In October 2023, Reuters reported on Russian Storm-Z assault units assembled from convicts and soldiers accused of disciplinary offenses. A soldier who had treated wounded members of one such unit described their standing in the military hierarchy in three words: “They’re just meat.” These “expendables” were sent into some of the most exposed positions in Ukraine, with only few survivors left to describe their devastating losses. These modern-day battalions of Russian men doomed to die are an echo of an ancient past.
First thoughts might justifiably leap to Stalin as an obvious historical parallel, but the brutal dictator neither invented compulsory service nor established the Russian state’s claim on the lives of its young men. More than a century before the Bolsheviks seized power, imperial systems could compel a peasant to leave his village for decades in service of the tsar.
Today, Vladimir Putin’s government offers enormous enlistment bonuses, but also employs legal restrictions that can prevent soldiers from leaving once the ink is dry. Through empire to communism to Putinism, Russia’s political system has changed almost beyond recognition, but the underlying question remains unsettled; how much of a person’s life may the state demand?
It is tempting to answer with a sweeping claim about the Russian national character. Such a broad statement about “cultural DNA” ignores citizens’ convictions in favor of rulers’ capabilities. The more compelling continuity is institutional. Russian governments of profoundly different ideological outlooks have repeatedly built similar mechanisms for acquiring manpower, compelling obedience and accepting tremendous human losses. Their means have varied over the centuries, and their subjects have at times resisted fiercely, but the ceaselessly rhyming character of Russian history merits a closer listen.
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