ABSTRACT
In the wake of the Second World War, military service in the USSR was habitually portrayed as a deeply patriotic act, a ‘sacred duty’, to be expected of every able-bodied Soviet man. Following the accession to power of Mikhail Gorbachev and the relaxation of censorship in the Soviet media, however, concerns over the deaths of young Russian soldiers in Afghanistan began to emerge increasingly persistently. As the country then began to disentangle itself from what was often referred to as the ‘Soviet Vietnam’, other similarly disturbing aspects of military service began to come to light. Bullying, the dedovshchina, as it was known, appeared to be widespread within the Soviet army, on a scale which officers either could not or would not control, and habitually covered up by the military authorities in the event of fatalities or serious injuries.1 This extremely complex situation, inherited by the newly constituted Russian armed forces from 1992, was unlikely to be readily resolved, whatever the political will, in a society which then underwent a period of profound socio-economic dislocation. It was against this background that raw recruits were to find themselves caught up in a particularly bloody theatre of conflict in Chechnya. In circumstances such as these, the anxiety of parents of sons of an age for conscription can be readily imagined. As a result, the avoidance of conscription has for some years now been a live issue in the Russian media with parents apparently ever more desperate to find a legitimate way out for their sons. This chapter examines both this situation and the responses of men interviewed during this study towards military service. Men’s opinions, as will be explored below, were often strikingly at odds with the predominant representations of this issue which have appeared in recent years in the Russian media.
