Messaging the War as the Potential for National Renewal

Russian officials are claiming that the war on Ukraine can reforge a new nation out of the blood of its supposed heroes and clean the country of its 'rot'. It is a highly concerning development.

The online investigative resource People of Baikal (Lyudi Baykala) recently released this outstanding piece (presented also here in English in an abridged form by Meduza), on how Russian authorities are trying to portray fighting in the war on Ukraine as a positive experience, a galvanising rite of passage that brings a range of benefits to those who choose to enlist.

The article is fascinating in demonstrating many how officials focus on ‘post-traumatic growth’, ignoring the negative impacts of potential PTSD, and how they highlight the benefits of combat experience can supposedly have on soldiers’ psyches.

Officials claim that these benefits impact soldiers’ professional and personal lives. The piece outlines how state media shows soldiers claiming that taking part in the war is a ‘wholly positive experience’ that allows men to progress in their careers, and prove themselves to their families (and also in bed with their wives).

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.’ [Translation taken from Meduza]

The article is also remarkable in revealing the multilayered messaging that the Russian state releases in order to persuade people to sign up to the war, from the professional to the social to the intimately personal.

I get concerned when people dismiss Russian information manipulation as simplistic or crude. Such conclusions ignore the holistic context in which Russian messaging operates, the political and social environment and the cultural norms that provide the basis for nudging, persuasion and coercion from officials and others. Russian authorities appear highly skilled in tuning their information at specific audiences and their concerns. Appealing to supposed masculinity is likely highly effective in some Russian communities, as is likely offering opportunities at self-fulfilment and economic reward in areas where rewarding jobs and careers are not common. The article outlines the various ways in which officials pull at many of these personal and cultural demands.

The piece also suggests that excellent investigative reporting still exists in Russia – certainly in the regions – and that some journalists are still questioning the war and its consequences. (The People of Baikal article uses the word ‘war’, not the official term ‘Special Military Operation’.)

War as national rebirth

After reading this piece, I went back to a post on the Rybar Telegram channel, a prominent pro-war military analysis account, that was published on 24 February 2024 to mark the second anniversary of the war.

The Rybar post admits that the ‘Russian blitzkrieg’, initially envisioned to overrun Ukraine two years previously, failed (it’s telling that Rybar, which reportedly received funding from Yevgeniy Prigozhin, uses Nazi terminology). However, Rybar insists that in light of that failure and the unexpected length of the war, it is time to use the ‘Special Military Operation’ for ‘the healing of the nation’, to get rid of its ‘rot’, even if this costs human lives. The post argued that such a painful process was required for the formation of a ‘full-fledged civil society’. (Of course, nothing is mentioned in the post about the blood of murdered Ukrainians.)

This argument, that the Russian people should be galvanised and renewed through a forging process of war, has also emerged in other pro-Kremlin sources, a possible further sign of the influence of the remnants of the Prigozhin media network on the Russian state and its messaging.

It is a clear attempt to find new justifications for the war, after two years of fighting, and also to try to encourage more people to enlist without resorting to forced mobilisation.

The messaging, seen alongside the attempts by local officials and psychiatrists to point to the potential of fighting for personal renewal, also appears to underline the organic links in Russian cultural theory between the individual and the national. It also speaks back to theories of the organic development that were so prominent in Russian thought in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and which have not gone through a rationalist revision as in many European countries.

But it is also highly perverse. The claim that a nation must be reforged through blood, war and killing is reminiscent of some of the worst policies of 1930s Europe – and that is likely, as hinted above, deliberate.

It also speaks to a growing willingness in Russian politics to express the extreme, the iterate the nihilism that underlines its prejudice and brutality in Ukraine. It is a further indication that the Russian authorities are creating a society where violence and war are not only acceptable, but beneficial.

This helps forge a social and cultural context where people are even more receptive to state persuasion to go and fight in Ukraine and kill Ukrainians. This wider shaping of a belligerent and bellicose nation – being targeted at a range of audiences and generations – will be extremely hard to undo, and should worry us all.

We should also study it more carefully to understand to evolving context and impact of Russian state messaging, certainly as violence increasingly becomes a norm in Russian society.