This article is a preview from the Summer 2020 edition of New Humanist
I once met a Russian pacifist in Gorelovka, a dying village in Georgia. Nikolai Sukhorukov is one of the last elders of the Dukhobors, a sect whose name roughly translates as “spirit warriors”. Once their spiritual centre, Gorelovka is now a dispiriting place, lined with collapsing houses, livened by an occasional rumbling lorry.
The Dukhobors did not come here by choice. They were one of several Christian sects in the heartland of the Russian Empire from the late 18th century, attracting peasant followers who rejected the authority of the Russian Orthodox Church. They also refused to bear arms. Something had to be done. So in the early 19th century, the authorities banished the Dukhobors to newly conquered territories in the South Caucasus, curtailing the spread of “spiritualist anarchism” among the Russian peasantry and resettling a depopulated borderland.
Two centuries since the Dukhobors arrived in Georgia, their pacifist ideals still seem peripheral in their ancestral homeland. Patriotic militarism surged after Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. “The figure of the pacifist is simply absent in Russian societal discourse, even as an enemy,” explains Sergey Medvedev, a professor of political science at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. “Military service is seen as an integral part of masculinity, and pacifism as an historical curiosity.”
That curiosity occasionally draws Russian tourists to Gorelovka. They seem to be motivated less by pacifist principle and more by a general post-Soviet search for religious belonging. They can be found at Kalmykov House in the village centre, flanked by communal prayer rooms.
“To be a Dukhobor is a way of life,” Alla Bezhentseva says. She is head of the Russian Women’s Union of Georgia and author of a book on the sect. Most of the original inhabitants of these villages emigrated to Russia in the early 1990s, as Georgia descended into civil war. The few hundred pensioners who remain are their descendants.
Sukhorukov spends several months each year living in a traditional turf-roofed hut, tending to Dukhobor graves and holy sites. His is a particularly post-Soviet spirituality, blending his ancestors’ suspicion of holy books and leaders with the eclectic new-age belief systems which took Russia by storm in the 1990s. He believes that the era of the first Dukhobors is over, though perhaps brave new Dukhobors, in spirit if not in kin, will appear elsewhere – as and when they are needed. Sukhorukov is convinced that they are.
If writing about pacifists (or their absence) in Russia feels anachronistic, it is not because Russian society is irredeemably warmongering. Many of today’s post-Soviet states were forged in bitter conflicts. Anybody who has spent time with post-Soviet pensioners in the region will have heard the phrase lish by ne bylo voiny (“as long as there is no war”), often uttered after describing today’s economic hardships.
But an aversion to war is not the same as anti-militarism. Over 25 million Soviet citizens lost their lives in the Second World War. As the last veterans pass away, their annual commemoration on 9 May has sought new ways of celebrating martial glory. Many Victory Day “traditions” are recent innovations. The now ubiquitous black and orange St George’s Ribbon was popularised in 2005; the Immortal Regiment, when Russians parade holding photos of relatives who fought in the war, first marched in 2012. A new term has entered the dictionary in their honour: pobedobesie, or victory frenzy.
“The state never needed to encourage this; Russian society is traumatised due to a perceived loss of empire and a feeling of humiliation,” says Medvedev. “Military-patriotic symbolism is everywhere; take the recent slogans that ‘Topol rockets aren’t afraid of sanctions.’ Russia realises that it falls short on a lot of comparative measures, so falls back on customary arguments of force.”
He continues: “There is a strong equals sign between masculinity and military service. It’s no surprise that Vladimir Putin’s statements, with their primitive alpha-male machismo, ring a bell with the Russian electorate. They supposedly contradict the liberal ‘gender neutral’ Western politicians who fear using force. In that context, any attempt to insert pacifism into the agenda becomes pointless.”
But it was not always so. During the First Chechen War in the 1990s, anti-militarist sentiment surged in Russia. The Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, founded in 1998, agitated for an end to human rights abuses in the army, including the notorious hazing of new recruits. Russia, they argued, deserved a humane military worthy of its sons. Analyst Ivan Preobrazhensky writes that the Chechen War was the “last blast” of Russian pacifism, but that there has been a muted return in opposition to the war in Ukraine. The ruthless efficiency of law enforcement and the secret services, Preobrazhensky continued, had even taken a toll on more established anti-militarist movements. In 2014, after the outbreak of war in Ukraine, the Russian government briefly proscribed the Committee as a “foreign agent”.
The Russian authorities recently cracked down on anarchists and anti-fascists. This follows earlier crackdowns on conscientious objectors; in February 2017, police broke up a “Deserters’ Festival” in Moscow. The same year, a Russian court banned Jehovah’s Witnesses from practising their religion; like the Dukhobors, the group refuses military service.
If these moves did not provoke mass outrage among Russians, that may be because their attitudes to the army have warmed in recent years. A poll by the Russian Public Opinion Research Centre last year found that 87 per cent now approve of the army’s actions, compared with 52 per cent seven years ago. Over the same period, the share of respondents who said that they would like one of their relatives to serve in the army rose from 52 per cent to 65 per cent. While the polling agency is known for its pro-Kremlin leanings, these figures are consistent with widespread perceptions that conditions in the army have improved. In recent years, senior Russian officials, including Putin and Minister of Defence Sergey Shoigu, have openly speculated about transforming Russia’s conscript army into an entirely professionalised force.
If that happens, it could have repercussions for the military’s exalted place in Russian society. Although many young Russians are able to exclude themselves from the draft before they turn 27, few take advantage of the rights afforded to conscientious objectors, enshrined in the constitution and a 2002 law. The application is rigorous and requires several witnesses who can confirm that the applicant really holds the beliefs he professes.
The Movement for Alternative Civil Service works to raise awareness of the possibility, offering free consultations to young Russians. According to the movement, between 700 and 1,000 conscientious objectors opt for alternative military service every year in Russia. Journalist Makar Butkov was among them.
“When I turned up to report at the military commissariat, I wrote a declaration explaining that I was a pacifist, that I even reject the killing of animals. I said that the army was a hierarchical organisation where you have to carry out any order you’re given without the right to question it. I said that I find a system like that unacceptable.”
Butkov recalls that the officers took a dim view of his convictions. But they allowed him to undertake alternative military service, which lasts 21 months compared to 18 months for military draftees. He spent nearly two years in central Moscow working for the postal service, one of 63 professions listed on the Russian Ministry of Defence’s website for conscientious objectors.
“There are few men in Russia, particularly in small towns, who get to realise their life goals. Very often, militant patriotism is a way for them to improve their social status or simply provide an outlet for their aggression. In contrast, pacifism is seen as something for the weak. Even some women feel that way; I know many women who have said things like ‘if only you’d gone to the army, they’d make a real man of you,’” says Butkov. “People like that view the army as an institution for turning people into ideal citizens, by which they mean people just like them.”
But prestige and patriotism form only part of this picture. When investigative journalists from Bellingcat revealed the identities of the two alleged Russian foreign intelligence agents who assassinated Sergey Skripal in Salisbury in 2018, biographical information soon surfaced online. Reporters in Russia scurried to the hometowns of “Ruslan Boshirov” and “Alexander Petrov” to dredge up life stories, with choice quotes from ebullient ex-neighbours.
They painted dismal pictures of fading towns in remote rural Russia such as Loyga in the Arkhangelsk Region, hometown of Alexander Mishkin (alias Petrov). Another suspected Russian intelligence officer who travelled to the Netherlands was from the similarly desolate mining town of Gremyachinsk in the Ural Mountains. In towns like these, one Associated Press correspondent wrote, a military career is the only way out.
This hardly makes Russia extraordinary. While the British armed forces do not enrol conscripts, the military recruits aggressively in impoverished communities across the country. Around the world, leftist opponents of militarism remain wedded to the argument that a good foreign policy is simply a good domestic policy; wouldn’t the millions spent on costly warmongering abroad, the argument goes, be better spent on hospitals and schools at home? For people in Loyga or Gremyachinsk, it is the military which puts bread on the table.
This presents a conundrum for the most seasoned anti-militarists, as well as for avowed pacifists. As the horrors of war recede from those whose paychecks directly or indirectly depend on them, this could get more complex. Just as the US has anonymised carnage with the expansion of its drone war, Russia has started to outsource some of its overseas engagements to private military contractors such as Wagner, a company linked to the prominent Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin. Wagner’s ranks appear to be filled with professional soldiers. The poorer and more desperate of these soldiers, volunteers and conscripts alike, headed to eastern Ukraine. Their bodies returned, without fanfare, to cemeteries in Russia’s regions.
Many of Gorelovka’s houses have long since collapsed. After the Dukhobors’ descendants left in the early 1990s, Armenians and Ajarians from south-western Georgia made the village their own. It appears that some Dukhobor spirit remains in the country they left behind. Young Georgians are doing their best to avoid their fate as soldiers, if not strictly because of pacifist principles. Last February, officials in Tbilisi brought back military conscription, which had only ended the previous year. Girchi, a libertarian party, found a novel solution: in 2018, it erected an inflatable church where it ordained young men. As members of the clergy (albeit of the Christian Evangelical Protestant Freedom Biblical Church), they became exempt from military service. The authorities fought back; last March, a bill was submitted to Georgia’s parliament which would limit religious exemptions from conscription exclusively to the Georgian Orthodox clergy.
In 1895, when war loomed with neighbouring Turkey, the Dukhobors refused conscription, arguing that military service was irreconcilable with their faith. They collected all the weapons they could find in their settlements and burned them in a cave outside the nearby village of Orlovka. The reprisal was brutal. Cossacks were dispatched to Gorelovka, who rounded up dozens of Dukhobors to be exiled to Siberia or marched off to work as forced labourers. Leo Tolstoy was so touched upon hearing of the Dukhobors’ plight that he donated part of his earnings from the novel Resurrection to pay for several thousand to emigrate to Canada, where their descendants live to this day.
Exploring Gorelovka, we reached the site of the carnage: a cave beside a stream in a small gully. By its entrance, a stone inscription in pre-revolutionary Russian described the tragic events. Sagging beeswax candles clinging to the stone suggested the cave was still visited, if only rarely. Eventually, Sukhorukov, the Dukhobor elder, ran out of stories of his spirit warriors. We sat by the brook in silence.
While the ancestors of today’s Dukhobors burned the Tsar’s rifles rather than carry them into battle, Sukhorukov said that his generation acquiesced: some did serve in the Soviet Army. After all, he added unprompted, “it taught you the value of hard labour, comradeship and self-reliance.” In short, a Christian work ethic.
