Will Russian Mothers Step Up for their Sons?
Illustration Credit: Ken Downing
Vladimir Putin’s attempt to strengthen Russia’s military forces in Ukraine turned out to be chaotic, with some men reportedly being sent to the front with little or no training in the use of weapons there deployed. Are they being treated like lambs led to slaughter? If so, it’s not the first time in Russia’s history.
At the beginning of World War I, soldiers in Russia’s armed forces ran short of ammunition. In a memoir, Konstantinas Zukas, a Lithuanian who had enlisted in the Imperial Russian Army and was a captain in charge of communications for a division on the Galician front, wrote that at first the Russians fought in high spirits. Then, “despite major victories . . . . morale began to sink. . . . The head of our division received a secret order to ‘save ammunition.’. . . The artillery fared the worst. . . . .For a long time only 25 cannon balls were allowed daily for 24 pieces of equipment. That was almost a mockery. It was good that we could use equipment and ammunition seized from the enemy.”
Later, wrote Zukas, he learned that at the beginning of the war the czar led a meeting of the defense commission at which the chief inspector of the artillery, who was an uncle of the czar, Zukas believed, had announced that sufficient ammunition was available for six months, by which time the war would be over. He also argued that the Russian soldier was accustomed to fight better with lances than with bullets. The senior military chiefs shuddered at such a view. Soon it came to light that there was only enough weaponry for a few weeks and it had to be ordered, at very high prices, from America and Japan.
As revelation of these developments spread among officers and filtered down the ranks, contempt for the czar replaced the traditional veneration and desertions became common, Zukas wrote in A Glance into the Past – Memories of a Man and a Warrior – Material for Historians, published in Lithuanian in 1959 by Terra (Chicago).
Czar Nicholas saw his people as “a grey mass that required rule with an iron hand,” Zukas observed. But the czar had lost the ability to do so, the empire was falling apart. In 1917, the Russian Revolution began.
The historical parallel with Putin’s war in Ukraine must not be overstretched. Putin has not lost control of his people. But his blunders in trying to recapture Ukraine, especially the heavy loss of Russian men’s lives, could cost him more than he can afford. I’m remembering that in the late 1980s, before the Soviet Union pulled its troops out of Afghanistan after occupying the country in a failed attempt to prop up its unpopular Communist government, Russian mothers were traveling there to reclaim their sons.
Will Russian mothers step up to keep their sons from dying in Putin’s war on Ukraine?