Russia’s cult of death

Russia appears to be in love with war and death. “War is victory, war is a friend, war is love” is how one Russian official, a middle-aged woman who could be a mother or grandmother, recently put it to an audience consisting of young boys and girls.

Last May, school children, tots really, were dressed up as tanks and fighter planes in celebration of Victory Day, which commemorates the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany.

Russian Orthodox clergy routinely bless tanks and encourage Russian soldiers to defend Mother Russia with their lives. A holy picture, issued by the Bryansk Eparchy, informed them last year that “Your task [is] to wipe the Ukrainian nation from the face of the earth.”

In June 2022, the director of the world-famous Hermitage Museum termed its exhibits abroad as “our special operation,” explicitly referencing Vladimir Putin’s euphemism for the war against Ukraine (a “special military operation”). As if that weren’t enough, he went on to call these exhibits “a great cultural offensive.”

In early 2023, the Russian propagandist and popular television talk-show host Vladimir Solovyov matter-of-factly informed viewers that “Life is highly overrated.” His two guests nodded in agreement, adding that Russians used to live from day to day, but now they have “nonmaterial dreams” and “lofty goals” — namely, war. Besides, intoned Solovyov, who has pointedly refrained from offering his services on the front, “Why fear what is inevitable? Especially when we’re going to heaven. Death is the end of one earthly path and the beginning of another.”

What’s going on? Why this obsession with war and death?

For starters, keep in mind that the Russian army has suffered at least 200,000 dead and wounded, according to Western estimates, and over 140,000 dead alone, according to the Ukrainian General Staff’s estimates. (The two numbers aren’t necessarily incompatible, as there are numerous reports of Russian soldiers leaving their wounded comrades on the battlefield to die. That would “artificially” inflate the number of dead and reduce the number of wounded.) Whatever the exact figure, it’s staggering, especially in light of the fact that the Soviet Union lost 13,310 soldiers in nine years of war in Afghanistan. At the current rate, Russia will have lost about 275,000 soldiers by the end of 2023.

Given these numbers, it’s no surprise that Russian officialdom is making a virtue of necessity and glorifying war and death. As Solovyov said, why fear death if it’s inevitable — especially for growing numbers of poorly trained and poorly equipped draftees whose role in the war is that of cannon fodder?

But there’s also a longstanding Russian tradition of employing unrestrained violence and treating its own people as expendable pawns.

Muscovy, as the Russian Empire was called until the early 18th century, expanded into Siberia by destroying the native peoples and their cultures. Imperial Russia did the same in Belarus, Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and Central Asia. The Soviet Union, Imperial Russia’s successor, established the Gulag, engineered a famine-genocide in Ukraine, and slaughtered hundreds of thousands in waves of terror.

Russian strongman Vladimir Putin is thought to have overseen the bombing of several Russian apartment buildings in 1999, waged a savage war in Chechnya, and ordered the assassination of at least a score of political opponents. His genocidal war in Ukraine is only the latest manifestation of his own, and Russia’s, propensity for violence.

Official Russia’s indifference to human life evidently extends to many average Russians as well. General Mikhail Kutuzov defeated Napoleon Bonaparte in 1812 by pursuing a scorched-earth policy that made large swaths of Russia uninhabitable. The Bolsheviks slaughtered millions of Russians in the Civil War of 1918-1920. Joseph Stalin sent millions of soldiers to their deaths in poorly planned assaults on the German Wehrmacht.

Finally, there’s the nature of the regime that Putin has assiduously constructed over the past two decades. Regardless of what his regime is called, there are striking similarities between it and Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. All three were illiberal, deeply authoritarian polities that were ruled by a charismatic leader with a personality cult and war-making and empire-building agenda.

Not accidentally, all three also glorified violence and death. Only violence could destroy their political opposition, and only violence could guarantee the state’s imperial aspirations. Since war was central to their identities, all three polities logically had to glorify the soldiers and heroes who died for the cause, whether in street battles or on the front.

Most Germans continued to give their lives for the regime, even if unwillingly, until the end of World War II in 1945. The Italians proved to be rambunctious fair-weather friends of Benito Mussolini and turned against him in 1943.

Which way will Russians go?

Thus far, the question remains unanswered. Russians did protest in the early days of the war, and thousands were arrested. Draft boards continue to be fire-bombed, flowers continue to be placed in public spaces in commemoration of Ukrainian war dead, and soldiers continue to throw down their arms and desert. “Hidden resistance” appears to be widespread.

At the same time, political passivity, love of the “good tsar,” popular indifference to the costs of war, the all-pervasive Putinite propaganda, and the coercive powers of the state stand in the way of open protest.

How many hundreds of thousands of Russians must die on the front before their friends and relatives say “enough”? Putin obviously believes that Russians are cattle, and that Russia is an abattoir. It’s up to them to show him that they aren’t.

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”