian-American sociologist Dina Chapaeva, also cited by Piretto, contemporary Russia has returned to “forms of neo-medievalism (monuments and the cult of figures such as Ivan the Terrible) and a revaluation of the figure of Stalin. “This”, says Chapaeva, “is nostalgia for a class society, paternalism and terror as a form of government. Neo-medievalism denies the fundamental values of democracy and human rights.” Likewise, “Restalinization,” to use Chapaeva’s words, “has been and remains the cornerstone of Russian historical politics for the past fifteen years because of the enormous role that the myth of the Great Patriotic War has played in consolidating support for the regime in power”. Added to all this has been the constant appeal to an “idealized” and manipulated past and the need to revitalize imperial ambitions in a context of an increasing militarization of society.
As Adriano Dell’Asta, professor of Russian Language, Culture and Literature at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Brescia, recalls in his essay Russian Peace, in his speeches Putin regularly refers “to the power politics of Alexander III (with his idea of a Russia’s exclusively military greatness) as a model for his own government practice”, and referring to the theories of Ivan Il’in, who in the aftermath of Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Dell’Asta underlines, “made an apotheosis of National Socialism that today appears truly paradoxical” given that this author is then indicated as an “inspiring deity” precisely by those who justified the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 in the name of the fight against the latter’s alleged neo-Nazism.
According to the analysis in Riddle, Putin’s triumphal cult of war, inherited from Brezhnev, focuses precisely on the victory of 1945, obviously ignoring the high blood tribute that also emerges between one crack and another of the regime. To heal this vulnerability, it is essential for the state that the cult of victory imposed by the Kremlin in which, moreover, the theme of heroism is reaffirmed, is not undermined in any way. The Orthodox Church is a fundamental ally in this process, as it has demonstrated since the 1990s.
Professor Dell’Asta takes up the theories of Father Kirill Hovorun, who was in sharp contrast with Patriarch Kirill. Hovorun is convinced that, during his first two mandates, Putin did not really have his own ideology. “He was not a visionary […] he was interested in getting rich, and success in selling gas and oil. In Putin’s eyes, Russia was nothing more than a large gas distributor.” It was precisely in this phase that the Orthodox Church offered Putin a new vision for the imperial project, “a concept, and language, that inspired this megalomania”. Moreover, the original ideology of the Russkij mir, elaborated in the 1990s by some Russian liberal political scientists, had been overturned by the Church itself. Therefore, these ideas about Russia had become so important that it was necessary to “spread them to the periphery to bring it into Moscow’s orbit. It is an imperial idea: to spread Russia’s political influence through ideas. To create a new political reality through so-called soft power.” Since the Church of Moscow is transnational (it extends to Belarus, Ukraine and the former Soviet spaces), it has proposed itself as a channel for the dissemination of these ideas. In short, it is the ideology of the Russkij mir in an ecclesiastical version.
In this context, in the twentieth century even the concept of martyrdom, which typically belongs to the religious sphere, has been secularized, transforming the victims of atrocities and military conflicts of the past into martyrs. Martyrdom, as Ekaterina Klimenko argues in Riddle, allows “transforming defeat into victory and trauma into triumph” by manipulating collective memory in the name of political utility, especially when it comes to painful events in Russian history. If violent death is represented as “noble” and “romantic”, martyrdom gives it meaning. In fact, it is often politicians who use the language of martyrdom, but in the Russian case it is the Church itself that politicizes the language. And this is the peculiarity.
Klimenko points out that the annual memorial services of the Orthodox Church, which intertwine the Divine Liturgy with a parade and prayer with a march, are a marriage of Orthodox Christianity and militarism. Interestingly, in his sermons, Patriarch Kirill obscures the admittedly many differences between religious martyrdom and death in war. “Mass, involuntary and brutal death in battle has little in common with the individual, voluntary and ecstatic sacrifice of a martyr.”
He describes those who died in the Great Patriotic War as martyrs, “martyrs of patriotism rather than Orthodox Christianity.” If for martyrs suffering leads to salvation, for soldiers it leads to victory, and “the greater the suffering, the greater the triumph”. In this view, death is not a problem. At the same time, the homeland, be it the Soviet Union or the Russian Federation, is celebrated as something worth suffering or dying for, since the Red Army soldiers who died in the Great Patriotic War are the martyrs of today’s Russia.
According to this interpretation, even trauma is transformed into triumph. Since it is compatible with the cult of victory, this reading makes it possible to address the question of the human cost that war imposes by linking war heroism to spiritual salvation and describing war as heroic, glorious and noble. By glorifying the sacrifice of life for one’s country on the battlefield, it makes war acceptable, if not desirable. That goal has been achieved: the war of aggression against Ukraine is justified using the memory of the Great Patriotic War.
It should be emphasized, however, that the Church’s mnemonic activism is not a phenomenon linked only to the present. Cooperation between Church and State is also strong in the military sphere and has led to a process of militarization of Russian Orthodoxy and the sacralization of militarism. Yet the interpretation of the Great Patriotic War from the perspective of martyrdom is rooted in the traditional vision that the Church has of the Russian national past, a vision that unites spirituality and militarism. The strength of the Orthodox Church’s mnemonic project lies precisely in this tradition, rather than in the contingent politics.
The alliance between the state and the Orthodox Church is even more strategic in the face of a fairly secularized public opinion. According to a 2023 Levada Center survey, 72 percent of respondents consider themselves Orthodox, but only 40 percent believe that religion plays an important role in their lives, while 45 percent consider themselves religious. 43 percent of respondents do not attend religious services, while 12 percent attend with some regularity (at least once a month).
This data is certainly noteworthy. However, it is worth highlighting that the authorities have set up a public discourse that focuses heavily on religious identity as a pillar of the true Russia and pushes citizens towards religion by insisting on the concept of “cultural and patriotic membership” in an anti-Western key, more than on the concept of “faith”. Being Orthodox therefore becomes a declaration of belonging rather than a spiritual commitment. Although participation in ecclesiastical rites is an important element, the citizen’s perception of religion as part of Russian identity is even more so. The Church is the guardian of collective identity and traditional values, the same values that the state, first and foremost, promotes. This promotion takes place in the educational and training fields, in the media, as demonstrated by the large space the media dedicates to the Orthodox Church, its rites or the statements of its exponents, and in the institutional field, as demonstrated by the reform of the Constitution in 2020, which introduced faith in God into the text and the definition of a single model of marriage, that is, the union between a man and a woman. It is also important to recall the government’s commitment to promoting the construction of new churches, even if the choice of sites is at times the subject of debate within individual communities.
In this process, Putin is no longer just the President but is rather considered as the defender of the faith who deserves credit for having restored Russia’s role as the protector of the Orthodox faith and for having supported the revival of Orthodoxy and the reconstruction of the Church in the country. Thus, the state sacralizes itself through religious language and ideology, and the Church becomes a political institution (or a “state ministry”, according to some theologians who disagree with the Patriarch) that supports the state, war and Russian identity.
But has this ideological vision, between the cult of death, war, victory and martyrdom, had an impact on the Russian population? Putin knows his people and also knows that in the countryside, in the suburbs and in the provinces these appeals might take hold, as happened with the standardized Soviet citizens who believed in the “good tsar” and the “bad boyars”. Now, the blame falls on the “bad middle management” and, obviously, on the collective West, portrayed as devoid of values and eager to subjugate Russia. It is almost a form of self-consoling belief to create the delusion that, despite being in conditions of complete poverty, Russia is still able to redeem itself while maintaining its dignity.
At the beginning of the invasion, many believed that the soldiers’ widows and wives (especially the young conscripts) would rebel, as they did in the 1990s during the war in Chechnya, and, in fact, the core of the nationwide protests in September 2022 was composed of precisely this category. But soon, both due to the pain and the awareness of the brutal repression underway by the authorities, the protest movement became marginal.
Another type of dissent has therefore emerged: patriotic dissent. According to The Moscow Times, soldiers’ widows and wives are very careful in their protest to present themselves as a group of loyal and patriotic women and, above all, to differentiate themselves from other activists such as, for example, those of the Feminist Anti-War Resistance or other opposition figures.
In practice, according to Jenny Mathers, a lecturer at Aberystwyth University in Wales, they are acting like Navalny, but implementing different strategies; that is, they are using the laws of the state and the commitments made by the latter to ask for an account of its actions and thus to hold it responsible. This strategy, in some cases, especially when conscripts are involved, has proven effective.
In this regard, it is worth mentioning the case of the mother of Aman Malyshev. Originally from Yakutsk (a city in north-eastern Siberia), Aman was sent to Ussuriysk, a city in the Far East, to complete compulsory military training. The family, after a long search (he had been declared missing), learned of his death in Bryansk, near the border with Ukraine. Aman, who had not signed any contract, is among the many conscripts killed in combat who, according to the Kremlin’s promises, should not even have been in those areas. The position of Aman’s mother has been clear from the beginning: she does not want their story to be used to discredit the government or to incite people to rebel against the authorities. She only wants those responsible for her son’s death to be punished and is trying to help the state to take care of it. No one knows whether this strategy will work. It certainly will not lead to the collapse of the regime, but it is a small step towards making people’s voices heard. Meanwhile, the minority that is resisting, which we have spoken about on the pages of this magazine, is not giving up and continues on its path.
In this context of the historical regression of society, which we have been witnessing for years now, the reflection of the historian Andrej Zubov is worth sharing:
Putin is trying to replace the ‘Russian world’ with the Russian war, and in doing so he has demolished the ‘Russian world’ and much, much more, in the space of the ‘historical Russia’ that he claims to love so much… As with everything else, Putin is the gravedigger of the ‘Russian world’.
All images in this article are taken from the official site of the President of Russia
L’articolo The Cult of Death in Putin’s Russia proviene da ytali..