Podlesnaia Ì.À. “Ethics” of war in the SMO soldiers’ letters to children. RUDN Journal of Sociology, 2024, 24 (3), 615–631. DOI: 10.22363 ...

Abstract

The special military operation (SMO) has actualized ethical and ideological aspects of war, which led to the corresponding social consequences. One of them is related to the educational-ideological component and manifests itself in the fact that children and schoolchildren began to write letters, send crafts and drawings to soldiers. In turn, these messages gave rise to a response movement in the form of personal and collective letters from soldiers to schoolchildren and “walls of support” made of children’s letters and drawings in dugouts. Thus, there is a kind of correspondence which reflects not only the ideas of civilians on the SMO events but also the soldiers’ “life world” and actualized values — manifested and realized during the SMO and then recorded in its ethical and ideological discourses. The article presents an attempt of an exploratory analysis of ego-documents — letters from soldiers to children — as reflecting ideas about war. The conducted analysis is metatheoretical due to combining discourse analysis (a common refrain), narrative analysis (letters) and biographical analysis (SMO as a kind of a temporary extended epiphany which makes a person rethink one’s life in the context of collective ideals). The main categories of analysis were as follows: attitudes towards enemy; attitudes towards killing; attitudes towards death; moral imperatives for justifying military actions; space of war. The results of the analysis of these categories represent the “ethics of war” typical for today’s Russian soldiers. The conducted study is interdisciplinary due to the theoretical combination of the ideas and approaches of military sociology, theory of values and ethics. In particular, the author mentions features of the so-called “new hybrid” wars, transformations of ethics in the contemporary society, and differences between the ideological and the ethical in collected narratives. The author comes to the conclusion that in terms of values and ethics Russian soldiers are in a certain sense located in the past due to an extremely revived historical memory (feats of grandfathers and great-grandfathers and the connection with them are especially significant), and this is primarily a memory of the Soviet past: the SMO is not only identified with the events of the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 but also borrows its rhetoric, reproducing its ideological and ethical narratives