Paul
Goble
Staunton, February 20 – In advance
of Fatherland Defenders Day, which many view as the main “men’s” holiday, the editors
of the Levada Center polling agency say that what many Russians think of as “a
real man” is the product of the brutal
system of dedovshchina in which more senior draftees and officers mistreat more
junior ones.
“In the last Soviet and first
post-Soviet times, this is how things stood,” they write in Vedomosti. “At
the age of 18, a young man educated” mostly by their mothers and the schools to
treat all people equally and with respect was drafted and trained to value very
different things (vedomosti.ru/opinion/articles/2020/02/20/823557-kto-muzhchin;
also posted at levada.ru/2020/02/21/kto-takoj-muzhchina/).
Mothers handed over their sons to
commanders “believing that the latter would make [them] real men.” But what military service did, the Levada
Center continues, was to show young men that the values of their mothers and of
their schools were incorrect and that in fact these values were “exactly
opposite” those that real men should follow.
Through the experience of dedovshchina,
they learned that they should not be defending the weak but beating them, “that
force isn’t in what is right” but in who has the ability and power to force
others in every and all circumstances to use force in order to impose his
will. “Justice, right and law are not
for all,” in this understanding, “but only for the weak.”
After military service, these men
carried the values they had learned from dedovshchina back into civilian life.
Is it any surprise that they, these products of the 1970s and 1980s, have made
the choice for their country that right arises out of force rather than the
other way around and don’t see any reason to help their wives or anyone else?
Such men not only offended their wives,
triggering a dramatic rise in divorces initiated by women, but their behavior, including
violence, alcoholism, and suicides, had other consequences as well, the Levada
Center editors say. “The authority of the draft-based army fell sharply and
above all in the eyes of women who did not want to give their sons to it anymore.”
In the 1990s, these attitudes were reinforced
by the very different requirements of employment in a de-industrializing economy
where as employees of service or other sectors required cooperation and deference
to customers who were held to be always right, statistics show.
And as a result, ever more families
sent their sons to higher educational institutions so that they could not only
avoid dedovshchina by escaping the draft but keep or acquire values needed for
the new society. This rush to
universities was not caused by a thirst for knowledge but rather a desire to
avoid the negative impact of military service.
These schools often did not provide
high quality education but they did offer what the students and their mothers
wanted: draft deferments and an escape from dedovshchina. And as a result, the
new rising generation of men is less like its predecessor and more like what
women say they want.
That means that it is now “becoming easier
for young men today to conform to the masculine ideal our women have carried
with them through all their hardships, to be the way women want them to be” and
thus making their congratulations of this men’s holiday more heartfelt.
But it also means, the Levada Center
editor suggest, that when this generation of men replaces the one now in power,
it will bring with it very different values and that this will change Russian life
in fundamental ways.
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