‘A very dangerous trend’

How the idea that war can be good for soldiers’ mental health is spreading in Russian society

Over the last two and a half years, Russia has sent hundreds of thousands of men to fight in its brutal invasion of Ukraine. Data on the number of former Russian soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is scarce, though as early as December 2022, Russian psychologists had identified at least 100,000 military personnel as having the condition, according to the U.K. Defense Ministry. But the trauma of the war has had undeniable effects in Russian society: more than 100 people have been killed by returning soldiers, and at least 100 others have been seriously injured. According to a new report from the regional news site People of Baikal, however, it’s becoming “bad form” in Russia to talk openly about PTSD; instead, many psychologists and public figures prefer to focus on “post-traumatic growth,” referring to the positive effects that combat experience can supposedly have on soldiers’ psyches. Meduza shares an abridged translation of the story.

Caution: The following text contains descriptions of extreme violence.

Thirty-nine-year-old Viktor Birtolan started teaching at Yekaterinburg’s Turtle Dove Sunday School in September 2023 — six months after he returned from Ukraine, where he’d fought as a mercenary with Russia’s Wagner Group. If he’d received the job offer before his stint in the war, Viktor says, he would have “made excuses,” claiming he was too busy. “But after the front, I started thinking about how I have a duty — about how children need male role models,” he explains.

According to the Sunday school’s singing teacher Maria Astakhova, Viktor is a “calm and knowledgeable” teacher who can always “find the right words when talking to children.” He works for free, she says, because it’s a “labor of love.”

Sometimes, Viktor says, his teenage students ask him tricky questions during his lessons — for example, whether it’s okay to kill people. To that one, he responded: “Yes, killing is bad, I completely agree with you. Mr. Birtolan has killed a bunch of people. But what else can you do, if that’s the only way bad people will understand?”

Viktor didn’t join Wagner Group from prison as many of its fighters did; before going to war, he worked in the construction industry. “I went [to the front] because I wanted to personally take part in this,” he tells People of Baikal. In total, he spent about eight months on the battlefield as part of an assault unit stationed south of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine.

‘Tempering steel’

Since the start of the full-scale war against Ukraine, Russian state media has reported extensively on the “good deeds” of former soldiers. News stories have described returning soldiers rescuing a person from a fire, finding an elderly man lost in the woods, and providing life-saving first aid on a plane, among other things. Other reports have portrayed veterans as thriving in the civilian world, whether by becoming farmers, going to college, playing professional sports, or running for office.

These stories rarely mention their subjects experiencing any negative psychological effects from their time on the battlefield. On the contrary, former soldiers are often quoted as saying the war has led them to reevaluate their lives and given them a newfound sense of purpose. Mikhail Lubkov, a volunteer soldier from the city of Voronezh, for example, told state media that taking part in the war was a “wholly positive experience” that allowed him to prove himself as a man and better appreciate his wife and kids.

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Russian psychologist Mikhail Reshetnikov urges People of Baikal to focus on “positive” examples of former Russian soldiers rather than on those with symptoms of PTSD. He claims that the dangers of battlefield trauma are greatly exaggerated, arguing that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

“War doesn’t just traumatize people — it also heals them,” Vasily Langovoy, another Russian psychologist, tells People of Baikal. He proceeds to spend about 10 minutes enumerating the “positive personal changes” soldiers can experience after going to war, which he says include decisiveness, better workplace performance, quicker reaction times, control over their fears, increased sexual desire for their wives, and more. According to Langovoy, all of these changes are evidence that some military personnel experience “post-traumatic growth” rather than PTSD.

Tatiana Uryvchikova, a psychologist from Moscow, compares going to war to the process of tempering steel. “Stress can cause a person either to break down or to become steel,” she says. “And we never know which it will be. But many soldiers’ wives have told me that their husbands returned from the front more heroic and more responsible, and began exhibiting their best masculine qualities.”

Langovoy agrees with this idea, though he says some soldiers’ relatives may have difficulty adjusting to their “positive” transformations after they return from the war:

Imagine there’s an ordinary guy whose wife wears the pants in the family, so to speak. The guy goes to the front, comes home, and takes the power away from his wife. His wife says, “He’s lost his mind — he must have been hit in the head.” But in reality, this guy has grown as a person, his ambitions have expanded, he’s become more resilient! His family’s become accustomed to a different side of him, so they may perceive the change as an illness. We shouldn’t just label everything as PTSD!

‘Life was passing me by’

Fifty-one-year-old former soldier Vladislav Orlov tells People of Baikal that his time in the military led him to “rethink his priorities.” After going to the front, he realized he “needed to live his own life,” and after recovering from the severe concussion he incurred on the battlefield, he became a German and English teacher at a school in Russia’s Tver region.

Vladislav comes from a family of teachers, and he began his career as one before leaving education to go into the corporate world, where he worked for over 20 years. “Before joining the special military operation, I was working for others, not for myself,” he says. “I realized that my life was passing by and that I wasn’t fulfilling my creative potential.”

Now Vladislav says he finds inspiration in teaching. Yevgeny Kopylov, the director of the school where he works, tells People of Baikal that the new teacher stands out for his “versatility and compassion.” When he’s not teaching, Vladislav says, he writes short stories in the style of Haruki Murakami and paints pictures.

Artyom Dilmuradov, a 31-year-old former Wagner Group fighter, also describes his time at war as a “positive experience.” He tells People of Baikal that he returned from Ukraine with a sense that he had a duty to “serve people.”

“At the front, I knew I was doing a very important job,” he says. “When I returned, I started to miss the feeling that I was doing something good. I wanted to be helpful, to do something right.”

This year, Artyom began working as a social coordinator at the regional branch of a pro-war charity foundation called Defenders of the Fatherland, where he helps other former soldiers access their government payouts. He also visits various schools and gives presentations to students about the Russian military’s “cleansing operation” in Bakhmut.

Artyom recently spoke at a school for troubled teenagers. He says the visit was important to him because he wanted to show the students “through his own example how a person can change.”

In 2013, Artyom Dilmuradov was sentenced to 14 years in prison after he and a friend killed a family of three to steal their savings. They tortured the family before killing them. But Artyom tells People of Baikal that he prefers not to think about his past because his priority right now is to motivate young people.

“It feels nice to be an example for other people,” he says.

‘People live in a world of illusions’

Viktor Birtolan, the Sunday school teacher from Yekaterinburg, was initially asked to speak at schools as well, but the invitations stopped coming after his first few appearances. According to Viktor, this is because he “told the truth and didn’t sugarcoat it.”

“They say that when you’re at war, you use your body to cover up those who’ve been injured. That’s bullshit,” he says, giving an example of the kinds of “hard truths” he told students. “In reality, when you’re pulling out a wounded soldier, you use him to cover yourself. Because if you get hit, neither one of you will make it out. But if he gets hit, well, tough luck.”

Viktor also says he explained to high schoolers the importance of “not messing around” by recounting a time when one of his unit mates “failed to dig his trench in time and got his whole back blown off by shrapnel.” He described to the students in detail, he says, how his fellow soldier’s “spine, intestines, and lungs” were exposed. “And he didn’t die immediately — he screamed at first,” Viktor says.

When asked why he thinks schools stopped inviting him to speak, Viktor responds:

I was told that the teachers [who were present for his speech] cried all weekend. People live in a world of illusions, where our brave soldiers triumphantly win with smiles on their faces. And I tell the students it’s darkness, horror, death, pain, blood — there’s nothing good about it.

But while “war is terrible,” he adds, “it helps you reassess your life.” In fact, he says, when he first returned from the front, he “actively advised everyone to go there — to get their heads straight!”

‘It’s become bad form’

Mikhail Reshetnikov, the psychologist who told People of Baikal that the dangers of PTSD are exaggerated, served with the Soviet army in Afghanistan, where he studied the negative psychological impact of war. Just a few years ago, this was still his focus. In 2019, for example, he compared the task of adapting soldiers back to civilian life to the process of decommissioning a nuclear power plant.

By last year, however, Reshetnikov had changed his tune: in an early 2023 speech at Russia’s State Duma, he argued that the “hysteria over the possible prevalence of PTSD [among Russian soldiers] needs to be debunked.”

Maria Lebedeva, a psychologist from Russia’s Kirov region, agrees with Reshetnikov: she says that the “idiotic term PTSD” is “everywhere” in Russia right now, even though it “won’t affect everyone.” However, she’s unable to provide any examples of positive personal growth among soldiers she knows; instead, she describes how one of her clients has recurring nightmares about his unit mate’s severed legs.

But not every Russian psychologist who spoke to People of Baikal said the PTSD issue is overblown. One doctor from Novosibirsk, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that while not every former soldier will get PTSD, “almost all of them” will develop psychological disorders as a result of their combat experiences, though some may take years to show up. “But I’ve noticed that it’s become bad form to talk about this in Russia. It’s a very dangerous trend,” he says.

‘I feel calmer with my knife’

Viktor Birtolan carries a pocket knife to all of his Sunday school lessons. Ever since he came back from the front, he says, he doesn’t feel like himself “without a weapon.”

“I don’t feel any need to shock or scare the people around me,” he tells People of Baikal. “If I need to, I’ll kill someone with my bare hands. But I feel calmer with my knife.”

When Viktor returned from the war, he didn’t start working at the Sunday school immediately; initially, he tried to get a job as an OMON (riot police) officer. However, he says, he was rejected after the required psychological test found that he had “severe PTSD.” Despite this, Viktor maintains that he feels “quite calm and well.”

“How did the experts determine that you have severe PTSD?” People of Baikal asks Viktor.

“Well, they asked me why I wanted to become an OMON officer. I responded that I wanted access to weapons, good guys around me, and some good old-fashioned violence,” Viktor says.

“Some good old-fashioned violence?”

“I’ll put it this way: I don’t get enough adrenaline. Like most of us [former soldiers]. I realize that when people like me return to Russia en masse, there are going to be problems. You all need to observe certain rules when interacting with us. Like not provoking or upsetting us,” he explains.

Viktor recounts how his nine-year-old son recently came up to him from behind and poked him in the head with a toy gun. He says he “barely restrained himself,” taking the gun away from his son and screaming at him not to do that again.

“But my first reaction was to kill [my son],” he says.

Original story by Karina Pronina for People of Baikal. Abridged translation by Sam Breazeale.