The secret funerals in Pskov: Spectacles of war and specters from the past

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The secret funerals in Pskov: Spectacles of war and specters from the
past
Emil Edenborg, Department of Political science, Lund University and Department of Global
political studies, Malmö University1
Introduction
The war in eastern and southern Ukraine, in the aftermath of the 2014 Maidan revolution and
Russia´s annexation of Crimea, has brought renewed attention to the role of the media in
warfare. Many observers have pointed at how the Russian state-aligned media machinery is
mobilized in order to win not only the hearts and minds of people in Russia, but also of
Russian-speakers in Ukraine who consume Russian TV news (Goble 2014; Pomerantsev &
Weiss 2014; Kniivilä 2015). Thus, in addition to the warfare on the ground, there is also what
has been termed a “media war”, “information war” or “propaganda war”, involving national
TV channels, newspapers and radio stations, social media resources as well as international
media. Depending on which source people turn to for information – Western media, Russian
state-controlled media or Russian alternative media – the war, and the world, will appear as
fundamentally different, different images and narratives will be visible, and different
interpretative frameworks available.
This article concerns the politics and meaning-making practices involved in representing war.
In the context of the Ukraine crisis, I will deeper examine the “spectacle of war” – i.e. the
publically visible appearance of war, constituted by mediated images and narratives – as
produced by state-aligned Russian media. I ask how the spectacle of war produced by Russian
state-aligned media, rendering some subjects and narratives visible and other invisible, was
challenged by alternative media. For these purposes, I have examined representations in some
Russian alternative media – the newspapers Pskovskaya guberniya and Novaya Gazeta, and
the television channel Dozdh – which exposed how Russian soldiers who had supposedly died
in Ukraine, despite official non-involvement in the war, were being secretly buried. These
1 This is an early article draft, to be presented at the 15th Annual Aleksanteri Conference “Culture and Russian
society”, 21-23 October 2015, University of Helsinki.
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media were examined between 25 August and 31 December 2014. I discuss these exposures
against the background of a more extensive overview of state-aligned media, mainly focusing
on the news program Vremya on Channel One. I will contrast state-aligned media´s
representation of Ukrainian refugees fleeing to Russia, with their (non-) representation of
Russian soldiers who had died in Ukraine. The main focus of the analysis, however, is the
alternative media representations of the Pskov funerals and their aftermath. Importantly, the
analysis is not intended as an exhaustive examination of how the official Russian media
narrative was contested overall, but rather as a close-study of one particular moment of
contestation.
A core idea of this article is that the state-aligned media representations of the war in Ukraine
produced a particular “arrangement of visibility” rendering certain things visible or even
spectacular while excluding other things from the public sphere. I argue that the case of the
exposure of the secret funerals in Pskov demonstrates how those very arrangements may
become targets of contestation. As we will see, both the dominant spectacle of war and the
efforts to contest it invoked particular notions of gender and nationhood, and both mobilized
emotions by creating suggestive links that were not always articulated explicitly.
Visibilities and invisibilities of war
Though the practice of portraying war is far from new, as names such as Thucydides, Tolstoy
and Goya remind us of, there is good reason to argue that during the last decades of the 20th
and the first decades of the 21st century, we have seen an increasing spectacularization of war.
As the media have become increasingly integrated in the everyday lives of people, co-
constituting their lived worlds (Silverstone 2007), they are bringing images and narratives of
war and violence into the quotidian sphere with a speed, intensity, intrusiveness and graphic
quality not seen before. Live television broadcasting has turned people into consumers of the
spectacle of war allowing them to follow – in real-time – bombings and invasions via staged
visualizations sometimes resembling a computer game. Warfare has become a spectacular
media event (Katz & Liebes 2010; Kellner 2003; McInness 1999). Terrorists have adapted
their methods of violence to fit the logic of screen display (Silverstone 2007:27). Digital
interactive media have added another dimension to how people witness and experience war:
both state and non-state violence today is accompanied by cyber-attacks, information warfare,
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online hatred, video-witnessing and citizen journalism (Kuntsman 2010). Of course, to say
that war has become a spectacle does not imply that the media appearance overshadows or is
as important as the real bodily suffering of war, but rather that another dimension to war has
been added or reinforced. Spectacles of war have a performative function: they appeal to
certain publics, but those publics do not simply exist out there: they are (re)constituted in the
very moment of being addressed (Chouliaraki 2013:45). Others point at the depoliticizing
functions of war spectacles. Judith Butler (2004:148) argues that the mediated visual
aesthetics of war aim for a “shock and awe” effect that numbs the senses of the audience and
puts out its capacity to think. Susan Sontag (2002) writes that graphic images of war,
especially those depicting atrocities and deep human suffering, may privilege an interpretation
of war as a universal horror, a generalizable, sublime and almost epic thing, removed from its
particular and concrete historical context and the politics that caused it.
We should not understand the notion of spectacle of war as implying that all aspects of war
are visible to everybody at all times. On the contrary, spectacles of war involve what I call
“arrangements of visibility”, particular stagings of what images and narratives become visible,
where, to whom and how they are visible, and what remains invisible. Poststructuralist
feminists understand visibility as the object of constant regulation and contestation. As Kipnis
argues: “[v]isibility is a complex system of permission and prohibition, of presence and
absence, punctuated alternately by apparitions and hysterical blindness (quoted by Gordon
1997:15). In a similar vein, Donna Haraway asks:
In a world replete with images and representations, whom can we not see or grasp, and what are the
consequences of such selective blindness? (…) How is visibility possible? For whom, by whom, and of
whom? What remains invisible, to whom, and why? (1997:202)
I believe we must look closer at the political regulation of visibility, the mechanisms and
manoeuvres that determine what can be seen, heard and said in the public sphere, and what
cannot, but also examine the moments when those regulations break down. Public spheres are,
argues Butler, constituted by what appears but also by what is excluded, which images do not
appear and what stories are not told. Regulating what becomes visible in the public sphere is
to restrict lived reality and the field of perceptibility, i.e. the extent of what is perceived to
exist (2010:66). Absence, omission and invisibility are politically conditioned, results of
“historically structured angles of vision” (Shapiro 1997:17). If war has come to function as a
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form of theatre in contemporary society, this “theatre of war” (Caspar & Moore 2009:134) is
scripted in particular ways, not only orchestrating which images and narratives can appear at
all, but also in what ways those representations are seen and heard. We should thus study not
only what is visible and what is not visible, but also identify what frameworks for
interpretation, in Butler´s words “hegemonic grammars” (2004:13, 108), are available,
because they will affect how that which appears is seen and heard. In this process, the role of
emotions is crucial. Examining what she calls “sticky words”, Sara Ahmed (2004) argues that
by constant repetition and proximities in speech, affective links are created between different
figures: her example is the asylum-seeker and the international terrorist. The result is that the
two figures need not be explicitly tied together: when we hear the one we will, by the force of
affect rather than logical argument, think of the other, with paranoia, constant suspicion and
scapegoating as consequences.
The visibility/invisibility dichotomy does not fully capture the complexity of how images and
narratives of war acquire their meaning and become politically effective. In some societies,
there are histories which are not visible or explicitly referred to in the public sphere, but
which are still heavily, even disturbingly present. That which has been excluded, forgotten
and rendered invisible in dominant imaginaries may still be felt and known. Avery Gordon
(1997) argues that sometimes violent historical events, which are supposedly over with, return
to the public imagination as specters. People and histories, she writes, which have been
expelled, repressed and abjected from dominant narratives come to function as haunting
specters, unsettling and disturbing taken-for-granted truths. Though seldom explicitly
articulated or addressed in the public sphere, the spectral may nonetheless remind us of an
unresolved violent past through the uneasiness, implicit associations and emotional
connotations that certain things evoke. Gordon describes the spectral as
...the domain of turmoil and trouble, that moment (of however long duration) when things are not in their
assigned places, when the cracks and riggings are exposed, when the people who are meant to be invisible
show up without any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings cannot be put away… (2008:xvi).
Spectacle and spectrality are thus two different ways to conceptualise the function of visibility
in the politics of representing war. Spectacle is the overly visible, the aspects of war that are
being constantly displayed and talked about in the public sphere. The spectral, on the other
hand, is the invisible yet disturbingly present, that which is not displayed or referred to
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explicitly, but which haunts self-celebratory efforts to legitimize war, by bringing back
memories of violence that cannot neatly be accommodated within the dominant narrative.
In mediated spectacles of war, some subjects are rendered highly visible, even hypervisible,
whereas others disappear. People who are killed or mutilated in war may in media
representations and official narratives be talked about as “collateral damage”, and war
refugees are often represented as a depersonalized mass or “flood” (Ahmed 2014:46). The
frames of the media, argues Butler, thus produce differentialized dispositions for public
mourning, rendering some lives more grievable than other (2010:38). In the staging of which
subjects become visible in representations of war, and how they become visible, norms of
gender, sexuality, race and nationality are operating. Who is displayed and who is concealed
in spectacles of war, who is represented as heroic, who becomes a villain, and who is not
represented at all, signify and reproduce norms and boundaries of belonging, expressing how
a member of the warring community is desired to look and act (Casper & Moore 2009:134).
If the figure of the refugee is often constructed as ungrievable, the figure of the fallen soldier
has traditionally been put on display and celebrated as an example of national sacrifice, one
who deserves to be mourned and revered. The grievability and symbolic status of the soldier
is demonstrated and constructed by spectacular rituals and symbols, including ceremonial
funerals, military parades, monuments and days of national mourning (Wendt & Åse 2014;
Edkins 2003). Such spectacles convey, in sublime and mythologizing forms, particular values
and truths as natural and outside the realm of politics, such as the goodness and necessity of
state violence as well as its dependence on male strength. The figure of the soldier-hero who
sacrifices his life for the safety and survival of the collective is intimately bound up with ideas
of masculinity, narratives of nationhood and the legitimacy of the state (Mosse 1990).
Gendered narratives of male warriors defending the national body (often narrated as female),
as well as the bodies of “our” women, are a key element of national and geopolitical
imaginaries (Yuval-Davis 1997; Enloe 2000). As the body of the heroic male soldier is
represented as an incarnation of state power, variations in the symbolic status of military
masculinity are connected to changes in the national imaginary (Shapiro 1997:48, 160).
In the following sections, we will see that in Russian state-aligned media representations of
the war in Ukraine, traditional patterns of which subjects are rendered visible or invisible in
war were sometimes reversed: Ukrainian refugees fleeing to Russia were highly exposed in a
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positive light, whereas Russian soldiers who died in Ukraine were erased from public
narratives. However, as we will see, precisely these arrangements of visibility served as
targets of contestation.
Refugees as a spectacle
The refugee, fleeing persecution or war, is normally not a very visible figure in Russian
media. When issues of migration are discussed, it tends to be in terms of “illegal immigration”
from Central Asia, organized crime and terrorism in the North Caucasus, or “failed
multiculturalism” in Western Europe (Hutchings & Burchell 2015; Hutchings & Tolz 2015;
Russell 2005). To the extent that he or she appears, the migrant is often represented as an
absolute Other, as embodying an external danger, whereas the humanitarian aspects of refuge
are seldom visible. These are obviously patterns not exclusive to Russia, but similar to how
refugees have often been represented in the media also in Western Europe and the US
(Petersson 2006). In terms of visibility, the figure of the migrant often straddles the categories
of invisible and visible, unseen and ignored as a human being, but simultaneously
overexposed as embodying a threat to the nation (Brighenti 2007; Latham 2014).
Contrary to usual patterns, in official Russian media representations of the war in Ukraine
during the period of study, the figure of the humanitarian refugee was rendered hypervisible.
According to the narrative in state-aligned media, the war was causing a refugee crisis. On 12
January 2015 Vremya reported that half a million people had fled from Ukraine to Russia
since the start of the war (C1 2015c). Images were displayed which were said to show
refugees queuing at the border to get into Russia (C1 2014f). In contrast to how large flows of
refugees are often represented in both Russian and Western media, these reports did not
narrate the influx of refugees in terms of security threats or a potential rise in crime. There
was some mention of economic costs (Krupnov 2014), but the overall tendency was to focus
on the individual traumas of the refugees, how the war had affected them, the losses they had
suffered, and not least the sacrifices made by families in Russia who, according to the reports,
received the refugees with open arms. A typical story was the following, told on Vremya:
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In the Russian regions people continue to receive refugees from Donbass. Some farmers from Tambov
were not indifferent to the sorrows of their neighbours: when they saw a news story from Donetsk on TV,
without thinking twice they invited a family having a child with a cerebral palsy diagnosis (C1 2014g)
Generally, these refugees were represented not as foreign but as “ours”, by virtue of being
ethnic Russians, connected to Russia by shared language, culture and religion. The religious
affinity was underlined by stories such as Vremya´s report about refugee-children from
Ukraine participating in the yearly Christmas tree celebration in Moscow, led by the patriarch
Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church (C1 2015d). Another news item reported that the
Russian Orthodox Church “had collected more than 57 million rubles to help refugees from
Southeastern Ukraine (C1 2014h). Children and families were very prevalent in the narratives,
such as in an article in Argumenty i Fakty about Ks’usha, a Russian five year old girl who
broke her piggybank to help Ukrainian refugees (Vyskub 2014). Groups and petitions were set
up in social media with names such as “Help the Ukrainian refugees” (VKontakte 2014). If,
as Ahmed claims, emotions are produced in circulation rather than inherent in the individual
psyche (2014), these images and narratives clearly privileged endearing and affectionate
emotions towards the refugees.
As the refugees were constructed as already belonging to the Russian imagined community,
their coming to Russia was not narrated in terms of their going to a foreign country, but rather
as coming home. Argumenty i Fakty interviewed a sociologist who argued that the refugees
from Ukraine, in contrast to migrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus, “are people close
to us in soul and worldview” who could in fact help turn the demographic situation in Russia,
and that the refugee situation was a “civilizational test” for Russia (Prilutskaya et al 2014). If
the figure of the refugee in many cases is seen as embodying a threat to the nation (Petersson
2006), the refugee from Ukraine, in the state-aligned media representations, rather reaffirmed
and demonstrated the vitality of the Russian nation-state by stressing its attractiveness for
Russian-speakers abroad.
Though it is outside the scope of this article to estimate to what extent the mass flight from
Ukraine to Russia was “authentic”, some of the images which where displayed by Russian
state-aligned media as evidence of it weren’t. In some alternative media, it was revealed that
photographs allegedly documenting the Ukrainian refugee crisis had been taken from other
contexts. In July 2014 the webpage Stopfake.org, a site launched by Ukrainian journalist
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students with the aim to, according to the description on the site, “refute distorted information
and propaganda” on the Ukraine war, published images showing that footage used by Vremya
(C1 2014f) to illustrate a news story of Ukrainian refugees fleeing to Russia, in reality
depicted people queuing at a Ukrainian-Polish border crossing (Stopfake 2014a). The same
webpage showed that footage displayed by Russian state-aligned media, supposedly
displaying Ukrainian refugees fleeing to the Rostov oblast, was identical to older images of
refugees in Kosovo (Stopfake 2014b).
The latter disclosures, I believe, can tell us something about the limits and dangers of treating
photographs as uncontestable evidence. According to Roland Barthes, ”the Photograph’s
essence is to ratify what it represents” (1993:85), to authenticate that what is depicted has
indeed existed. Documentary photographs are powerful, Sontag argues, because they are often
seen as having their credentials of objectivity inbuilt, as being transparent windows to war
which tell us “everything we need to know” (Sontag 2002). However, precisely the
“declarative verisimilitude” (Gordon 1997:102) of photographs makes them particularly open
for accusations of being staged (Hansen 2011). Photographs are ambivalent, also with regard
to what emotions are produced by their circulation. As Kuntsman writes: the same image can
appear “once as truthful and heartbreaking evidence, and once as a skilful and evil deception”
(2012: 4). Photographs are often regarded as an inroad to the unique, specific and very
particular, but in this case, the disclosure that photographs from one context could be used to
depict an entirely different situation, pointed at the very opposite: the generalizing,
decontextualizing and detaching function that photographs can have.
For some people who took part of them, the exposures of the fake refugee photos may have
undermined Russian state-aligned media´s narrative of a Ukrainian refugee crisis. It is,
however, probable that the Stopfake campaign mostly spoke to an audience of already
convinced disbelievers. The exposure received some, although limited, attention in Russian
alternative media, where trust in the state-aligned media is already low or non-existent. Not
surprisingly, larger Russian media did not pick up the story. We will now turn to an exposure
that received much more attention.
The secret funerals in Pskov
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A status update appeared on 22 August 2014 on the personal VKontakte2 page of a woman
resident in the small Russian town of Pskov near the Estonian border, the wife of paratrooper
Leonid Kichatkin, which came to ignite a news story that spread around Russia and the world.
As later accounted by Aleksey Sem’onov, journalist on the local newspaper Pskovskaya
Guberniya who revealed the story, the message was:
“Life ended!!!!!!!!!! L’onya has died, the funeral is on Monday at 10 AM service in Vybutakh (sic). Who
wishes to say farewell, come we will be happy to see everyone”.
Two days later the message was removed and replaced with a short text stating that “My
husband is alive and well and we are celebrating the christening of our daughter”.
Nonetheless, Sem’onov and his colleague Lev Shlosberg went to the Vybutakh cemetery on
the mentioned date, 25 August. The reason was that Kichatkin´s name recently had appeared
on a list circulated in Ukrainian media with names of Russian soldiers who, according to
Ukrainian authorities, had taken part in battles outside Luhansk earlier the same month. At the
same time the Russian government continued to claim that there were no Russian forces in
Ukraine, and the commander of the brigade in which Kichatkin served had stated, on 22
August, that everyone in his brigade were “alive and well”. When Sem’onov and Shlosberg
arrived at the cemetery chapel, a funeral service was going on with a military ceremonial
guard. Later the same day, the journalists returned to the cemetery and found two fresh graves
with wooden crosses and name plates with the texts “Kichatkin Leonid Yur’evich, 30.09.
1984 – 19.08. 2014” and ”Osipov Aleksandr Sergeyevich, 15.12.1993 – 20.08.2014”. The first
grave had a photograph of Kichatkin, the second had no photograph (see image 25 and 26).
2 VKontakte is the largest social media community on the Russian-language Internet, very similar to Facebook in form and
function.
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Image 25 Image 26
Pskovskaya Guberniya published the account of the journalists illustrated with photographs of
the graves (Sem’onov 2014a), and other, nation-wide alternative media such as Novaya
Gazeta (2014a) and the TV station Dozhd (2014a) reported extensively on the secret funerals
in Pskov, publishing the same or similar photographs. Russian and foreign journalists came to
see the graves for themselves but were, on several occasions, attacked and chased away by
unknown men at the cemetery, and Shlosberg himself was beaten up by anonymous men and
hospitalized with a concussion (Prokop’eva 2014a). During the same period, various
alternative media reported about other secret funerals taking place in various regions of
Russia (Dozhd 2014b; Novaya gazeta 2014b). Interviews were published with wives and
mothers of soldiers who could not get hold of their husbands and sons, fearing that they had
been sent to Ukraine, and worrying about what had happened to them there (Racheva 2014).
Different regional Soldier Mothers organizations publically demanded information from the
army about the whereabouts of the missing soldiers. State-controlled media eventually
confirmed the deaths of Russian soldiers in Ukraine; we will return to these official reactions.
I believe the exposures of the soldier funerals can tell us something about how dominant
spectacles of war regulating what subjects are visible and not can be challenged. To
understand the reverberation of the disclosure, we need to look at how gendered mythologies
were deployed. In addition, we will examine how photographs were used to verify the
existence of that which the state was denying.
Invoking patriotic military masculinity
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In Russia, military masculinity and sacrificial death have a prominent place in public
narratives of national belonging. There is a strong mythology surrounding the Second world
war – which generally is referred to as the Great patriotic war - expressed in gendered
narratives about soldiers and wives, patriotic sacrifice and mourning. The military cult
connected to the Second world war has been and continues to be reproduced in films, songs,
literature, official rhetoric, monuments, street names and public holidays. However, the
unpopular wars in Afghanistan 1979-89 and Chechnya 1994-96, resulting in thousands of lost
soldier lives that were hard to narrate as sacrifices for the nation but were rather understood as
a cruel waste of lives in meaningless wars, contributed to a perceived “crisis of masculinity”.
These wars, along with political and economic turmoil, the breakdown of the Soviet empire
and the loss of international superpower status were tied to an imagined emasculation of the
Russian man (Zdravomyslova & Temkina 2001; Eichler 2006), sometimes seen as embodied
by the alcoholic and comic figure of Yeltsin (at the end of his presidency). In contrast, the
Putin period has been associated with a perceived remasculation, connected to the popular and
officially successful second war in Chechnya, economic growth and military build-up, and
incarnated by the spectacularly masculine figure of Putin (Rutten 2012; Foxall 2013; Goscilo
2013). This has been accompanied by a reinforced celebration and visibility of patriotic
military masculinity, in public narratives as well as everyday popular culture. The renewed
symbolic status of the soldier appears, one should remember, quite detached from the lived
reality of Russian soldiers as demonstrated by numerous reports of abuse and bullying in the
army. In addition, from the increased public visibility of military masculinity does not follow
that individual men are necessarily appealed by this ideal, especially in a country where
military conscription is a strong class marker, denoting a mans belonging to lower social
strata (Eichler 2006).
For a political regime that actively deploys the myth of male soldiers defending the homeland,
and for which the symbolic resurrection of masculinity is a source of legitimacy, I believe the
war in Ukraine posed a challenge regarding how the spectacle of war was to be orchestrated.
On the one hand, at least during the period of study popular support for the separatists and the
Russian government´s position vis-à-vis the Ukrainian government was solid, and both the
state-controlled public sphere and much social media were dominated by jingoist and
aggressive rhetoric (Suslov 2014). On the other hand, as Russia according to the official
narrative was not part of the war, when Russian soldiers nonetheless died in Ukraine, the state
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could not easily appropriate their deaths in national mythology and deliver on its implicit
promises that heroic sacrifices should be publically honored. National mythology had
constructed soldiers as grievable, yet they could not be grieved. This awkward tension
explains why the body of the dead soldier could be turned into a site of symbolic struggle.
Notions of honor and patriotism were repeatedly deployed in the rhetoric of the alternative
media that revealed the secret funerals. By drawing on the – in normal cases officially
sanctioned – myth of the heroic soldier, they actively exploited the gap between the public
visibility of military masculinity and the erasure of the dead soldiers from public discourse.
Dozhd presented its coverage on the dead paratroopers from Pskov under the headline “Our
soldiers”, thus emphasizing the symbolic link between the soldier and the national body.
Oppositional journalist Oleg Kashin wrote in Pskovskaya Guberniya about the 14 000 rubles
paid out monthly to the families of deceased soldiers:
These 14 thousand are the payment for the fact that they died “just because”. For the fact that nobody will
ever tell us openly by whom and for what purpose they were sent to Donbass, For the fact that there will
never be any medals “For Donetsk” or “For Lugansk”, there will never be any memorials, but only
“reliable partners” and new gas contracts (Kashin 2014).
In several of the reports, the state´s silence around the dead soldiers was described as treason
against the army and the families of the soldiers, such as when Dozhd, referring to the forces
behind the cover-up, said that “they have betrayed the army” (2014c).
In another article, Pskovskaya Guberniya wrote that while it was possible to understand the
reluctance of some family members of the soldiers to let journalists come and photograph the
graves
…what cannot be understood is nameless graves of soldiers contracted in the army, buried without honor,
without memory, without worthy headstones in an atmosphere of death-like silence… (Prokop’eva 2014a)
I believe that, by deploying the hegemonic idiom of male military honor, normally a symbolic
pillar on which the Putinist state rests, but in this case in order to criticize that state, these
narratives attempted to expose a breach in the symbolic alliance between the state and
patriotic military masculinity. Mythologies that are usually complicit with and conveyed by
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the regime were suddenly wielded against it. This suggests that the disclosure of the secret
funerals were a blow directed straight at the narrative fundaments of the Putinist state.
Good wives and mothers
To tell a story about someone who is missing under unknown circumstances is difficult: how
does one speak about absence and uncertainty? When there seemed to be no credible sources
on Russia´s military participation in Ukraine – it is hard to trust any side in an information
war – the narratives came to revolve around the very concrete act of missing itself, and the
persons who were missing or mourning the soldiers. Here, wives and mothers played a
prominent role. Edkins (2011), studying the politics of loss and missing by examining the
search for lost persons in various contexts such as Argentina after the military dictatorship and
in New York after 9/11, stresses the central role that women play in those practices. According
to Dorfman (2007), images of women with photographs of disappeared men have become part
of a global mythological landscape. In the case of the dead soldiers from Pskov, it is
significant that the exposure began with a social media post by a soldier´s wife. In addition, in
most of the media accounts, the manifest substance was not secret government reports or
sources within the army, but the stories of female family members who could not get hold of
their husbands or sons, fearing that they had been sent to Ukraine.
On 28 August 2014, Novaya Gazeta published the account of Olga, the wife of Ruslan, a
soldier serving in the same Pskov division as the soldiers buried at Vybutakh. In the article,
Olga accounts that Ruslan, on 16 August, had come home from military exercises for a few
hours, only to depart again.
They flew in on Thursday night, he had time to put a few things in his backpack and said: “We are flying
away”. He came at 4 in the morning, and already at 6 they were supposed to meet. Then he called me
around 16 o’clock and said: “We have arrived, it is very hot here”. That is all. Where was “here”, he
didn’t say (Petl’anova 2014).
Since that phone call, Olga says, she had not been able to come in contact with her husband.
She says that her sister-in-law managed to talk to an officer who certified that Ruslan is “alive
and well”. However, she claims to mistrust those declarations, especially since a soldier-
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colleague of Ruslan, hospitalized with a broken leg, had told her that Ruslan´s division was
fighting outside Luhansk. Her account contains no explicit criticism of the military or
government but focuses on her worries, for her husband, herself and her children: “I don´t
even know… If anything has happened – I do not even have my own place to live. And two
children” (Ibid). The article is illustrated with a photo of Ruslan, according to the caption
taken from their private photo album.
There were many similar stories. Dozhd reported that the wife of another of the soldiers in the
Pskov division posted the following text on VKontakte on 24 August:
On Friday morning I was happy – I was bringing some things home to Pskov to OUR house, but at noon
everything fell apart. I am at the brink of an abyss, on one side is our happy life, on the other, emptiness.
Please pray for my only and beloved Anton, how can such things happen, he is no more (Dozhd 2014d).
I believe that in the absence of any affirmative information about the whereabouts of the
soldiers, narratives such as the above, focusing on the private grief and worries of their wives
established concreteness and a sense of veracity. While endless “lists of dead Russian
soldiers” and “leaked documents” claimed to prove Russia´s involvement which circulate on
the Internet could easily be dismissed as fabrications, the particular story of a wife missing
her husband gave a form of materiality to the disappearance which the lists and documents did
not have: an embodied manifestation of missing. Also, by such accounts, in describing how
the family at home in Russia was in emotional and material need of the missing man, a
symbolic link was established between the soldier and the home, he was constructed as “our
soldier”, naturalizing his belonging in the national community. The trope of heterosexual love
was thus invoked to bind the soldier to the homeland, embodied by his wife (and children).
In the alternative media reports about the missing or dead paratroopers, a prominent role was
played by the Soldiers Mothers Committees, a coalition of regional organizations that since
perestroika have worked for the rights of soldiers enlisted in the Russian army, whose
activism during the first war in Chechnya gained them national and international fame, but
since then have been ostracized and excluded from large media. In the interviews in
alternative media, representatives of the organization spoke about how worried families were
contacting them to find out what has happened to their soldier sons, and expressed concerns
for how the soldiers are treated and what will happen to soldiers who return home from an
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undeclared war, for example whether they will have the right to pension. When asked about
reports about how family members are being threated to silence, Valentina Melnikova, head of
the union of Soldiers Mothers Committees insisted that family members have an
unconditional right to know, an answer perhaps more resembling an incantation than an
empirical description:
If they are being threatened, the relatives should turn to the nearest military investigative unit and tell
them about these idiots. Because nobody dares to threaten the relatives of the dead, captured or wounded.
Nobody dares to call this a secret. If they are enlisted in the army, there can be no secrets (Dozhd 2014e).
Not seldom, the Soldier Mothers talked about the soldiers as children in need of rescue. Such
infantilization could also be discerned in an interview with some mothers – not affiliated with
the organization – whose sons were reported to have been taken capture by the Ukrainian
army. In the words of one of the mothers: “Our only wish is that our children (deti) are
returned (…). If they offer us to come and pick up our children, we will go there. We will not
abandon our children” (Dozhd 2014f). This form of emasculation, the construction of the
soldiers as children in need, not only reverses the myth of the strong and heroic warriors, but
can be read as an implicit criticism of how the Russian military system has already
emasculated the soldiers, by denying them possibilities to act and speak for themselves as
active subjects.
Without doubt, many of the stories about wives and mothers drew on essentialist ideas of
femininity, motherhood and heterosexuality. Embodying notions normally associated with the
private sphere, such as home and family, and ascribed emotions such as love, grief and caring,
the women appeared less as political activists than as loving relatives. They were positioned
outside the realm of politics, interested “only” in knowing where their husbands and sons
were. The wives claimed to be uninterested in politics, some even explicitly expressed support
for president Putin (Racheva 2014). However, the very act of making public the
disappearance of the soldiers and the silence surrounding it, was in its essence political,
precisely because the disappearance itself was politically organized. And once again,
dominant mythologies of gender, on which the regime normally relies, were mobilized against
it. By subscribing to the figure of caring wives and mothers, a norm actively celebrated by the
pro-natalist and neotraditional policies of the Putin government, the women could claim a
position which would have been unavailable had they appeared as oppositional politicians or
15

anti-war activists (cf. Eichler 2006). Parallels can be drawn to how mother organizations in
other contexts, notably Argentina, have deployed traditional notions of motherhood to
criticize authoritarian and patriarchal regimes (Taylor 2001; Edkins 2011:164). Precisely
because caring and love has been constructed as belonging to the private sphere, when the
women spoke as wives or mothers they could present their claims as non-aligned and non-
ideological, which perhaps made the claims more difficult to dismiss. Thus a very political
critique could be delivered without appearing to be political.
“We saw their graves”
The claim to be non-political, to not be part of any anti- or pro-war campaigns, but simply to
search for the truth about what had actually happened to the soldiers, was not only
characteristic of the stories of wives and mothers, but recurred in many of the accounts in
alternative media. Frustrated by the lack of verifiable information and the multitude of
competing stories that circulated the “information war”, the journalists who exposed the
Pskov funerals seemed to be seeking for points of stability on which to anchor their story.
Whereas the focus on family members’ grief and worries provided one such concrete
manifestation of missing, another was the existence of the actual graves and especially their
documentation in the form of photographs. Pskovskaya Guberniya wrote:
In the context of an all-consuming propagandistic lie, you can only believe in the death of a person at the
moment his grave appears. I had the chance to visit a few graveyards and see a few graves. Other graves
were seen by people whom I trust. And to remove any doubts, they photographed these graves (Sem’onov
2014b).
Here, the insistence on sensual experience, that ”we saw their graves”, “we were at these
funerals, we saw the name plates on the crosses raised on the graves” (Sem’onov 2014c), and
that what had been seen was verifiable by photographs, became a forceful repudiation of the
authorities’ repeated claims that the soldiers are “alive and well”. To understand why for
example the photograph of a grave with a portrait of Kichatkin and a sign with his name was
invested with such weight, we should once again consider that photographs tend to be
regarded as objective evidence in a way that oral or written accounts do not. Barthes writes
that “photography´s inimitable feature is that someone has seen the referent in flesh and
blood”, it authenticates that the depicted object has indeed existed (1993:79, 115). A
16

photograph of a person, writes Edkins, is taken as proof that I did not just imagine her. By
making a person who is not here visible, she argues, a photograph can blur the distinction
between absence and presence (Edkins 2011:16f). Images have the capacity of animation,
they can evoke a direct emotive response and a sense of actually “being there” (Barthes
1993:20; Hansen 2011). In the reports about the secret funerals in alternative media,
photographs of the graves were presented as “speaking for themselves”, as authenticating both
that these particular soldiers had in fact existed, and that the official statements about Russian
troops not being present in Ukraine were false. In the information war with endless
unverifiable claims circulating, the image of a particular grave with flowers, a cross, a sign
with a name and a photo of a young man, deployed the logic of the very particular and
concrete as a way to root the stories of the paratroopers from Pskov.
Another quality that images have is circulability: the capacity to be reproduced and spread,
even beyond linguistic borders, as they are believed to be “readable” for everyone (Hansen
2011). Indeed, the photographs of the graves in Pskov, as well as other similar images from
other graveyards in Russia, spread on the Internet and were reprinted in various alternative
Russian media as well as in foreign media, with a speed and reach which would have been
unthinkable a few decades ago. Although the images of the graves in Pskov were not
displayed in the state-aligned media I have studied, the story soon became well-known among
the Russian public. One indication of the wide dissemination of the exposure is a poll
published by Levada Center on 29 September, according to which 46% of the Russians said
that they had heard about the deaths of paratroopers from Pskov on Ukrainian territory
(Levada Center 2014).
Official responses
So how was the response to the exposure of the funerals in Pskov on the level of official
narratives? The initial strategy of full denial and insistence that the Pskov soldiers were “alive
and well” (Sem’onov 2014a) was eventually abandoned. A letter sent by Shlosberg, one of the
journalists who uncovered the story, to the Central Army Prosecutor´s Office, in which he
demanded information about the fate of Kichatkin, Osipov and other paratroopers from Pskov,
received an official reply in November 2014, in which the army confirmed the death of these
17

soldiers “outside of their regular location” but would not reveal the circumstances around
their deaths due to laws of state secrecy (Sem’onov 2014c).
The reports that Russian soldiers had died in Ukraine finally appeared also in the state-
controlled public sphere. On 4 September 2014 the news program Vremya on the First
Channel told the story about a funeral, not those in Pskov, but in Kostroma, where a Russian
soldier who had recently died in Ukraine was put to rest. This was, according to Pskovskaya
Guberniya (Prokop’eva 2014b), the first time state-aligned media confirmed the presence and
death of Russian soldiers on Ukrainian territory. A closer look at this news report (C1 2014i)
gives us one insight into how the deaths of Russian soldiers in Ukraine were made sense of in
official narratives. Footage of a flag-draped coffin surrounded by weeping women, an
orthodox priest with a smoking censer, a military gun-salute and a band playing the Russian
national anthem, accompanied the following account:
Today paratrooper Anatolii Travkin was buried in Kostroma. About a month ago he set off to Donbass and
died in battle. He did not say anything about his decision neither to his wife, whom he had married shortly
before going, nor to the military unit in which he served. Officially he went on vacation. A military
honorary funeral was organized next to the grave of his mother. Among those who came to depart with
Anatolii on his last journey were his family, among them the grandmother who raised him, his friend and
colleagues. Anatolii Travkin was 28 years.
“It is sad that we lose young people. But I am proud that in our Russian provincial towns, there are boys
who are not indifferent to what is happening today in our world. And who, by the calling of their souls
and hearts, do what they have to do” – says VDV veteran Mikhail Kozlov”.
The same news item also told the story of Sergey Zhdanovich, who had died in May in
Donetsk after going there as volunteer. His widow is interviewed:
- He went to war knowing what he was doing. There was no way to hold him back, because the man took
the decision immediately. He did what a real man must do. We miss him very much. But we will be proud
of him for the rest of our lives.
As we see, also the official narrativization of the deaths of Russian soldiers in Ukraine was
highly gendered, deploying similar notions of heroic men and loyal grieving wives as we saw
in the alternative media. However, whereas the alternative media suggested that the state had
betrayed its men and women, Vremya presented, not surprisingly, the sacrifices made by
soldiers and wives as completely harmonious with official policies. The explanation that the
18

Russian soldiers who had died in Ukraine were volunteers going to the war on their own
initiative sought to reconcile their deaths with the official narrative that Russian forces were
not involved in the war, a story which did not change during the entire period of research.
The Pskov story and its circulation meant that events that the state had rendered invisible
suddenly had become visible and widely known. When full denial was no longer an option,
the state sought to establish a frameworks for interpretation designed to orchestrate how that
which had appeared was seen and heard. Smear-campaigns were directed against those who
had uncovered and spread the stories about the secret funerals, seeking to compromise them
by suggesting that they had suspicious links to foreign powers. On 29 August 2014 the
Ministry of Justice included the Soldiers Mothers organization in St Petersburg on its list of
“foreign agents” (Dozhd 2014g). A few days later, in a response to a letter sent by the Soldiers
Mothers demanding information about whether Russian soldiers were fighting in Ukraine, the
Ministry of Defense wrote that:
The information you refer to does not correspond to reality. Your speculations are based on information
propagated by media channels who are pro-Western and hostile towards the Russian Federation. Keep
your calm and respect the defenders of our homeland (Dozhd 2014h).
The news program Vesti on Rossiya-1 ran, on 17 September 2014, a story on the Lev
Shlosberg, the journalist who, after uncovering the story of the Pskov funerals, was beaten up.
Vesti presented documents allegedly proving that that Shlosberg, who is also local Duma
representative for the liberal party Yabloko, had regularly received grants from the US
organization National Endowment for Democracy. In addition, a video was shown said to
document a meeting at a restaurant between Shlosberg and the US General Consul in St
Petersburg. The clip was removed from the Vesti webpage but is available on Youtube (2014).
Such reports can be seen as a way to restore control of the spectacle of war. By putting the
two figures textually close to each other, affective proximities (Ahmed 2014) were
constructed that linked the people who reveal these stories with foreign powers, notably the
US government, with the possible result that audiences, when they see the one will
automatically think of the other. Although it was not said outright, the implicit suggestion
produced by those links was that stories such as the one about the dead soldiers from Pskov
had been fabricated by enemy powers to damage the morality of the Russian people.
19

Closing remarks: specters from the past
What kind of war was it? If it was a war, it was a strange one, without dead and captured. No one had
yet seen any zinc coffins. Afterwards we learnt that they had already been brought home to the city, but
buried secretly, at night, and on the grave plates was written ”dead” not ”fallen”. No one asked how it
came that suddenly twenty year old boys in the army had started to die. (Aleksiyevich 2013:33)
The above quote is not about the current war in Ukraine, but an excerpt from Svetlana
Aleksiyevich´s book Zinc Boys, in which she documents the stories of young Russian soldiers
who in the 1980s were sent to the war in Afghanistan under celebratory slogans of Soviet
patriotism and international socialist solidarity, but whose return was less heroically framed.
The advent of Gorbachev in 1985 and his policy of glasnost had opened up for heavy
criticism and public reappraisal of the war, and in this new societal climate, according to the
stories in the book, returning soldiers, many of whom were severely wounded physically or
mentally, were often met with silence or even despise, from friends and relatives as well as in
public discourse. As the above-quoted Afghanistan veteran accounts, a less-than-heroic
homecoming awaited also many of those who returned in coffins.
This analysis suggests that traditional patterns of visibility and grievability were reversed in
the dominant media representation of the Ukraine war 2014-15. The normally not-so-visible
figure of the refugee was hypervisible, and the opposite was true for the figure of the soldier.
Whereas soldiers returning from war have traditionally been turned into spectacles, the
homecoming of the soldiers from Pskov is better captured by the metaphor of specter. If the
spectral is the invisible yet disturbingly present, which haunts imagined communities by
revoking painful memories of violence and exposing silences and contradictions in dominant
narratives (Gordon 1997), I believe the dead paratroopers from Pskov came to play exactly
such a role. The story of how the state secretly buried the boys it had sent to their death, and
the images of their graves, could function as an echo from violent experiences in the past such
as the war in Afghanistan, seldom talked about in official narratives but present as a lived
trauma for many Russians. For others, the Pskov story might invoke memories of the Stalinist
repressions, another absent-yet-present episode featuring disappearance, state denial and
secret funerals (cf. Aleksiyevich 2014:240).
20

The exposure of the funerals revealed a gap between the loud and macho patriotism of state
rhetoric and the utmost silence surrounding those men who had died “for the nation”.
Precisely their erasure from the dominant spectacle of war made these dead soldiers
politically significant: they showed that there was something the state did not want to be
visible. The secret funerals were an unsettling indication that things were not in their place,
working not only on the level of rational argument but also of emotion and collective memory,
and thus the exposure was a real challenge to the narratives that legitimize the regime. It is, I
believe, against this background we must understand the reverberation and dissemination of
the story, but also the official response.
21

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