by Stefano Caprio

For the philosopher Nemtsev, a latent tendency towards violence has become a pivotal tool to regain what has been lost. Civilians become "quasi-soldiers", who engage in ad hoc individual and group training. Even everyday clothing comes with a war theme, like tactical gloves and protective knee pads. War is a key aspect of Russian literature, art and culture.

A large online conference on Academic Bridges was held recently, bringing together researchers and scholars of Russian history and culture from various European countries to discuss a number of sociological and anthropological issues in Russian society, which has undergone radical changes after more than two years of war.

Mikhail Nemtsev, a philosopher and historian from Novosibirsk, presented one of the main reports, on the "Anthropology of the New Russian Militarism", to show the specificities of an aggressive attitude that was traditional in Russia, during centuries of tzarism and decades of Soviet rule, with militarist education now making a comeback in today’s Russian school system.

Nemtsev explains that, after a break in the 1990s, the propensity for militarism has made a comeback and spread, especially in the past 15 years, both in the production chains of the private and government war industry, and in the tendency to revise history in an "alternative" way, which forms the basis of the now dominant ideology of the "Russian world" interpreted with different variants and at various levels.

A devastating push came from the COVID-19 pandemic, which fuelled conspiratorial theories, according to which health measures were really military actions to submit to or to fight against, an imaginary enemy often seen as dark force foreign to Russia, designed to annihilate its spiritual and moral strength.

This led to an "aesthetic and ethical" interpretation of the military experience, different from the archetypes of the past like the liberation from the medieval Tatar yoke, the reunification of the Russian lands against internal and external disorder, the imperial holy alliance to dominate Europe against the invaders, or the Soviet-flavoured “struggle for universal peace”.

The current militarism is a "rediscovery of Russian identity in a new form", notes the philosopher, in which the latent tendency to violence becomes the decisive tool to find all that one believed was lost.

In fact, as Nemtsev explains, the contemporary world has been based for over three centuries on a clear division between "civil" and "military": soldiers do their job and civilians live in their own realm, supporting and maintaining the army so that it does not meddle in people's private affairs.

This ideal model is now failing in Russia, as the military expands into civilian life, propaganda, and war training in schools, and, more generally, with an increasingly broader interest among ordinary people in the military, considered increasingly important, on which to invest one’s time and interests.

Strictly speaking, civilians do not become soldiers, they morph into "quasi-soldiers", with ad hoc individual and group training, setting up associations of Cossacks and combatants, or even just collecting an ever-widening literature on the history and art of war.

This transformation is not exclusive to Russia, a similar trend is underway in the United States, not to mention many militarised countries in Asia, Africa, and South America, while Europe remains in a state of peaceful “separation”, refusing to let war interfere in its existence.

In Russia, as in the United States, the fighter imagery is becoming increasingly attractive, with people dabbling in firearms, taking part in extreme survival courses, in addition to engaging in violent protest.

Russians like to dress up as soldiers in everyday life, not only camouflage jackets, but even wearing tactical gloves and protective knee pads.

Alongside the aggressive policies of federal and regional leaders and governments, the sub-culture of war that everyone aspires to join is growing.

All this came to the fore with bang in 2014, with the start of the conflict with Ukraine when Putin ordered the annexation of Crimea, shouting Krym Nash! "Crimea is ours!" which turned a fratricidal conflict into a thriller that eventually went global.

Some people have come to embody  this "popular" war trend, like the hero of the "hybrid war" in Ukraine, Strelkov (Igor Girkin, currently in a Russian jail), and the founder of the Wagner Group, Putin's “cook”, the late Yevgeny Prigozhin, perhaps the most popular figure in recent years.

Now all the mercenary groups have been brought under the thumb of the Ministry of Defence. With the appointment of economist Andrey Belousov, the ministry has become the main pillar of Russia’s politics and economy, and to some extent even of the "militant" Orthodox religion.

Nemtsev sums it all up with the observation that “military interest today is present and increasingly dominant at all levels of Russian society, beyond the political use that is made of it by those in power.”

This is certainly an important factor in mass support for Putin's regime, which needs to rely on people to tell their friends and children how exciting it is to run through the woods with automatic weapons and camouflage, parachute over targets to attack, or other similar adventures, far more attractive than sporting competitions, leaving the Olympics as a plaything for depraved Westerners.

For at least two generations, after the world wars, the overriding principle was "as long as there is no more war", while now, more and more, the idea is that “there is no other solution but war”.

The cult of war, after all, is embodied, in Russia as elsewhere, in the many monuments celebrating victorious heroes. Nemtsev notes that war is a fundamental element in Russian literature, like in Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, but also in the art and culture of many peoples.

He defines war as "a fundamental element of the life of contemporary societies", regardless of the victories or defeats of the past; memory and debates about past wars are considered essential to define national identity.

Today Russia has merged this memory with the Great Patriotic War (as World War II is called in Russia), morphed into a "Victory cult", whereby 9 May 1945 and 24 February 2022, the conquest into Berlin and the invasion of Ukraine, become one and the same.

Even the very word "war" has been set aside and outlawed, replaced by the mystical concept of "special operation", which is military, political, economic, and religious, all wrapped into one.

This is symbolically represented by the swastika Z, so that nowadays there is only Z-poetry, Z-literature, Z-religious orthodoxy, and the public expression allowed is reduced to the verb Zigovat, "to make the Z", in everything.

Russian society is not opposed to this new reality, apart from the few dissidents who have been repressed, poisoned, murdered, or exchanged for a few war heroes and criminals.

People accept to live in a brave new world of permanent conflict like in science fiction movies, with alien invaders from another planet: the Martians have landed, and we will learn to live on Mars (named after the God of war).

The fact is, Nemtsev argues, a “people is a community who face the questions of life and death together in a given territory.”

The people is made up of those from whom one is born, those with whom one goes to school, those with whom new children are generated and families are built, and those who are finally buried. The philosopher quotes a Russian saying, na miru i smert' Krasna (На миру и смерть красна), which means “death is beautiful when you are around people.”

The cult of war is the cult of death, which must be dignified and honourable, full of positive values. War is the final element of "traditional moral and spiritual values". One lives for a glorious death, and defending the homeland is the main path to holiness, as Patriarch Kirill likes to repeat when talking to his metropolitans, an extreme version of the imitation of Christ and the martyrs.

No matter who lives and who dies, who fights and who tries to escape, warlike patriotism defines the boundaries of the soul well before geographic and military borders.

Thomas Mann, one of Germany's greatest writers, wrote in 1946 that “I have no intention of returning to Germany. How will I live with those who supported Nazism for years?”

This question concerns everyone: how to live in the culture of death, and how to choose to rediscover life, assuming one's responsibilities and asking for forgiveness, rebuild the State, society, Russia, and the world that await us after the war.

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• russia
• cult
• death
• war
• children
• ukraine
• war
• militarism
• mikhail nemtsev