Self-sacrifice generator

Philosopher and social anthropologist Mikhail Nemtsev discusses why so many Russians are ready to die in a war

In videos taken last autumn and winter showing the ritual of seeing off the mobilised men to the army, we see ordinary streets, town memorials, and yards. The men in these videos could be our neighbours or relatives. The ceremonies are official, with mayors or local military officers speaking into microphones (although they still haven’t learned to speak in public). Then a priest from a local church speaks with a professional voice, without a microphone, offering wishes for a safe return. The message is clear: return home, with victory or without it, but return home. And, without fail, there are a few words about NATO.

Then, all the men get on the buses. Some walk hand in hand with a teary-eyed woman (wife, sister, girlfriend?), while others hold a small daughter (I have one of the same age). I watch them from another country and realise that I would not want to be among them. If I faced this threat, I would try my best to avoid being among them. However, it is easy for me to picture myself there. Something inside me shows readiness to go to the war and die there with the rest of them.

I am sure that few of those in Russia who are going to the war, voluntarily or not, wish to kill. Of course, apart from a small number of those obsessed with murder. Others go for something else. Experts, publicists, and bloggers ask the question: how did so many people decide to become murderers? However, I am sure that they did not make that decision. There is another reason.

For the majority of people, killing someone is unimaginable. It is an experience beyond all imagination. It is impossible to visualise oneself “there”, where someone I do not know dies by my hand or where I myself may be killed in some way, by someone, at any moment. Yes, one can carry out this mental experiment. Alternatively, one can be offered this experiment as preparation: go outside and hit the first person you see on the head as hard as you can, regardless of age or gender.

For most people, with the exception of criminals and people in extreme mental states (obsession, revenge), killing cannot be a goal or the subject of a conscious decision. Therefore, people do not (and did not) go to war for the purpose of “killing”.

In military subcultures, soldiers were specifically trained and accustomed to killing. This is still done today. However, it does not always “work”. For people who happen to be “there”, who have not thought of the army and the military as “their thing”, the experience of actually taking part in killing becomes completely devastating. The forthcoming internal Russian problem of “veterans of the Ukrainian front” is a separate topic.

There is something very much in tune with this war in the men of my generation. The “last Soviet generation” of men grew up in the strange atmosphere of the all-presence of war. The cult of the Great Patriotic War became part of everyday life, not quite like the cult of Victory. At the same time, some other wars were constantly going on, without victory or defeat. And we also lived during the Cold War — the very end of it, amid the constant fear of missiles.

Fear of a nuclear explosion was one of the early impressions of childhood for some (I recall with surprise that in kindergarten I played a game of “atomic warfare”). Then there was Afghanistan — a war with no clear goal or beneficiary — and the first and second wars in Chechnya.

The wars would stop and start again, someone would come back from there and tell their stories. The war was almost always around.

We listened to the same songs and watched the same Soviet war films, in which the best ones always went somewhere and died there. It is very difficult to free yourself from the way Soviet and post-Soviet culture “mobilised” you in your younger years.

The self-consciousness of thirty-somethings in the West was influenced by the tradition of revisionist war and anti-war films. They told stories about the war while simultaneously developing an aversion to it. A similar tradition did not develop in Russia, and such films remained the privilege of a small number of film buffs. In mass Soviet and Russian culture, depictions of war carried a more or less explicit justification for it, a recognition that, bad or good, “it had to be done this way”. If it must be done, it must be done.

This predetermination creates a special attitude which is much stronger than personal desires, interests, or fears. I can see this attitude in the videos of the mobilised. At this moment you can see something very ancient on their faces. Like this, men have been going away for thousands of years: to war, to hard work, to forced labour camps. Someone came back alive, and then there was nothing to say about the feeling of grim, senseless determination.

This skill, developed over centuries, would come in handy in the event of a real danger to society — the kind of war where taking up arms is necessary for all who can defend their kin. But this same skill makes people unarmed in the face of the criminal abuse of those who know how loyalty and nobility can divide people and, under the guise of fighting for justice, provoke genocide, writes psychologist Arlene Audergon in her book The War Hotel: Psychological Dynamics in Violent Conflict.

So, this war has been in the works for a long time. They were preparing our souls for it. Most of us always knew and accepted that this war would devour us. A heroic version of this self-sacrifice generator is literally built into the heads of men of my generation (and not only mine). It was the one that worked in the spring and summer of 2014. At that time, men from all over Russia went to war in Donbas.

But it seems that in 2022, the capacity of this generator was no longer sufficient. And this is good news. That is why the Russian commander-in-chief reluctantly announced a partial mobilisation last autumn. I hope the generator will finally break down at this point: the era of “people’s wars” has passed, and apart from a willingness to “die for the motherland”, it produces nothing. I hope that the catastrophe of this war will be a terrible price to pay in order to finally abolish the unconditional acceptability of death in war to Russian men, and we will be able to attend to other things in peace: our children, parents, building our own lives and our own businesses.