(S)mothered

Story about the downfall of Russia’s most powerful anti-war organization and the meaning of motherhood in modern Russia

The Union of the Committees of Soldiers' Mothers of Russia is a Russian non-governmental organization that has been advocating for the rights of soldiers and their families since the late Soviet period. This organization, seen as the strongest force resisting the creep of militarism in Russian society during the 1990s and 2000s, has struggled to do so in the face of the Russo-Ukrainian War. This lack of action in the face of the biggest conflict for Russia since World War II shows not only the efforts that the Russian government has undertaken to silence the opposition, but also the drastic change in the understanding of motherhood, family and women’s role in the current Russian society.

Role of The Mother and Motherhood in Russian history

The perception of motherhood in Russia finds its roots back in the Russian Empire. The main crusader for traditional family values in Russia has always been the Orthodox church, even though the symbol of mother as the caretaker and guardian of people stretches back far beyond the acceptance of Christianity by Kievan Rus. In the orthodox church in particular, the mother of God, or “Theotokos”, stands as the highest of the mortal saints, second only to the holy trinity. As such, when the Russian Emperor Nicholas I forged the imperial ideological doctrine of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality” in the 1830s, the traditional family values of the Orthodox church became the official government narrative and the role of the mother stayed as the central part of these values. Nicholas I promoted the Virgin Mary as a model for women, reinforcing the idea that a mother’s duty was to nurture, educate, and instill religious devotion in her children.

The start of the Russian revolution marked a drastic change in how society viewed motherhood. Lenin was heavily influenced by Friedrich Engels' 1890 work on The Women Question and this, along with prominent Bolshevik women such as Inessa Armand and Alexandra Kollontai, shaped the view of the renewed structure of family and motherhood. As Alexandra Kollontai put it in her 1920 article “Women’s role in production: its effect upon the family”: “The workers’ state needs new relations between the sexes, just as the narrow and exclusive affection of the mother for her own children must expand until it extends to all the children of the great, proletarian family, the indissoluble marriage based on the servitude of women is replaced by a free union of two equal members of the workers’ state who are united by love and mutual respect.” 

While not completely advocating for undoing the concept of motherhood, it nevertheless called for rethinking it as a shared commodity for the communist state, arguing its integral role in women’s emancipation. The Bolsheviks advocated for the abolition of differentiated gender roles, and for the women in the party this meant not only their involvement in the public sphere, but also equality in private life.

Figure 1: Women's demonstration for bread and peace in 1917

As Stalin consolidated his power in the 1930s, he pushed through his own reimagination of the Soviet state. Soon after the death of Lenin in 1924, the policies around many societal issues began to change, with the 1926 Family Code reviving a more conservative definition of the family, doing away with the 1918 concept of "collective paternity". However, by 1936, when Stalinism had been completely established as the dominant ideology of the USSR, the changes were much starker. The Family Code of 1936 emerged along with an expansion of pro-maternalism propaganda. Hand in hand with restrictions on abortion and divorce came the increasing perks for motherhood and propaganda about the “mothers of the nation”. World War II especially turbocharged the pro-natalism as the concept of “Mother Russia” became entangled in the war effort and the post-war rebuilding of the USSR. Soviet propaganda framed mothers as national symbols of sacrifice, expected to endure grief silently while supporting the war effort. This veneration of “Mother Heroines”, mothers with a substantial number of children, continued until the death of Stalin in 1953 and to a lesser degree until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Figure 2: WWII monument "The Crying Mother of Dead Soldier" in Volgograd

As the Soviet Union was collapsing in the 1980s, the societal crisis morphed the concept of motherhood in two very different directions. On one hand the soviet memory of “Mother Russia” mixed with the rise of the orthodox church and the image of Virgin Mary used by the Russian Empire, reaffirming the traditional family model as the basis of a nationalist state. Evolution of this mix of Soviet and Czarist society has by now become the ideology of the current Russian state, but in the 1980s and 1990s its power was much less pronounced. On the other hand, there was the influence of the West, which during the Perestroika era helped give rise to the more individualistic path for young people, free from the ideological base of the USSR. The breakdown of previous ideological control over society enacted by the government meant that the sacrifice of the people for the “greater good” was not accepted in 1990s Russia the same way as it has been before or after.

Origins and Early Activities

In the shadow of the collapsing empire, the unexpected freedom of speech during Glasnost gave rise to Russia's first NGOs and amongst them, grassroots women's organizations. Out of all of them, the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers of Russia stands out as a political force like no other. The Soldiers' Mothers' movement initially emerged in response to restrictions on military service deferments for university students in the early 1980s. After successfully lobbying the USSR Supreme Soviet, a group of mothers secured the reinstatement of educational deferments in the spring of 1989. This success led to the official creation of the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers (CSM). The movement quickly gathered momentum all over the USSR as the poor living conditions in the Soviet conscription system and the presence of Dedovshchina (“rule of the grandfathers”) were an ever-present worry for millions of parents.

The Red Army had for a long time hidden the true extent of the hazing and abuse of junior conscripts. Dedovshchina, as it’s called in Russia, is most often traced back to the army reforms of 1967, which were the result of manpower shortages brought on by the demographic hole of World War II. These reforms introduced the four-class system by creating the bi-annual call-ups and allowed the draft of conscripts with a criminal history. The Russian prison system has always been a breeding ground of structural shadow society with its own jargon, rules and extreme levels of ritual humiliation and abuse. Soldiers were separated into different categories based on the amount of time they had been in the army. The first-year soldiers were expected to serve the old-timers (“grandfathers”) , give them money, food and other items and follow hazing rituals.

Conscript Vasilii B. described one of the rituals - “musical elk”: “You stand with your arms and fingers outstretched to the sides and sing songs. As you sing, you slowly move your hands toward your forehead. At the end of each verse a ded [“grandfather”], who stands facing you, punches you at the level of your forehead. If your hands are in front of your forehead, they break the punch. If not, you get hit in the face. The ritual derives its name from the fact that, when your hands are in front of your forehead, your fingers resemble the antlers of an elk.” Any kind of failure to follow orders of the “grandfathers” would lead to violent and sometimes deadly physical, psychological and sexual abuse. By the time Gorbachev came to power in 1985, the extent of hazing had taken on gigantic proportions. The Artūras Sakalauskas case, where in 1987 a Lithuanian conscript, after a rape attempt, killed eight soldiers who had been abusing him, became the first union-wide news story about Dedovshchina.

Figure 3: Soldiers from North Caucasus wrote “Daghestan” on the heads of younger soldiers, France24

In the first years of the CSM’s creation, the fight against dedovshchina became their primary focus. In 1990, they published a report claiming that 15,000 non-combat deaths had occurred in the Soviet armed forces during the preceding four-year period, and that 75-80 percent of those deaths were attributable to dedovshchina. During those initial years the work done by CSM was vital in bringing to light the abuses that were prevalent in the Armed Forces. They would often do surprise visits to military units to register the situation – “The first time we went to a military unit, we were told ‘Oh, now we’ll show you this, and we’ll show you that…’ And then we started to implement ‘dispersion’ tactics—that is, we would arrive at the unit, two or three of us would engage the commander in conversation, and the rest would scatter throughout the unit. And then when we came together again, we’d ask one another ‘What did you see? And what did you see? I saw a bruise. I saw a boy crying. I saw such and such.’ And this general information, as it happened, gave us a complete picture of what was going on in the unit. Because otherwise, previously, all this was veiled, it was concealed from outside view.” In 1990, some demands, including partial demobilization of the work battalions, which harbored an especially large number of criminal elements, were conceded by President Gorbachev, but in general, the situation did not improve much.

War of Mothers

In November 1994, the war in Chechnya broke out and this became an integral event in the rise to power of the CSM. Russian President Boris Yeltsin planned a quick military operation to "establish constitutional order in Chechnya" but the units including untrained conscripted soldiers were quickly shredded by highly motivated and experienced Chechen fighters during their advance into Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. The war devolved into costly back and forth in which thousands of Russian conscripts were killed and taken prisoner. With thousands of mothers worrying about their captured sons, the CSM gathered unprecedented notoriety and sprang into action. On January 3, 1995, the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers held its first anti-war vigil in Red Square, honoring those who had lost their lives in Chechnya. Three days later, on January 6, a group of organized parents, led by Maria Kirbasova, entered a military zone in Grozny. They came due to public invitation by president of Chechnya Dzhokhar Dudayev, who declared early in the conflict that he would release Russian prisoners of war, but only into the custody of their mothers. They remained there for a month, managing to negotiate the release of dozens of soldiers.

In March of the same year, the CSM started a march from the Kremlin Wall in Moscow all the way to Grozny where they hoped to obtain information and negotiate for further releases of Russian soldiers. This “March of Mothers’ Compassion” consisted of hundreds of mothers and monks and took them on a journey of almost 2000 kilometers into an active warzone. They arrived in Chechnya in early April, walking through the village of Samashki, where they tried to help survivors of a massacre there. Only a couple of days before the arrival of the mothers, Russian forces had carried out a brutal massacre of at least 300 villagers after which the houses in the village were burned. 

Massacre initially managed to scare surrounding villages into submission, but when a statement written by March of Mothers’ Compassion was read on national Russian television news, the brutality of Russian soldiers led to a serious backlash from the European Union and United States. On April 21st the march reached Gronzy and mothers walked through the destroyed city demanding peace in Chechnya and the withdrawal of Russian Forces. The war ended in August of 1996; the march remained the most ambitious action of the CSM during the war.

Figure 4: The “March of Mothers’ Compassion” in 1995

By 1999, the health of Boris Yeltsin had largely forced him to leave the political scene and give reins of the Russian Federation to his chosen successor, Vladimir Putin. Putin, as a long-time FSB operator, was not going to repeat the same mistakes as his predecessor. In his effort to build a new kind of strong Russian state, he was much less tolerant of any kind of opposition. As such, when the Second Chechen War started in August 1999, the conduct of the Russian government and military was completely changed. Chechnya was completely closed off with only very few journalists who managed to enter there and even fewer who managed to make it back out alive. The Russian army took a slow and methodical approach, bombing towns to the ground before entering and setting up "filtration camps" for civilians. The change that the Russian government tried to enact was not only on the battlefield but also in the society at large. 

As Laura Sjoberg and Caron Gentry explain: “During the first Chechen war, images of motherhood and femininity were crucial in turning Russian public opinion against the war. Russian and Chechen women together vocalized objections to the fighting…. The rhetorical transformation of Chechens from rebels to terrorists at the beginning of the second Chechen conflict was crucial to the government’s gaining and maintaining public support in Russia…. The emphasis on the ‘black widows’ as terrorists … provided support for the use of force generally in Chechnya … and specifically against Chechen women.”

Pro-Kremlin politicians and journalists started a smear campaign against Mothers’ movements. The most frequent attack along with accusation of madness, hysteria and political incompetence was that they are “foreign agents,” a critique still used to this day. Despite the limited information and campaign against them, the Soldiers’ Mothers were still able to maintain a strong position. In 2003, the Soldiers’ Mothers launched a campaign advocating negotiations with commanders of Chechen armed groups. In 2005, they engaged in talks in London with representatives of the Chechen side, resulting in the signing of the London Memorandum. This agreement called for, among other measures, European involvement in facilitating a peaceful resolution to the Chechen crisis.

Effects of the First Chechen War and the breakdown of the more moderate Chechen forces in the Second Chechen War caused an ever-increasing radicalization of Chechen fighters and reliance on fundamentalist Muslim groups spearheaded by Shamil Basayev. As the power of Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov weakened, Basayev instituted a campaign of hostage takings and suicide bombings. On the first of September 2004 a schoolhouse in the town of Beslan, North Ossetia, was filled with children, accompanied by their parents and other relatives to celebrate the beginning of a new school year. During the festivities, 32 attackers from Basayev’s Riyad-us Saliheen Brigade of Martyrs entered the school and managed to take over 1100 hostages. The three-day long siege ended when the Russian military stormed the school. In total more than 350 people died in the Beslan school siege, most of them children. This event rocked the Russian society like no other before, death of so many children especially became a sore point for the entire nation. While there were fears that the attack might reignite the Ingush-Ossetian conflict (East Prigorodny conflict) which had led to the displacement of up to 70,000 people just a decade before, ethnic violence remained limited. However, the political effects were wide and long-lasting. Anger against the conduct of the Russian government and security forces transformed the families of Beslan victims into a serious political force mirroring the Soldiers’ Mothers. A large chunk of those people remained politically active even after the official investigation was concluded, creating the Beslan Mothers' Committee and later Voice of Beslan organizations. 

These organizations first focused on civic activities, such as aid distribution, information collection and grief counseling. The only surviving hostage taker was charged in May 2006, but this did little to silence the mothers tired of the lack of accountability. As was said by the founder of Voice of Beslan, Ella Kesayeva: “We know the terrorists came to kill, and they should be punished, but those who were supposed to save the hostages are also guilty. They are criminally liable for the death of innocent people. It’s not negligence on the part of the authorities, it’s murder.” 

Over the following years these organizations organized rallies, conducted independent investigations, blockaded a highway and went on a hunger strike. The Voice of Beslan especially became a serious voice fighting for human rights and against Putin. On June 4, 2008, the Voice of Beslan filed criminal charges against Vladimir Putin for violations of eleven articles of the Russian Criminal Code, including negligence and murder and in March 2012, members of the Voice of Beslan attempted to become election observers “to monitor the purity of elections” in the upcoming presidential race. Like the Soldiers’ Mothers before them, the Beslan mothers found themselves transformed from grieving parents into political dissidents, facing state repression rather than justice.

Figure 5: Mothers lay flowers and light candles at the Beslan school gym in 2009, NPR

Extinction

In addition to the unexpected demand of government accountability, the Beslan school massacre brought on something far more sinister. Putin used the Beslan school siege as a justification to strengthen anti-terrorism laws and expand the powers of law enforcement agencies. The attack also served as a pretext for implementing measures that had little to do with counterterrorism but significantly bolstered Kremlin control. Among these was the abolition of regional governor elections, further centralizing power in Moscow. In 2008 the Voice of Beslan itself was charged, over an open letter heavily criticizing President Vladimir Putin, under the anti-extremism law that was conceived as a response to the Beslan massacre. In October 2006 the activities of many foreign non-governmental organizations were suspended using a newly passed law requiring NGOs to re-register as Russian organizations.

2008 marks what was supposed to be a long-waited victory for the Soldiers’ Mothers. Following the Russo-Georgian War in August, the Russian Defence Ministry finally started reforming the Russian Army. Wide selection of reforms were introduced, including cutting compulsory service from two years to one, reducing the size of the army and changing the military’s management and education system. While this did lead to the notable reduction in hazing, the problem is still a very serious chronical illness of the Russian army, especially since the widening of Russo-Ukrainian war in 2022.

Between the end of the Second Chechen war and the annexation of Crimea most of the Russian civil society crumbled under the pressure of the Russian government. Many of the journalists and activists fighting since the 1980s were either killed or forced to leave the country. Unlike many other opponents of Putin, the Soldiers' Mothers proved to be resilient and often even untouchable. Russia’s cult of motherhood has deep roots and for anyone, even Putin, to attack them directly would be catastrophic. Nonetheless, the CSM has changed a lot since the 1990s. The beginning of the 21st century saw the gradual rise of the conservative politics in Russian society, supported heavily by Putin’s government and the Orthodox church. Drawing from the stalinist and czarist maternalism, this shaped a new understanding of motherhood which increasingly fractured the CSM. No longer a unified force, they evolved into a loose network of organizations. Some committees express strong support for traditional values, patriotism and the military, while others campaign for progressive human rights and against militarism.

The Holy War

In those precarious times for the Committee, the War in Donbas started. Until August of 2014 the amount of Russian forces on Ukrainian territory was relatively limited, consisting mostly of special forces and paramilitary groupings. Success of Ukrainian forces around Luhansk and Donetsk in July and August, however, forced the Russian government into much more brazen action. In the end of August the Russian government deployed a large number of (allegedly at first around 4000) regular army troops into Donbas, leading to withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from a large part of the area. Soldiers' Mothers of Saint Petersburg first publicly reported that soldiers were being sent to and dying in Ukraine in August 2014. As a response to that, the organisation was declared a “foreign agent” on 29th of August and head of local Committee of Soldiers' Mothers in Budennovsk, Lyudmila Bogatenkova was arrested for financial fraud.

As the full-scale invasion started in February of 2022, the families of soldiers sent to fight were mostly left in a frozen state. Unlike prior wars, the society itself seems to be much more mobilized towards supporting the Russian government and as such the CSM has been impotent in organizing a united front. Mothers of Russian soldiers in Ukraine have instead formed smaller social media groups centered around specific regions and units. These groups work well when it comes to sharing information about status of units in Ukraine, but the fragmentation of those groups means that they are extremely vulnerable to government control and don’t possess a political component needed for actual change.

For the core of Russian society this war is different from Chechnya or Georgia. The Russian government and orthodox church have been mostly successful in framing the war as a part of a series of great patriotic wars which include the French invasion of Russia, World War I and especially World War II. The invasion is pushed to the Russian society as a “Holy War” for the very survival of Russian people. While the Kremlin worked hard to frame the war in Ukraine as a sacred duty, this message resonates not only due to state propaganda but also because of deeper historical anxieties—economic instability, post-Soviet identity struggles, and generational trauma from previous conflicts. This has made many mothers consider sending their sons to war as patriotic duty in defence of the motherland. Elena Evsigneyeva, who lost her son in Donetsk, said: "What do I think? Even though I lost my son in this special operation, in these hostilities, I supported and will always support the president and his policy. Yes, I lost my son, but I understand that this had to be done. If we hadn’t done this, then someday all this would probably have come to us.”

Figure 6: Putin at the staged meeting with soldiers' mothers in November 2022, The Independent

Shifting role of women in the Russian society in 21st century

In the morning of 21 February 2012, five members of Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot walked onto the soleas of Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Over the next couple of minutes, the band delivered a punk song praying for Virgin Mary, the mother of God to “Banish Putin” and “Become a feminist”. In addition to earning themselves prison sentences in Siberian penal colonies, they reframed the understanding of women as the anti-governmental force in Russia.

Figure 7: Pussy Riot perform ‘Punk Prayer’ in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, Financial Times

In the 21st century, as the Russian state pushes more and more for the conservative maternalism as the bases of traditional values and Russian Imperialism, the pushback against it has taken many opposing forms. As said by Yulia Gradskova in her article: “The reinforcement of the state propaganda of “traditional values”, presenting an unproblematic synergy between state security interest in increasing the birth rate and the “natural” happiness of maternity, led to several different ways of opposing these politics.” 

As organizations like CSM, which embrace maternalism as a positive instrument for protest against the war are divided, the organizations like Pussy Riot, which are more rejective of it, have taken the center stage. However, in society as conservative as Russia, these organizations find it hard to gather supporters. This means that feminist organizations that do want to manage a larger anti-war bloc have to do so treading carefully between pro- and anti-maternalist forces. Feminist Anti-war Resistance (FAR) group that was created in 2022 and has become one of the strongest anti-war groups in Russia, has been able to not only criticize state maternalist ideology but also used maternalism to protest against the war. While some mothers actively resist the war, others navigate a more ambiguous position, criticizing military leadership but not the Kremlin or seeking answers about their sons while still believing in Russia’s broader mission. This fragmentation has made large-scale mobilization against the war difficult.

It is also important to note that the “toxic maternalism” that the Russian government promotes is not only dangerous to the anti-war movements like CSM, but also to real people in Ukraine. With the support of the Russian government, up to 700 000 children from Ukraine have been taken to Russia, reframing cultural genocide as maternal compassion. Maria Lvova-Belova, the Commissioner for Children's Rights, who has taken charge in abducting children from Ukraine, herself has five biological and eighteen adopted children. She has described the difficulties to “civilize” the child she took for Mariupol: “My adopted son runs after my young children and says, ‘I will eat the Muscovite.’ And this manifests itself in everything. […] He tells them how he used to go out with a flag to demonstrate in support of Ukraine, how he used to celebrate various Ukrainian holidays. And he is proud of it!” 

The Russian state has determined motherhood not as taking care of one’s children but as a tool to transform them, whether they are one’s own or taken from elsewhere, into a part of the State. As an increasing number of Russian families adopt these kids kidnapped from Ukraine, it will make it harder for anyone in Russia to claim maternalism as something different than a state ideology. 

Figure 8: Maria Lvova-Belova and Moscow governor Andrey Vorobyov with children taken from Donbas, Lvova-Belova Telegram account

Conclusion

Soldiers’ mothers committee might be the strongest opposition organization that has existed in contemporary Russia, but its story is not unique. Almost the entire Russian civil society follows the same pattern: from its conception in the thaw of Glasnost, to the shaping during the First Chechen War, the suppression during the Second and finally, the quiet step-by-step extinction during the later years of Putin’s presidency. The downfall of the Soldiers' Mothers of Russia is not one of an organization but the very society in which it existed and the values which that society carried. In the 90s the existence of such an organization was seen as a normal call for the betterment of a new society and government. Over the past two decades, the Russian government has managed to make participation in organizations such as the CSM a subversive and highly political act. As the Russian government has more and more adopted the maternalist policies and iconography, the once powerful organization has been left in an inner conflict with itself with Russian mothers having competing definitions for what it means to be a mother.

Still, in a way Putin’s Russia has painted itself into a corner. Its promotion of family values has taken on proportions beyond control of Putin. It has created a society where extreme violence against women and different nationalities is tolerated but the sanctity of the “mothers of warriors” is superior to almost everything else. Unlike other political opposition, Putin cannot use violence against soldiers’ mothers as in the societal hierarchy they stand above him, representing the idea of the Russian nation, the “Mother Russia”. This means that if there were a genuine mass movement against Putin led by the mothers of Russia, he would not be able to suppress it in the same way he has dealt with other opposition. However, as long as the meaning of motherhood in Russia itself is in conflict with itself, it is unlikely that even the once unrivaled Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers could challenge the course that Russia is heading in.

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