Crime Far From Most Serious Threat Russian Veterans of Ukrainian War Represent, Russian Commentator Says

Paul Goble

    Staunton, Apr. 12 – Russian commentators and even officials have been discussing the likelihood that when veterans of Putin’s war in Ukraine return home, there will be a dramatic upsurge in violent crime (jamestown.org/program/russia-faces-upsurge-in-crime-as-veterans-return-from-ukraine/).

    But Insider writer Anton Pavlovich argues that history suggests returning veterans may present more serious threats including even to the survival of the social system and political regime that brought them home, possibilities that must be very much on the mind of Kremlin officials even if they aren’t talking about them (theins.ru/history/280009).

    Veterans, he points out, “not infrequently become a significant political force,” most famously in Germany after World War I when they became not only “the lost generation” Remarque and others described “but also in the end contributed to the coming to power of the Nazis led by Hitler.”

    Russia faces the possibility of something similar, he suggests. At the very least, the danger is far greater than what happened after the end of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. The number of Russians who have fought in Ukraine is far larger, and the number who have died or been wounded far greater as well.

    Even the Afghan war, “had a colossal influence on Soviet and Russian society,” Pavlovich continues, with veterans forming an important part of the criminal world in the 1990s and generals like [Aleksandr] Lebed and [Aleksandr] Rutskoy becoming “key figures of Russian politics in their time.”

    Now as the end of the Ukraine war appears to be approaching, veterans have already formed “de facto” a new social group in Russia, “’the SVO participants’ or to use a more familiar term, front-line soldiers whose ideas about their own place in society are unlikely to correspond to the reality” they will be asked to reintegrate into.

    Consequently, “the probability that those coming back from the front will form a lost generation in Russia now is high” and the risk that they may behave as German veterans did after 1918 too great to be dismissed out of hand. Putin wants to integrate them by giving them political jobs, but the reality is this: there aren’t enough such jobs to go around.

    “Since neither state corporations nor the civil service has enough vacancies to employee everyone who fought, the only real way to support them is to provide them with various benefits .. but that will only increase the discord between the veterans and the civilian population,” likely radicalizing both still further.

    But as the experience of Germany in the 1920s shows, Pavlovich says, “the masses themselves give birth to leaders, and both the leader of the Red Front, communist [Ernst] Thälmann and the Nazi leader Adolph Hitler appeared literally out of nowhere.” Something similar could happen in Russia when the troops come home.