Russia’s appeal to 'warrior masculinity' is unlikely to encourage men to enlist in the army

In his May 9 Victory Parade speech, Russian president Vladimir Putin likened the war in Ukraine to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, saying “real war” had been unleashed against Russia.

He is reported to be planning to mobilise an extra 500,000 troops in 2023. In April he passed new legislation introducing electronic military draft papers, which will make it much harder to avoid conscription.

The last wave of conscription in September 2022 prompted an exodus of hundreds of thousands of young men to neighbouring countries. So to encourage men to enlist, the Kremlin has launched a massive media campaign appealing to the notion of “warrior masculinity”.

Russian news outlets and social media platforms as well as billboards and lampposts in big cities have been filled with adverts explaining that a man who joins the military is a hero – a real man deserving respect and admiration.

The advertising videos tell the stories of men who volunteered to join up. It’s a familiar tale of how signing up drastically improves men’s lives. Their children and wives admire their heroism, their ex-girlfriends fall in love with them again and they gain the respect of their communities.

Those who have left are portrayed as selfish cowards, as with one advert in which a woman says: “The boys left, the men stayed.” Another advert, which ends with the caption “You’re a real man, be one,” emphasises the good wages on offer to men who join up. Enlisting is presented as a means to improve one’s financial standing – pay off a debt, buy a car, move out from a small town into a large city.

But how effective are campaigns like this? My research on Russian masculinities suggests that the themes of “be a man” and “make more money” play into two of the most common anxieties among Russian men. But the problems experienced last September when – according to some reports – up to 700,000 left Russia to avoid conscription (something the Kremlin has denied) suggests that these messages haven’t worked very well.

Two paradoxes, which are legacies of the fall of the Soviet Union, can help explain the lukewarm response to the call to arms.

Unwilling to serve

The first is a structural contradiction which has persisted since the break-up of the Soviet Union. Despite the fact that military service remains a constitutional duty for men aged 18-27, only a minority of men in the draft pool end up serving in the armed forces. The rest avoid military call-up via legal and illegal means.

According to Canadian researcher Maya Eichler, compared to the Soviet era when 70% to 85% of draft-age men were conscripted, in the first post-Soviet decade or so the Russian state was only able to call up about 10% to 30% of men in the draft pool.

Secondly, my research has found that while Russian men tend to support the military as an institution, they are very critical of the way it is run in Russia. Men I spoke to – across several generations – called the Russian army “corrupt”, “venal”, “deeply damaged”, “rotten”, “discredited”, “severely underfunded”, and “a shameful place based on dedovshchina” (hazing and bullying).

I conducted these interviews in 2012-2014 and found the majority of men I spoke with expressed personal unwillingness to serve in the Russian army and were strictly against their own sons serving.

My research comprised in-depth biographical interviews with 40 Russian men of different ages and highly varied socioeconomic and professional backgrounds living in Russia and in the UK. In almost half of those interviews, militarised notions of masculinity and heroic fantasies were expressed. For 17 participants, the idea of being a man was first and foremost linked to the notion of a “warrior” or “defender”.

Conversations about the military were one of the main grounds where Russian men negotiated and established their masculinity, as well as that of other men. A la