Pacifism removed in Russia

The large-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 has unleashed a wave of protests in Russia. For a few weeks, thousands of people poured into the streets and squares to spontaneously protest against Russian aggression. Lacking organizational structure, the protests gradually faded under the authorities’ brutal crackdown. In the coming months, mass protests were replaced by performative and symbolic anti-war activism. Guerrilla activism and micro-protests have sprung up all over Russia: flyers, graffiti, ribbons, performance art, statuettes, average of a different nature. Horizontal, anonymous actions, without leaders or masses, aimed at reaffirming the existence of an underground dissent, which struggles to emerge in a cohesive front, due to the forward-looking and gradual process dismantling of civil society infrastructure operated by the Putin regime from 2000 to today. Even within their limits, the protests against the war in recent months require a reflection on Russia’s relationship with pacifism.

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Pacifism removed

The conformation of civil society in Soviet Russia was different from today. Since the October Revolution, Russia has never hosted a mass peace movement. A movement, that is, which rejects war in all its meanings, which calls for the disarmament and demilitarization of society and the defense apparatuses, and which pursues nonviolent action and a negotiated resolution of conflicts both in domestic and foreign policy . Lenin’s thought on war, famously, did not problematize war as such, but war imperialist And reactionary. As Paul Leblanc documented in his Lenin and the revolutionary party“The slogan ‘peace’ is wrong”, Lenin said in 1914 at a conference entitled “The proletariat and war”, “the motto is ‘transform national war into civil war'”, i.e. into class war .

In the Soviet era, numerous associations governed by the CPSU organized the social and political life of citizens, and directed their causes. Among them, many promoted “peace among the peoples”. However, it was not about associations pacifist, but aimed at consolidating the cohesion of the nations and republics of the USSR. These organizations identified external actors, such as the United States or NATO, as the aggressors against whom to defend themselves, while the USSR was presented as a virtuous example capable of uniting different nations under a seal of peace.

The World Peace Council was founded in 1950 on the initiative of the Cominform. The Soviet leaders intended to promote the disarmament of the United States and condemn its “warlike imperialism”, at a time when the United States had a nuclear arsenal far superior to that of the Soviets, who had tested the first atomic bomb in Semipalatinsk site, in Kazakhstan, just a year earlier. The Council’s alignment with Soviet foreign policy was evident: it carried out a major campaign against aggression in Vietnam, but subsequently remained silent on the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. international pacifist organizations distanced themselves from the Council.

In the 1990s, most of the organizations supporting “peace among peoples” were dissolved in the process of reorganizing the state apparatus, while the conflicts in Chechnya undermined stability and the security of the country. The Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, founded in 1998 and now solidly aligned with the regime, denounced the systematic abuses in the Russian army, particularly against conscripts, which were also documented by Anna Politkovskaya in her Russian diary. However, these demands cannot be ascribed to pacifism: they were actions of denunciation against the systematic violation of human rights within the state apparatuses, without a debate on the role of the army and conscription, or on a possible demilitarization process.

Lev Tolstoy himself, perhaps the greatest exponent of nonviolent and antimilitarist thought in Russia, is today being taken up and celebrated in public discourse for his reflections of a moral and religious nature, or in an uncritical and instrumental way. His writings on political violence and the need to oppose it, on the rejection of arms and armies, are systematically overlooked. Tolstoyan-inspired Russian pacifist thought developed in the nineteenth century it was deeply rooted in Orthodox spirituality and its daily practices. The rise of Putin, however, has signed a new pact between the State and the Orthodox Church, whereby the latter has the crucial role to support and consolidate the new identity of Putin’s Russia.

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Identity militarism

In fact, Putin’s regime has contributed to further distance pacifism from the Russian horizon. In the transition between the Soviet era and the post-Soviet era, the centrality of militarism remained uninterrupted. Militarism has played a key role in the construction of a new social cohesion and in the redemption of collective historical memory. From the reintroduction of the pompous military parade in honor of victory in the Great Patriotic War and the memory of veterans, to the establishment of paramilitary organizations for children and teenagers, the glorification of the war world has established itself as the hegemonic narrative.

The removal of the pacifist tradition on the one hand, and the convergence of identity around bellicose rhetoric and a romanticized war past on the other, also determined the nature of opposition to the invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, it would be misleading to define these mobilizations as “peace-loving”. There most instanceswhich arose in opposition to the Russian invasion, did not call for disarmament and demilitarization, a diplomatic settlement of the conflict, and negotiations. He askedinstead, the immediate suspension of the Russian offense and respect for the norms of international law, demonstrating its support for Ukraine and the armed resistance of its people. There is a radical difference between this type of instance and the locations expressed by the Italian and European pacifist networks. These last have been criticized from many sides due to the lack of support for the supply of arms to the Ukrainian people, which, according to this point of view, ultimately ends with the endorsement of Putin’s aggression and with the sacrifice of the sovereignty of the Ukrainian state in the name of a peace that implies a radical and bloody geopolitical upheaval. Therefore, it would be more correct to define the mobilizations of recent months “against the war” rather than “pacifist” and, specifically, not against the war at all, nor criticism of the centrality of militarism in the domestic and foreign policy of the Russian government, but against the Putin’s war in Ukraine.

Pacifisms and not, today

A key example of groups insurgents in opposition to Putin’s war is the Feminist resistance against war, a network of feminist groups from all over Russia, born immediately after the invasion. In their manifest, published on February 25, 2022, the feminist Resistance had identified the ideological link between the macho chauvinism of Putin’s internal policies and the use of force in foreign policy, hoping for an overcoming of this model. In the following weeks, the network added clarification about his position on pacifism. The feminist resistance against war recognizes itself in a “conscious pacifism” (osoznannij pacifism), for which “defense against military aggression cannot be nonviolent”. Therefore, it supports in full the Ukrainian resistance, and is in favor of the supply of weapons by Western governments. At the same time, however, the Resistance raises a crucial point: Russia must be demilitarized, and this demilitarization comes from two fronts. On the internal front, desertion is encouraged, the downsizing of industrial production in the technical-military sphere and the reorganization of public safety agencies are called for. On the external front, the Resistance condemns the arms sales to Russia by several EU countries, including Italy, even after the sanctions package imposed on Russia in 2014, and calls for the immediate termination of these agreements. Similar is the appeal of the organization Vesnasigned by thirty-six groups, in which soldiers and reservists are given instructions on how to desert while minimizing the criminal risk.

It is evident how these positions detach themselves from “Tolstoy’s” pacifism and descend instead into a specific context, which becomes the starting point for the formulation of a situated and concrete ideology. The pacifist tradition is explicitly re-semanticized in the light of current events, rejecting an inverse process. Not surprisingly, the manifesto of the Resistance itself is placed within the semantic sphere of the clash: the resistance against war, a war on war.

However, they are different protests against military mobilization erupted in recent weeks in various peripheral regions of Russia, such as Dagestan, Jacutia and Burjatia. Local communities have protested against the authorities because of the methods of enlistment, en masse and without adhering to age and training criteria. A protest inevitably linked to the local perception of center-periphery relations, for which the center has kept a colonial attitude and extractivist through centuries and different forms of government.

In an analysis of Russia and pacifism dating back to 2018, Ivan Preobrazhensky he argued that a large-scale military conflict would be the only thing capable of challenging the hegemony of militarist sentiment in Russia, which enjoys mostly passive support, driven by the authoritarian and aggressive nature of the regime that ward off oppositional instances . Revisited today, this prediction reveals its full power: Putin’s regime must now contain a fear that creeps across the country’s eleven time zones, and which may have the power to instigate a broader reflection on Putin’s warmongering, and a reevaluation of hegemonic militarism.

Pacifism removed in Russia