Russia hasn’t Treated Invalids from Earlier Wars Well and isn’t Set to Do Better for Those who’ve Suffered Horrific Wounds in Putin’s War Now, Kanygin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 2 – Ever more people are asking what impact the return of veterans from Putin’s war in Ukraine will have on Russia; but few are focusing on the way in which the Russian state will treat those who have suffered the most horrific wounds there and will require support for the rest of their lives.

            Russia’s track record of treating veterans from all its wars in the 20^th century is hardly encouraging, despite Kremlin hype about the need to give these heroes all possible support. And now that pattern is reasserting itself, with the regime talking about the invalids from this war deserving support but the veterans who’ve suffered horribly not getting the help they need.

            In what is the most comprehensive survey of this issue, Pavel Kanygin, the founder of the To Be Continued portal, says that unless there is a radical change, the prospects that invalids from Putin’s war will get the recognition and help they need appear likely to be vanishingly small (prosleduet.media/details/returned-from-the-war/).

            Even after World War II, Stalin’s regime treated invalids in a horrible way, confining many of them to camps, including in the Solovetsky Islands, where they were kept out of sight and worked to death and persecuting those who begged on the streets. (On Stalin’s invalid camps, see bessmertnybarak.ru/article/ranenie_polucheno_pri_zaschite_sssr/.)

            (For more on the invalid issue in Soviet times, see Valery Fefelov’s There are No Invalids in the USSR (in Russian, London, 1986 London in 1986) and Sarah D. Phillips’ article, “’There are No Invalids in the USSR!”: A Missing Soviet Chapter in the New Disability History,” Disability Studies Quarterly, 29:3(2009) at dsq-sds.org/article/view/936/1111.)

            Kanygin devotes particular attention to invalids from the Soviet Union’s 10-year war in Afghanistan, In that conflict, at least 15,000 Soviet soldiers were killed and “tens of thousands” of the troops dispatched there became invalids. The fate of the last was anything but something to envy.

            By the time the Soviet intervention ended, there were 3700 veterans in jail; 75 percent of those who had been married were divorced; 60 percent suffered from alcoholism and/or drug abuse; and three percent of them had committed suicide. These measures of despair were even higher among invalids because the Soviet state did so little to help, the journalist suggests.

            The editor concludes that the Putin regime shows little sign of being prepared to do more – and that likely means that yet another problem will arise in Russia even if and when Putin’s war there winds down. Instead, it may be far worse because the numbers of veterans overall and invalids in particular are already far larger.