Russia’s new crop of conscripts are a desperate, dejected bunch. A photograph showing an Orthodox priest blessing these men as they headed off to fight from the settlement of Bataysk in the Rostov region summed up their hopelessness. The names of such little known Russian localities must – to an English reader – all merge into one. They are simply over there, in Russia, where the suffering it has inflicted on a neighbouring country has finally come back to haunt it.
But I know where Bataysk is very well. It is a dull suburb of Rostov-on-Don, a city where I lived for four years – a kind of nothing village of one-storey villas, inhabited by Rostov commuters. It was somewhere students of mine living there would get teased about, the most unfashionable suburb of the city, a byword for total boredom – a place where nothing of any interest could ever happen. I remember my seven-year-old half-Russian daughter and me visiting it one Sunday when I was groping about for areas where I could buy a house with a yard for my animals, back in the days when it seemed Russia had a future. That site in the photo where the priest is blessing the conscripted – not to say doomed – men: I’m pretty sure I know that too. A pretty Orthodox church with a big courtyard in front of it, quite jolly on Sundays, where my daughter and I lit candles for her mother and grandmother. I imagine that its jolly days are gone now, and that Bataysk is sleepy no more, though the candles are now getting lit – by terrified wives and mothers – in thousands.
It is autumn in Rostov, a brief season in which the ramshackle city is usually particularly charming. The trees and bushes along Pushkinskaya Avenue, its pedestrian street, are turning brown and gold. Young mothers take their toddlers on the rides – mini-trains and moving animals – of Gorky Park. There are conkers everywhere and the first cool winds, after a blistering and dusty southern summer, blow off the steppe.
Students are hoping that Putin means what he says when he tells them they are exempt
But something very different is blowing through Rostov this September, as in the rest of Russia. At times, talking to people there, you have the sense of a city going mad. No one’s mind was put at rest by Putin’s promise on 21 September, when ordering his ‘partial mobilisation of 300,000 reservists’, that the mobilisation would be partial, that it would remain at 300,000, or that it would only be reservists.
After 23 years of Putin’s rule, most people know that a phrase of five words like that above can contain at least three lies in it. By the evening, police in Rostov – according to a friend there – were rounding up random young men in the streets to take them off to sign draft papers. Men were hiding at home, frightened even to pop out to the local supermarkets in case they got stopped. A video was doing the rounds of a policeman searching someone’s flat and finding its male occupant hiding – with grim black comedy – in the refrigerator.
Although thousands are trying to get out – the photos of queuing cars by the Georgian border tell their story – everyone I know is staying put, tied to Russia by family, job, a feeling of ‘where would I go and what would I do?’ and the thinning hope that the war will pass over them.
Students are hoping that Putin means what he says when he tells them they are exempt, feeling a security that may turn out – given the president’s recent pattern with promises – to be completely false. Others are simply being stoic, as their history has taught them to be. One friend, a university teacher, said:
‘Just give me a couple of days and I’ll take it on board, the situation will normalise. We have to get ourselves ready for the next shock. We have a saying in Russia that “There is no bad situation that cannot get a bit worse.”’
Yesterday, for the first time in months, I spoke to Ruslan, an artist friend, and Olya, his partner. These people had done everything they could to help me leave Russia in March, booking me tickets, getting up at four in the morning to drive me to the railway station, handling my panic, carrying my bags. How were they? I asked, for Ruslan is of fighting age. ‘Fine,’ they both said, no problem, everything was ‘normal’. How could they use that word ‘normal’? I asked, given how everything is. Olya, over the phone, seemed to give a wry shrug: ‘We’re Russian, Robin.’
Other people have simply stopped answering messages, feeling, presumably, a fear of everything – of foreign friends, of speaking out of turn, of incriminating themselves, that the announcement of mobilisation has set in action. Young people are more open. The older ones – with Soviet memories – more guarded. Russians of any age are past-masters at reading between the lines, and among all of them there is a feeling of ‘What does this really mean? What is the real end point of this?’ Among wives, mothers, sisters, ‘Which of my male relatives will be alive in a few months’ time?’
Putin, who has ruled the Russians for 23 years, is now killing them as a finale, as though showing them what he had up his sleeve the whole time. Perhaps, in his dark, nationalistic, mystical view of the world, he feels he is administering it to them as a dark final gift. So much for the fabled ‘stabilnost’ (stability) he offered his people in return for their compliance. As this week’s arson attacks, school killings and murder attempt on a draft officer have shown, there are few places less stable, more combustible, than Russia right now.
Well, you might say, the Ukrainians have been living this way since February. And for the past seven months, as anyone with friends in Russia knows, there has on Moscow’s side of the border been a kind of phony war. Many have simply got through the first phase of Putin’s Ukrainian invasion by retreating into their private lives, shopping, doing their jobs, going on holiday and pretending it isn’t happening, whatever their dreams tell them (they confess) at night.
It has been frustrating to watch, maddening to interact with and no one could argue that from a moral point of view it was desirable. As one looks at the photos and films of drunk bewildered ‘conscripts’ bussed off to the front, or the shots of their howling women, it’s clear that war – a war many of them didn’t seek – has come home to the Russians now, and few could quibble with that. One’s feeling may be of justice satisfied, but the compassion previously extended to the Ukrainians should surely be spread more widely now. For if anything has become blindingly obvious in the last few days it’s that, whatever the situation on the battlefield, the entire region’s fighting men, young and old, skilled and unskilled, Ukrainian and Russian – yes, them and their wives, mothers, sisters, daughters – now share one common enemy. How long it will take them to realise this fact is something that concerns all of us.
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