On a Russian Telegram channel, Svetlana from Samara is making a public plea. She has not heard from her brother since the shelling of Makiivka on 31 December, which may have killed up to 400 Russian soldiers. Enquiries to the military registration, the city governor, the Ministry of Defence have apparently turned up nothing. ‘After all my appeals, requests, calls, I became desperate that no one was listening to me. Ordinary, simple people are not needed by anyone.’
Another, older woman, Valentina, posts from the same region. ‘Please help me find my son,’ she says. ‘He was in Makiivka on 31 December. Since then, there’s been no news. He is neither [registered as] alive nor dead. In the military registration and enlistment office they say “wait”. What to expect and how long to wait, to an inconsolable mother, no one answers.’
With the Kremlin, the Council of Wives and Mothers are, unsurprisingly, far from popular
Both are speaking on the Telegram channel ‘The Council of Wives and Mothers’, a group formed by Samaran resident Olga Tsukanova in late September, amidst suspicions the Russian army were making her son sign a military contract against his will. The group now has chapters in 89 cities across Russia, following the ‘partial mobilisation’ on September 21. They offer each other solidarity and are a piece of grit in the military machine, demanding information about their mobilised male relatives’ whereabouts and the often appalling conditions they are fighting under. Though demanding peaceful negotiations to end the war, they appear not so much against the invasion itself as violations of military procedure. Inadequate training, broken promises to new recruits about their battlefield postings, poor or non-existent equipment – all are on the council’s hit list.
Tsukanova’s organisation is proposing the creation of such councils in every major Russian city. On the one hand she must be applauded – she’s outspoken and brave and her Telegram channel is providing a genuine service to anxious wives and mothers who have few other outlets. Arguably, the channel is, however, undermined by other things it reposts: conspiracy theories about Zelensky bombing Ukraine, or blaming the Jews for Russia’s plight.
Without these bum notes, Tsukanova’s council might be a worthy descendant of the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers (CSM), an organisation set up in 1989 in response to widespread bullying and peacetime fatalities in the Soviet army. During the first Chechen War under Boris Yeltsin, the CSM famously bullied their way into barracks and prisoner compounds in Chechnya, often instrumental in getting their sons back home alive. Their public profile peaked in early 1995, when upwards of 200 members set out on a five-week protest march from Moscow to Grozny, the Chechen capital. The Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, it was said (only half-jokingly) was more daunting to the average Russian commander than the Chechen militants they were fighting.
But 2022 is not 1995, and Putin’s Russia is a far cry from Yeltsin’s – there are no independent TV networks in Russia to focus on the mothers’ plight. No tolerated opposition exists to the invasion, and its potential leaders – men like Aleksei Navalny or Vladimir Kara-Murza – are all in jail. Even to talk publicly of their bereavement may open mothers or wives up to prosecution for maligning the Russian Army. In any case, many would prefer to accept the official narrative that their husbands died gloriously in urgent defence of the Motherland than in a squalid, cooked up war. The CSM itself, after revealing in 2014 that Russian soldiers were fighting – against Kremlin assurances – in the Donbass, were accused of being a ‘Foreign Agent’ organisation. Though still extant, they have had to radically rein in their activities in line with the MoD, with whom now they must work.
All this makes the role of an organisation like the Council of Wives and Mothers more important. In October, a few weeks on from the mobilisation of their male relatives, women in Voronezh and Pavlovsk, frantic from worry, were filmed protesting to the authorities. Their men, they said, were almost untrained, ‘without food, without water, without adequate clothing,’ and had been sent to the front line as cannon fodder. ‘They are just workers in simple and peaceful professions,’ pleads one woman. ‘Call us back and tell us if our sons are alive and dead.’ ‘They completely ignore us,’ chips in another. ‘Because all their kids are at home.’
With the Kremlin, the Council of Wives and Mothers are, unsurprisingly, far from popular. In late November, Putin organised his notorious televised ‘meeting with the mothers’, complete with hand-picked and docile guests, several of whom the President allegedly already had links with. Needless to say, Tsukanova and her organisation were excluded from proceedings, prompting her to demand on Telegram:
Vladimir Vladimirovich, are you a man or what? Do you still have the courage to look us straight in the eye? Or can you only do this with the women you could choose for this press conference?… We expect an answer from you. Are you going to keep hiding from us?
As a result, Tsukanova was detained and the group’s V’Kontakte site blocked by the Ministry of Justice on the eve of Mother’s Day. Members have also complained about being tailed, not to say hounded, by the powers-that-be. ‘We are being constantly watched by security services,’ said Tsukanova.
The attitude of the Russian state to its mothers is a case of radically mixed signals. On the one hand Putin is out to ingratiate himself with them, speaking of their ‘punctuality… mysterious power… they always remain beautiful.’ Families of the fallen are invited to state ceremonies at which weeping wives and mothers are awarded medals (posmertnaya nagrada – a posthumous award), and salved with an array of military cliches. ‘Thank you to you all,’ a presiding officer intones on YouTube to a distraught audience, as soldiers goose-step ceremonially across the stage. ‘We will always keep alive the memory of your relative… Their names and deeds will be written in Russia’s history forever.’ Compensation packages, extremely generous by Russian standards, are offered to the families of the deceased. Hush money, cynics would say – though as claiming the compensation requires that a dead body be produced first, many families of the ‘missing’ have not been recipients.
While Putin may profess his admiration and respect (the words cost little), a more chillingly honest indicator of where mothers stand with the Russian state was given by Irkutsk governor Igor Kobzev. Addressing a group of Siberian women a month ago, he told them: ‘When I joined the military academy, my mother said a wonderful phrase: “From now on, you don’t belong to me. You belong to the state, to the fatherland.”’
And in fact, the antagonistic relationship between Russian mothers and the national army goes back decades. Even in the liberalising Gorbachev era, as Soviet specialist Julie Elkner points out, protesting mothers were smeared as ‘fuelled by female hysteria’, and the expression ‘mamen’kii synok’ (mummy’s boy) thrown about to humiliate – and silence – suffering recruits.
Yet such approaches, should they return, seem unlikely to deter Olga Tsukanova and her organisation. Asked by the BBC if the authorities were afraid of women, her response was frank. ‘Yes, they are afraid. Absolutely. Women are a strong force in Russia. Because when a mother fights for her son, it’s impossible to stop her.’
Should Tsukanova distance herself from the conspiracy theories, she might in time be proved right.
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