by Stefano Caprio

By 31 December, another 135,000 young Russians will be called up for military service under increasingly stringent conditions to prevent loopholes. The aim is not primarily to expand the army, but to redefine the very fabric of society, making the entire population feel at the front, even if it is mainly Caucasians and Asians who are sent to be slaughtered.

 

 

 

On 1 October, Russia began its new military conscription drive, which, according to the usual rules, will continue until 31 December to gather young conscripts, but this year the appeal is particularly intense and universal.

Starting in Moscow and spreading to other regions, only electronic notices will be sent, instead of the traditional postcard that many tried to avoid by hiding somewhere, even in the forests of the Urals or the Siberian taiga, but now there will be no escape.

Some 135,000 people between the ages of 18 and 30 will be called up, more than the 132,000 last year, when many managed to cover their tracks.

In addition to compulsory conscription, many young people have been sent directly to the front in Ukraine, drawing on the Junarmija movement, the youth army redefined by many as the Putinjugend, from which 11,000 young people have been taken for the war.

In addition, the Duma has passed a law abolishing seasonal restrictions on conscription from next year and introducing “perpetual call-up” every day of the year, extending electronic monitoring according to the needs of the army.

The rules are becoming increasingly stringent, and there are very few loopholes that allow young people to avoid military service. As Sergei Krivenko, head of the “Citizen and Army” project, states, “police officers will have to persist in their search for conscripts using every operational tool at their disposal”.

Formally, exemptions from service are still possible on health grounds for “category B” illnesses, which about a third of potential conscripts claim.

Many still try to avoid detection by changing their place of residence and not reporting to the barracks, but today this attempt to disappear seems increasingly impractical, given that military districts receive information directly from computer archives and the local police constantly monitor citizens' residences.

The search for those evading service is equated with that of bandits and criminals of all kinds, using telephone surveillance, CCTV cameras in the underground and on the streets, and in cities it is almost impossible to avoid being caught.

Even fleeing abroad is prevented by electronic controls, and accessing alternative civilian service, still permitted by law, is becoming increasingly problematic due to a series of increasingly restrictive conditions.

One of the possibilities for avoiding military service in the barracks is to sign up to go directly to the front in Ukraine, as new recruits are supposed to be kept out of combat, even if situations such as the Ukrainian invasion of Kursk arise, which has caused young people to flock to the disputed region.

In war, greater freedom can be gained after a certain period, provided that one returns home unharmed and in a horizontal position.

Those who arrive at the district are immediately offered the agreement to go and fight, promising money and impunity for the rest of their lives, and many accept out of desperation or because they are lured by illusions; the data on contract workers is confidential, but it is known that there are many.

There are also cases that escape military secrecy, such as in the city of Chebarkul in the Urals, where the division commander fraudulently signed contracts for all conscripts, as was later confirmed by the prosecutor's office, but the young men remained at the front nonetheless.

The Junarmija is increasingly praised in propaganda for its contribution to the war, as confirmed by the commander-in-chief of the youth military organisation, Vladislav Golovin, who reports that five young representatives of the movement have already been awarded the title of Heroes of Russia, and over 700 have been awarded medals for bravery. In the nine years since its foundation, almost two million young people have joined the Junarmija.

As political scientist Boris Pastukhov explains, an association such as that of “young soldiers” is particularly important in the climate of “universal conscription” in order to impose “structures capable of controlling people's consciences” throughout society.

The real purpose of this mass conscription is not primarily to complete or expand the army's ranks, but to redefine the very fabric of society, imposing categories that create a sense of war at all levels, making the entire population feel as if they are at the front, even if it is mainly Caucasians and Asians who are sent to be slaughtered.

There must always be “someone who controls you, a corporation to which you must answer and submit, to which you must belong”, says Pastukhov, rediscovering that feeling of “total sharing” that existed in the days of the USSR.

Becoming a member of the party was then “a preparation of the social cadres to enter the bright future”, with the possibility of putting pressure on all those who did not comply with the directives: today's call to arms serves to project Russian society towards a “multipolar and tradition-defending” future, rather than towards the conquest of other villages in Ukraine, a rather disappointing result in the last month, despite continuous bombing.

“Military service” is the true identity of citizenship in Putin's Russia, which must be instilled above all in the younger generations, reviving the traditions of the pioneers and the Komsomol of the good old Soviet days, experiencing war as the main content of one's personal, social and religious identity.

That this then translates once again into tragedy, invasion and destruction, as in Ukraine, becomes secondary, even if there is no shortage of plans to “reunify” many other former Soviet countries in Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

It is a form of education and inner training, homo putinianusas a new variant of homo sovieticus, an ideology and a universal and apocalyptic worldview, given that future happiness has no real connotations, neither those of revolutionary socialism nor those of the degrading consumerism of the “new Russians” who in the 1990s sought to spend all their accumulated capital in the pleasant locations of Europe or America.

Putin's speech at the Valdai Club on 2 October, in which he ideally associated Sweden and Finland with Russia, confirmed the new revelation of a worldview based on permanent and internal war, Russia's only response to all possible peace negotiations and international agreements.

This makes the figure of the president increasingly sacred and superior to all political, economic and military perspectives: Putin does not need to win battles on the field, but only the great battle of the spirit, imposing on his subjects and, by extension, on the whole world, a feeling of total sacrifice and willingness to renounce oneself in order to found a new world.

This is the path to the definitive affirmation of the cult of personality of the new tsar, which is not based on the hypnosis of rhetoric as it was for Mussolini and Hitler, but rather on the anonymity of common identification in the masses of those who are ready to die for their country, as in the example of Stalin, who won the world war from the confines of his Moscow bunker.

Putin's call to war is reminiscent of the tragic example of the last tsar of the Romanov dynasty, Nicholas II, who went to the front without realising the revolution taking place in his homeland, and then sacrificed his own life, along with all his family and servants, remaining a symbol of blind faith in the redemption of the people against all the tragedies of the world.

His remains have never been officially recognised by the Orthodox Church, despite the fact that the recovered bones are laid to rest in the imperial chapel of the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in St Petersburg, due to opposition from devotees known as tsarebožniki, the “deifiers of the tsar”, who, since the emigration of pro-tsarist elements during the Soviet period, were convinced that the tsar's body had been stolen from the earth and that the remains found by the Soviets in the 1970s were a deception used by those who wanted to take possession of them for their own interests.

The tsarebožniki expressed their opposition to the established power, first the Soviets and then Yeltsin's liberals, right up to Putin's “illiberal democracy”. During Covid, there was the sensational protest by Igumen Sergei Romanov, who from his monastery in the Urals refused vaccines and any other state impositions in the name of the memory of the holy tsar, and is now locked up in a labour camp with many of his followers.

The war in Ukraine allows Putin to turn this devotion to the ideal of the “tsar redeemer”, who sacrifices himself and the entire country for a higher cause, to his advantage, calling the entire people to the vocation of war against enemies from all over the world, and especially against those who arise within their own hearts.