On the symbolism of Defender of the Fatherland Day, a celebration of Russia’s armed forces and de-facto Men’s Day.
Every year, on 23 February, Russia celebrates Defender of the Fatherland Day. The holiday was initially known as Soviet Army and Navy Day, and became to all intents and purposes a celebration of the USSR’s armed forces. But it’s long since lost this historical meaning. In fact, it’s become a de-facto "Men’s Day" in Russia, a counterpart to International Women’s Day on 8 March.
oDR spoke to sociologist and author of the “Monument and Celebration: the ethnography of Victory Day” research project Mischa Gabowitsch about how this holiday has been transformed in the public mind and what role the army has played in this.
Mischa, your research group has carried out a huge project focusing on 9 May (when victory over Nazi Germany and its allies in 1945 is celebrated). You have shown that this celebration is surrounded by a vast spectrum of what you refer to as “commemorative practices” – ceremonies, rituals, collective emotions. But what happens on 23 February? What kind of commemoration is it? What meaning does it have for people today?
There are some commemorative practices, over and above those observed specifically by the army, that I haven’t observed. 9 May is a concrete date, despite the fact that it has already turned into a cyclical ritual, like, for example, Easter. But 23 February has become a thematic celebration, unconnected with any concrete events. It’s interesting to follow its evolution: its name was formally changed from Soviet Army and Navy Day to Fatherland Defender Day, but in fact it has become a de facto “Men’s Day” – the male equivalent of 8 March for women. Even when I worked at the liberal New Literary Review in Moscow, all the male staff were presented with vodka and perfume. So any connection, not just with the Civil War but with any historical event, has simply been lost.
Russian society has become increasingly militarised, so the Army has been rewarded with enormous symbolic significance – but at the price of its political castration
I think that in that sense, 23 February symbolises the spread of militarisation in Russian society. Much of what has become part of a general social calendar – including the commemorations on 23 February and 9 May, has grown out of internal army practice. Many of the practices that formed the basis of Brezhnev’s Victory Cult in the 1970s were initially only of interest to serving troops. Immediately after WW2 the army erected memorials to itself – the first ones were all set up in front of Officers’ Clubs – and their purpose was to glorify marshals and generals. None of this had any significance for conscripts and volunteers who returned from the war and melted back into civilian life: it was for the Soviet Army, the Professionals. And 23 February and other days and commemorations are much the same – they initially existed for serving soldiers but then, because of the Army’s important symbolic role, they became public events.
There’s another important point here, connected with the distribution of power. Liberal critics looking at Russia very often say that there, institutions such as the Army, and now the Orthodox Church as well, wield enormous power. But in fact they have no real political power at all. I’ve never heard, for example, of a regional governor being dismissed because of pressure from the Church. But the Church does, of course, have a great deal of symbolic power: you won’t find a single celebration, a single cemetery, a single new memorial inaugurated without the Church being involved.
It’s the same with the Army. There has never been a single successful military coup in Russia’s entire history, nor any example of Army top brass acting independently and effectively in the political arena, rather than just allying itself with some political leaders or other. In 1956, for example, Khrushchev used the disgraced Marshal Zhukov’s reputation for his own ends, to win an internal Party battle, and then showed him the door. There was no suggestion here of the military playing a particular political role. But at the same time, the Army’s symbolic role continues to grow. I can think of other countries, especially in the Middle East – Egypt, for example - where the military play a much greater social and political role than in Russia.
Nonetheless, it is celebrations connected with military victories that become big public holidays. We can see this now in the case of the new National Cemetery. It was built on the initiative of the Ministry of Defence, comes under its aegis and is officially called the Federal Military Memorial Cemetery. This is the cemetery where the Russian president and other important figures will be buried – but a lot of people are not even aware of its existence. The Army managed to take complete control of its construction and symbolism, but it has no public face whatsoever. They couldn’t create a Russian Arlington. In other words, the Army has been rewarded with enormous symbolic significance – but at the price of political castration.
What role does the Army play in the commemorative practices that you are studying – processions, rituals, demonstrations?
Visually, it has a very strong presence. In many places where we conducted research, a satellite relay of a parade in Moscow, for example, (or local processions timed to coincide with it) was an immensely important part of an official celebration. And here, of course, troops, military hardware and so on play a big role.
But at the same time, the army plays a subsidiary role in the organisation of celebrations, and this role is getting smaller year by year. Serving troops have been squeezed out in favour of veterans; these days it’s those of the Afghan and Chechen wars. The veterans are in fact the biggest organisers of celebrations, memorial unveilings and so on. And after them, it’s the historical re-enactment crowd with their various bits of military merchandise – uniforms, forage caps to put on children’s heads and, of course, St George Ribbons, widely associated with Russian nationalist and separatist sentiment.
On the initiative of patriotic Moscow journalists, the St George Ribbon has been turned into a general symbol, worn by everyone, right down to cats, dogs and strippers
Anyone connected with today’s combat forces has to overcome serious internal resistance to these, as he knows that a Guard’s ribbon is a specific decoration, a concrete award for concrete service. But since 2005, on the initiative of not even the military, but Moscow journalists, the St George Ribbon has been turned into a general symbol, worn by everyone, right down to cats, dogs and strippers. If anyone had asked the generals about the appropriateness of this symbol, they would have banned it. But the generals had no say in the matter.
Let’s look at the “Immortal Regiment”, for example. Although this movement, whose members annually commemorate relatives who fought in WW2, was created by liberal, critically minded Tomsk journalists, it is still militaristic through and through: you only have to look at the terminology and the parades themselves. Admittedly, this has all mined the experience of a specific generation of Russian men who went through compulsory military service – but neither the symbols, the rituals nor the terminology that goes with them have any relevance to the army today. To put it bluntly, while these symbolic militaristic practices are spreading around the country, their significance for the army itself is on the decline.
But is the army itself – today’s combat forces – in any condition to come up with any new practices of its own? Has it created its own foundation myth?
Of course it has. But I feel that it has relied, to a greater extent than in the Second World War period, on dialogue with non-military ideologists to help create it. If you think about the Izborsk Club and other nationalist-patriotic organisations that have sprung up in the past few years, there are always generals in the army who are sympathetic to their ideology. Or look at right wing intellectual Aleksandr Dugin’s relations with the General Staff in the 1990s. Yet the army itself seems unable to generate anything on its own.
At the same time, the army is constantly involved in combat operations. Why can’t it build all this into a narrative that would be attractive to the public?
There is a narrative being built, of course, but not by the people involved. Not by the army leadership, who have adopted a rather passive stance on the matter.
Some practices initiated by former combatants do however reach the public, albeit with some delay. Nowadays veterans of the Afghan war are very active in all kinds of commemorations, but they had to fight for this over many years. We can all remember how in the 1980s and 90s their combat service went effectively unrecognised by the public, and they developed their practices and myths more or less in isolation. And there’s a parallel here with what happened after 1945.
Commemorative practices developed by ex servicemen only began to influence the general public when the veterans themselves had risen to prominence in other public spheres. It was the same with the Afghan veterans. They are now in their 40s and 50s, or older, and are senior officials and businessmen, which allows them to put their ideas into practice - they have the resources for it. But soldiers returning now from service in Syria have no such role to play. They become, at best, passive objects of commemorative politics; and at worst, if we’re talking about Donbas, their plight is simply hushed up, as was the case in 2014 with the secret burials of paratroopers from the area who died fighting in Ukraine.
How does Fatherland Defender Day differ in principle from other popular “professional” celebrations – Teachers’ Day, for instance?
The thing is that 23 February has ceased to be a celebration of people in a given sector of the economy – the military – and become too much of a general celebration. It’s probably to do with the fact that the occupation “member of the armed forces” has dropped off the radar of the vast majority of the population. Everyone, after all has had involvement with teachers, in one way or another. But, contrary to popular opinion, not everyone in Russia today has been through military service. There’s a huge class divide – if you have been released from compulsory service because you are going to university, or, as has happened in the last few year, paid your way out, then you can avoid any contact with the army.
Actually, not everyone in Russia today has been through military service. There’s a huge class divide, and many have no connection to the army nor any idea what it is like
There are whole swathes of the population with no connection to the army nor any idea what it is like. And even if someone has done his military service, it’s not the same as being in the regular army. If he did his service and now works in an office, his professional “Day” is office worker’s day. The regular army is made up of a professionalised minority belonging to certain specific social groups. And attitudes to 23 February will be very different in Moscow or St Petersburg to those in, say, Pskov, Artyom or other regions where the army is a major employer. So you have both class differences and regional specialisation.
And Russia is by no means unique in this. In the US in the 1970s, protest against the Vietnam War was so massive because nearly everybody, including the intelligentsia, knew someone in the army, who had either already served in Vietnam or might be posted there at any moment. Attitudes to the Iraq War were different, because the educated classes no longer had much connection with the armed forces (the military draft was ended in 1973 in the USA).
You have been studying how people in Russia remember events of the Second World War and commemorate 23 February, and 9 May as Victory over Fascism Day, while yourself living in Germany. How difficult is it to do this, outside Russia?
On the one hand, studying this area in Germany is a very gratifying occupation, as here, even more than anywhere else, there is a whole industry devoted to the study of memory and public discourse of memory. There is also a whole institutional infrastructure to support it. I, for example, am very grateful to the Remembrance, Responsibility and Future Foundation for funding our miscellany on the commemoration of 9 May and, most important of all, the latest meeting of our research network in Potsdam in November 2016. We’ve also had great support from the German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst. This network of institutional support is very strong in Germany and goes far beyond purely academic scholarship.
On the other hand, the very sophistication of Germany’s memory discourse has caused me some very specific problems. Here the emphasis tends to be on memory, that is, people’s recollection of the past. So when you are studying not memory, but commemoration – what people do rather than what they think about – you can come up against a certain lack of understanding. In the last few years people here have started to talk a lot about memory culture, Erinnerungskultur in German, and use that concept as a general framework for this kind of research. But this approach isn’t always appropriate for what I’m doing: their focus is on what people think, not what they do. It’s a historian’s approach – memories of the past are always central to their work. What interests me is something else – not whether, and to what extent, people’s recollections differ from professional historians’ perspectives, but what we can observe today in people’s practices.
The question I am interested in answering is: “what are people doing when they express an attitude towards the past?” I am not attempting to discover whether their expression of this attitude is “correct” or “incorrect”. But it is extremely difficult to explain my approach in Germany, where the concept of “memory culture” is all-powerful. A colleague of mine once said that in Germany there are monuments, but no commemorations. So when we study what happens to these monuments after they have been erected – what ceremonies and rituals take place around them, what emotions they awake in people, what happens on 23 February or 9 May or 3 December, the International Day of Persons with Disabilities – people here look puzzled.
In addition, since memory research in Germany is very closely linked to the Nazi past, there is always a strong regulatory component in it. Therefore, if we are looking at commemoration, we constantly have to indicate our own ethical boundaries and declare our own perspectives. And so any research becomes very politicised. Any activity that is considered ethically unacceptable from the point of view of memory culture – the appearance of neo-Nazis in Berlin's Treptower Park on 9 May, for example – also becomes unacceptable as an area of study. And although as a citizen, I understand this stricture perfectly, as a researcher I feel limited by it. Supposing someone came to a Victory Day event in uniform, my German colleagues would be immediately alienated by it – it’s militarism, so it’s bad. But my task is to understand why this person put on a uniform, what their motivation was and what they invested in this act.
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