The Mother of All Wars

Illustration by Amber Tasniem

The grieving mother is a tragic figure, yet in the midst of her bitterness she has often been a source of resistance and light. Her protest is powerful in its rejection of the traditional notion of a mother who stays at home and diligently brings up her children, blithely uninvolved in the events beyond her front door. Suddenly, the domestic’s inevitable influence on the public sphere forces politicians to acknowledge this maternal trauma. Approaching this phenomenon in a modern context, we must wonder if and when Russian mothers will cease to tolerate the disappearance of their sons to the battlefields of Ukraine and pose uncomfortable questions to the Kremlin. 

There is a recent tradition of soldier-mothers rising against conflict in Russia; in 1995 the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers began a series of campaigns against the First Chechen War, beginning with a vigil held in Moscow, before 100 women marched from the capital to Grozny (Chechnya’s capital)  to demand the freedom of their sons. Not only did the group manage to liberate some soldiers from the military, but the images of ordinary, headscarf-wearing women protesting against the war raised awareness and arguably increased opposition to the military campaign, leading to its pause in 1996. 

The committee still exists, but the St Petersburg chapter was labelled a ‘foreign agent’ in 2014, and after the FSB released a list of topics deemed unacceptable for discussion/publication in October 2021, the chapter ceased to work in connection with soldiers for fear of criminal liability. A few weeks before the invasion, the Committee began receiving calls from parents whose sons were completing their military service and had been forced to sign contracts or moved to the border with Ukraine. They contacted the Russian Ministry of Defence, but didn’t receive a full explanation. 

In November, Putin arranged a meeting with mothers of soldiers serving in Ukraine where he congratulated them on their sons’ contribution to the Motherland, and ostensibly listened to their concerns. Perhaps this can be read as his attempt to quash dissent; he even appropriated the emotional language of mothers themselves, saying, “after all, for a mother, no matter what age her son is, he is always a boy, always a child”. The content of the meeting was harmoniously choreographed, with the women putting forward a few harmless complaints about the lack of camouflage uniforms etc, but mainly focussed on the pride inspired by their sons and linking their service to that of their grandfathers and great grandfathers who served in the Great Patriotic War. And at the end, the President expressed his belief that the mothers had been and would always be responsible for the foundations of Russia, passing traditions from one generation to the next. Paradoxically, this interpretation give some ownership to the mothers of soldiers who are ostensibly building a new nation, but also places them in a position of passivity by depriving them of any other role.

On the other hand, mothers in Ukraine have drawn attention to their plight, even reaching international news outlets. One woman, interviewed by the BBC’s Ukrainecast, explained how her teenage son had been dragged from his home and beaten by Russian military forces before being left in a cell for several days with no explanation as to why he had been apprehended. His mother expressed her belief that his eventual release had been thanks to the publicity his case had received in Poland and France.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the international community has tapped into the ‘mother rhetoric’, with Boris Johnson warning MPs in January 2022 that “If Russia pursues this path, many Russian mothers’ sons will not be coming home”. Perhaps even more dramatic was his video directly addressing Russians, where he told them that the crimes being committed in Ukraine betrayed “the trust of every Russian mother who proudly waves goodbye to her son as he heads off to join the military”. Indeed, the figure of the grieving mother is an international symbol who has made appearances far too frequently in recent history. Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, who called for justice over the ‘disappearances’ of their children during the Argentine Dirty War, provide an earlier example of where the international community was forced to pay attention to the suffering of the bereaved mother. In their white head scarfs, symbolic of the domestic sphere, they protested during the 1978 World Cup in Argentina, their ‘ordinariness’ garnering media attention in the same way as the Committee of Mothers had done in Russia. And like the Committee, they had a broad impact, prompting debates not only over the legacy of the Civil War, but also over the role of women and femininity in politics and violence. 

Almost one hundred years ago, Anna Akhmatova reflected on the loss of her son during Stalin’s purges in her poem Requiem. She evokes the candlelit image of ‘The Mother of God’ - the most important icon in the Russian Orthodox Church - elevating motherhood to biblical proportions, arguably reflecting on the weight that the mother holds in Russian society. 

Whether mothers will be able or empowered to employ this weight in the ongoing conflict is uncertain, but if they do they will be following in the footsteps of the many tortured mothers before them - Russian or otherwise.