Reforming habitus, reordering meaningful worlds
Soldiers' Mothers and social change in postsocialist Russia

Maja Hojer

University of Copenhagen, Institute of Anthropology
Thesis submitted for the Cand.Scient.Anth. degree (specialerække nr. 339; vejledt af Finn Sivert Nielsen)⁰

Contents

Abstract

Introduction
Reordering meaningful worlds
Reforming habitus
Studying social change
Structure of the thesis

Chapter 1: The Field and its Actors
Military service and the Russian Army
The Soldiers' Mothers of St. Petersburg
    - The organisation's methods
    - Daily activities
    - Draftees, runaway soldiers, and their mothers
    - Where are the men?
Conclusion

Chapter 2: Fieldwork and Methods
The course of the fieldwork and my position in the field
Methods and material
Ethical considerations

Chapter 3: Populating an intermediate social space–civil society revisited
Civil society – a contested social space
Public and private life in the Soviet Union and thereafter
Conclusion

Chapter 4: Arriving at The Soldiers' Mothers
"Soviet mentality"
Post-Soviet responses
Conclusion

Chapter 5: The Path to Freedom
Expressions of personal transformation
    - The School of Human Rights
    - Practical guidance and existential transformation
Own and common stories
    - Birth traumas
    - Fear
    - Militarization
    - Private into public stories
Conclusion

Chapter 6: Transforming the Self in Social Interaction
Technologies of the self
    - Individualized, governable subjects?
Technologies of the self in social interaction: The seminars
Working with Soviet selves: Knowledge, truth and incorporation
    - Gaining knowledge about the self
    - Producing "truths"
    - Incorporating practices
Conclusion: Responsible selves

Chapter 7: The Family, Gender and Kinship
Whose sons?
    - The power of kinship metaphors
The Father State and the Soviet Family
    - Soldiers and worker-mothers
    - A crumbling reciprocity
The importance of family networks
    - Bringing the family (back) in
Who is 'family'?
    - Gender and kinship: Women as the bearers of the family's responsibilities
    - "Motherist" organisations
    - A community of mothers
Conclusion: Father State vs. Soldiers' Mothers

Conclusion
A summary of the main arguments
When is "before"? Some thoughts about the study of change

References
Notes

Introduction

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia has been establishing the fundamental institutions of a democratic law-governed state and market economy. With the adoption of the Constitution of the Russian Federation in December 1993¹ and, by stages, the corresponding laws and institutions, Russians acquired new legal opportunities to defend their civic rights. It does not, however, automatically follow that local decision-makers, bureaucrats, and judges put the laws into practice, that people know how to make use of their rights or trust the supposedly democratic system. With the goal of making laws work in practice, a range of non-governmental human rights, environmentalist and consumer rights organisations have arisen since Gorbachev's Perestroika (1986-1991), mainly in the bigger cities.

In Russian, these organisations are called pravozashchitnye organizatsii (literally "rights-defending organisations"). They form the core of a special Russian variant of 'civil society' (grazhdanskoe obshchestvo or tretii sektor). Unlike those non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that were established with aid from Western governments, international agencies and private foundations after the fall of communism, these organisations, their ideology and methods grew out of the Russian historical experiences of arbitrary state power and terror (Daniel 2003). They emerged out of the small circles of dissidents and intellectuals during the 1960s and 1970s that turned into political protest movements in the 1980s as the Soviet state gradually weakened and loosened its grip on the population. Among the most prominent are The Soldiers' Mothers who use rights-defending methods to protect conscripts and soldiers in the Soviet-Russian army.² This thesis is based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted with The Soldiers' Mothers of St. Petersburg in 2003.

I attempt to show that local organisations based on home-grown ideas and traditional networks offer a potential for social change, and that 'civil society' does not need to be about implanting alien institutions, values, ways of acting and thinking onto existing communities (Sampson 2002a). By this I hope to contribute grounded knowledge to plans and projects promoting human rights and 'civil society' in Russia and a useful perspective for anthropological studies of social change in the post-Soviet countries.

The Russian Soldiers' Mothers' movement counts more than 300 organisations spread all over the country with the two biggest in Moscow and St. Petersburg.³ The Soldiers' Mothers have become world-famous because of the brave mothers who retrieve their sons from the war zone in Chechnya and for raising one of the few Russian voices against this war. It is less well known that the main activity of The Soldiers' Mothers of St. Petersburg is to teach draftees, conscripts, deserters, and their family members how to practically defend their constitutional rights. Their weekly lectures attract hundreds of mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and other relatives who help the young men in their families. Approximately two thirds of these youths have not yet been conscripted, but since the Russian army is known for bad conditions, diseases and violence even outside war zones, families use the organisation's law-based methods to avoid military service from the start.⁴

With the goal of exploring these women's practical strategies and how they carve out "some space of manoeuvre between the personal and the public" (Hann 1996:20), I set out to do fieldwork in St. Petersburg from March to September 2003, with a pre-visit in January.

I was interested in the interaction between people and state structures and the opportunities people have to exert influence on bureaucratic decisions. The methodological problems in studying state structures have been pointed out by various scholars. Since it is impossible to directly observe the state, it has been suggested that one should study it as the relationship between the "state-system", i.e. the agencies of the government, administration, military and police that make up the state in an empirical sense, and the "state-idea" that legitimates its power (Abrams 1988 [1977]) or that one should study how the state appears in everyday and localized contexts (Hansen and Stepputat 2001:5). Military service in Russia is mandatory for all healthy young men between 18 and 27 years and nearly all families in one way or another encounter the state and must deal with the question of conscription, so recruitment to the army seemed to be a concrete and observable interface between citizens and the state.

In this sense I might as well have dealt with the changing strategies of people who get thrown out of their apartments, pensioners who don't receive their pay cheque or the interaction between patients and doctors in public polyclinics⁵ (Höjdestrand 2003, Rivkin-Fish 2001). But I soon discovered that military service meant more to people than a detached interaction with the state, to which they relate as rational actors. Once I witnessed a conversation between a deserted soldier and his mother and the military officer who was responsible for the young man's case and wanted him to return to his unit. The officer tried to intimidate him by yelling: "Aren't you ashamed to let your country down and run away like a baby? Aren't you ashamed in front of your mother?" This shows that being a soldier is perceived as a moral obligation towards one's country and one's family, which is wrapped up in a complex of loyalties, symbols, and identities. By refusing to serve in the army or letting one's son become a soldier, the young men break with what was traditionally seen as a natural and necessary step in becoming a real man and full citizen, and their mothers with the duty to give their sons away. In other words, the social and political order is unsettled. I have sought to add these layers to my study by employing Verdery's (1999) notion of "reordering of meaningful worlds".

The Soldiers' Mothers Organization - St. Petersburg

Reordering meaningful worlds

In The Political Lives of Dead Bodies (1999), Katherine Verdery suggests that anthropologists should view politics as "a realm of continual struggles over meanings" (ibid.:24). Verdery maintains that politics happens in context and that we should think about politics "both as strategies and maneuvering and also as activity occurring within cultural systems" (ibid.:25). By seeing politics as complex and contradictory symbolic processes anthropologists can animate, or "enchant" (ibid.:26), the narrow standard conception of 'the political'. Verdery has coined her perspective on politics an attention to the "reordering of people's meaningful worlds" which includes social relations, political ideas and behaviour, worldviews, economic action, feelings, identities, ideas of morality, and the nonrational (ibid.:36). She suggests that this perspective describes the scope of changes in the postsocialist countries far better than talk about the "creation of 'civil society'", "construction of democracy" or "privatisation".

I will argue that The Soldiers' Mothers are involved in this redefinition of social relations, meanings and moralities. As we shall see, they do much more than create 'civil society' or teach people about new legal and democratic mechanisms. They bring about change in the Russian political landscape by helping young men to avoid military service in the army. Moreover, with their three hour lectures involving themes like fear of bureaucrats, human dignity and the family's role in society vs. the state's, they are engaged in an even more extensive redefinition some of the fundamental ways in which society is imagined in Russia. My fieldwork with the organisation thus became a window on the reordering of people's meaningful worlds.

Verdery's conception of "the reordering of meaningful worlds" concerns the shared world, the Durkheimian "conscience collective" (ibid.:35-36). The Soldiers' Mothers work, however, begins at the level of individuals and their embodied practices. I have tried to capture the connections between these two levels with the notion of habitus (Bourdieu 1977).

Reforming habitus

I agree with Verdery that "meaning" and "meaningful worlds" should not be understood as mere ideas in the cognitive realm, but as beliefs and ideas materialized in people's actions and in the surrounding society (Verdery 1999:34). Yet, I will add, with Bourdieu's (1977) notion of habitus, that people feel, think and act out of dispositions that are embodied, that is materialized in individual persons' bodies (ibid.:94). Habitus is a socially constituted system of cognitive and motivating schemes of perception, conception, and action that people acquire through socialization and that is continuously adjusted by their experience of the social and historical conditions under which they live (ibid.: 85-86). These dispositions are "given body, made body (…) through injunctions as insignificant as "stand straight up" or "don't hold your knife in your left hand"" (ibid.:94). That is, habitus is not an individual system, but subjective in the sense that every individual has internalized in his or her body a structural variant of the socially constituted system (ibid.: 86). Change of habitus - "the dialectic of […] incorporation and objectification" (ibid.:72) – must thus be studied on the level of individuals' embodied dispositions.

I will argue that The Soldiers' Mothers want to bring about political change by working to reform people's habitus down to this bodily level, e.g. when they train people to control their embodied fear through different exercises at their workshops. This attempt of the organisation was spelled out when I interviewed one of the two leaders:

Lena: I think that civil society begins from the bottom. I think what we are doing here is the real politics, because we are changing… we are encouraging people to change their mind, to change their mode of living.

From the outset, people do not come to The Soldiers' Mothers in order to change themselves or society; they want to save their sons from military service. But as we shall see, while helping people with this practical task, the organisation engages some of them in changing their understanding of the social order and their embodied dispositions of action. Thereby, The Soldiers' Mothers strive to change the political landscape in the whole of Russia.

The basic problem that this thesis addresses is thus:

In what ways do the methods employed by The Soldiers' Mothers of St. Petersburg contribute to the reform of people's habitus and the reordering of their meaningful worlds in postsocialist Russia?

I will explore this problem through the following research questions:

• What are the goals and methods of The Soldiers' Mothers? And how do they relate to the women's perceptions of their roles in society and their opportunities to free their sons from military service?
   

• How do The Soldiers' Mothers attempt to influence the women's perception of the social order and their practical strategies?
   

• What kind of changes on the personal and collective level does the organisation bring about?
   

Studying social change

How can anthropologist with our small-scale, time-specific, and relatively short-term fieldworks study social change? By which kind of analysis can my study of The Soldiers' Mothers become a window on social change in postsocialist Russia?

To capture these processes I have been guided by the Manchester School's attention to local conflicts and their wider context and the concept of 'extended cases' (van Velsen 1967).⁶ The extended-case method or situational analysis was developed by British anthropologists working in Southern Africa during the 1950s and 1960s under conditions of social conflict and rapid change (increase of population, urbanization and work migration) – conditions which the then-dominant theory of structural-functionalism was poorly equipped to grasp (Eriksen and Nielsen 2002:128-129). An extended-case analysis covers the same actors over a series of related situations and imbeds local events in wider and wider circles of context. Hereby the anthropologist attempts to present a fuller picture of complex social processes, spanning longer periods of time, distinct geographical places and large-scale socio-economic processes.⁷

The way I use the concept, I will not unfold the layers of context of one event (like Mitchell (1956) uses the Kalela Dance as a vehicle for his general account of social relations in Northern Rhodesia), but present several distinct situations and cases, I add layer by layer to understanding what is at stake at The Soldiers' Mothers.

Structure of the thesis

The first chapter describes the field and its actors. It provides background information on the Russian army and its standing in the Russian society. I argue that it is considered honourable and yet, in practice, unattractive to become a soldier. I present the organisation of The Soldiers' Mothers, their daily activities and practical methods to achieve exemptions from military service on medical grounds. The people who come to organisation are for the most part mothers or other female relatives of "draftees" (young men who have received a draft order, but are not yet enrolled in the army) or "runaway soldiers" (soldiers who deserted from their military unit).

Chapter 2 considers my fieldwork, the methods by which the data for this thesis were generated and the ethical considerations connected to the fieldwork setting.

Chapter 3 opens the analysis but also serves to conceptualize 'civil society' as an intermediate social space between the public and the private. This intermediate space is shaped historically and politically and The Soldiers' Mothers want to fill it out with new understandings and patterns of behaviour.

The arrival of a deserted soldier's mother to the organisation in chapter 4 gives a picture of people's expectations and desperate state of mind when they first turn to The Soldiers' Mothers with their sons' problems. The Soldiers' Mothers' reactions and recommendations, in turn, tell us that they want people to learn to handle available legal mechanism and not to avoid formal interaction with bureaucrats. Beginning with this first encounter with The Soldiers' Mothers, we accompany the women as they venture deeper and deeper into the organisation's different activities, from the introductory lecture of "The School of Human Rights" (chapter five) to the participation in the organisation's workshops, the so-called seminars (chapter six) and intense discussions among the organisation's "core" (chapter seven). These activities illustrate the different layers of the organisation's goals – freeing young men from military service, reordering people's meaningful worlds, reforming their habitus and contributing to the overall social and political change in Russia - which the women can commit themselves to in varying degrees.

In chapter 5 I analyze the women's stories about their sons and their endeavours to free them from military service as 'ritual performances' and reflections of the organisation's dominant narrative. Hereby we shall see how the women are engaged in reordering meaningful worlds on the individual and collective level.

In chapter 6 I move to the analysis of the women's concrete attempts to overcome their fear of bureaucrats, that is, the concrete ways in which their embodied dispositions of habitus are reformed. In order to arrive at a dynamic and operational analysis of habitus, I use Foucault's notion of 'technologies of the self' by which individuals act upon their own bodies and conduct. I argue that the women scrutinize their individual behaviour and try to align it to The Soldiers' Mothers' ideals.

In chapter 7 the reordering of people's meaningful worlds is further "enchanted" by examining the relationship between people and the state which in the Soviet Union was cast in metaphors of family relations where men were the Father State's sons and women the Father State's wives and mothers of their children. I will argue that the parent generation has deeply embodied these metaphors of kinship and gender which is an obstacle in helping their sons to be exempted from military service, reordering their meaningful worlds and reforming their habitus.

In the Conclusion I sum up my main arguments and reflect on the thesis' contribution to studies of social change.

Chapter 1: The Field and its Actors

Military service and the Russian Army

The saying that "The Soviet Union had no army, it was one" (Bladel 2001:52) reflects not only that the Soviet Union was one of the world's most militarized states with a standing army of 4.5 to 5 million soldiers and another 50 million in the reserve, but also that civil life was modelled on military organization. Every workplace had a mobilization plan ready in case war should break out, the mass youth organisations were organized in patrols and detachments, schools taught distinct military training classes for boys and girls, universities had special military departments for men, and military metaphors were used as political slogans, e.g. the Soviet People were meant to struggle for the "Victory of Socialism".⁸ The state defined itself as a "Warrior State" (Nielsen 1987:133) and canonized its victory and people's heroism and sufferings during The Great Fatherland War (World War Two). The parents who come to The Soldiers' Mothers with their sons grew up with these images, identities and gender roles (see chapter seven) and with the collective memory of the war (see chapter five).

The army remains a strong national symbol and "Victory Day", May 9^th, is still the most popular holiday in Russia with huge military parades and fireworks where the veterans and today's soldiers are celebrated. Military service in the army is widely considered everyone's contribution to the protection of one's family and country, an honourable duty, and a natural and necessary step in becoming a full citizen and "a real man". For young men from the provinces it is a chance to get away from the poor and dreary country-side, and many have listened to their fathers, grandfathers, and uncles tell with enthusiasm about their young years or leafed through their "memory books" with small drawings, poems and photos of fellow soldiers.

Due to the deteriorating conditions in the army and the risk of being sent to the war zone in Chechnya, the army has, however, lost some of its prestige and more and more young men try to evade military service. Besides the daily losses of Russian soldiers, often conscripts, in Chechnya, the Russian army is notorious for so-called "non-combat deaths": It is estimated that 5,000 soldiers "disappear" or die every year during their military service because of diseases, murders, suicide and "accidents" that often cover over violence among the soldiers (Bladel 2001:171). The biannual recruitment of conscripts for a two-year period gives rise to different kinds of abuse known as hazing that permits older soldiers to extort money, food, cigarettes and alcohol from the younger, make them work for them, beat and humiliate them. Hazing has long been considered a part of life in the barracks, but the extent of the problem was not publicly known in Soviet times. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, moreover, there is less discipline and control and hazing has developed into mortal fights, sexual abuse, and torture. Soldiers are ill fed and clothed, and tuberculosis, hepatitis, HIV, and other diseases spread due to the bad hygiene in barracks and hospitals. Officers get meagre pay and often try to make money by selling soldiers' labour to private construction companies. According to Russia's military traditions, soldiers' life is deliberately designed to harden them and conditions during military training should resemble the harsh conditions of war (ibid.:166). With the army's shrinking budgets and old equipment, soldiers spend most of their time on drills and receive no proper education. As a general rule, conscripts are sent far away from home for the whole conscription term, and home-leave is only granted in the event of special family circumstances. Soldiers in dilapidated barracks at miserable, desolate military stations have little other entertainment than drinking.

According to the "Law on Military Duty and Military Service"⁹ from 1998, two years of military service is mandatory for every fit man between 18 and 27 years. Summons takes place twice a year in two drafting periods, from April 1^st to June 30^th and October 1^st to December 31^st, and approximately 400,000 soldiers are recruited every year.¹⁰ In St. Petersburg, conscription is carried out by the city's 20 district draft boards (prizyvnaia kommissiia) and military commissariats (voennyi kommissariat or simply voenkomat). A team of 8-10 military doctors examine the young men, look through their "children's medical cards" from the polyclinics and other health certificates, and decide whether they are fit to serve in the army or not. Health conditions, family circumstances, and studies at institutions of higher education are legal reasons to postpone military service or be exempted.¹¹

More and more young men and their families use all legal and illegal means to avoid serving in the army: They enter college just to postpone military service, try to prove that they are unfit and are happy if their girlfriend gets pregnant. Newspapers and handbooks bring special listings of valid medical defects, and on the Internet, anti-conscription organisations and advocates of alternative service give detailed information on laws and opportunities for evading military service and applying for alternative service¹². Also, juridical firms offer their services in down-town offices and advertise on the Internet and in the St. Petersburg Metro. On the illegal side, health certificates and student cards are forged and can also be obtained on the black market. Bribery of the head military doctor or the head of the draft board is widespread. At the time of my fieldwork the unofficial price for an exemption was 1,500 dollars which is quite a lot considering that the average monthly income of state employees like teachers or doctors is 2-3,000 roubles (70-100 dollars).¹³

Data from the Leningrad Military District for 1992-1998 show that only 15-18% of the actual age cohort was effectively serving in the army – the rest managed somehow to escape service (Bladel 2001:190). The media and human rights organisations report illegal police detentions and round-ups on young men in the street, deportations to military stations without the required medical examinations, and denial of the right to appeal, because the recruitment authorities have problems meeting the quotas (Human Rights Watch 2002). Since draft evasion is primarily an urban, middle and upper class phenomenon, very many of those who actually are conscripted come from poor, rural areas, from broken families, have less than high school education (illiteracy is a problem in the army) and sometimes even have a criminal record (ibid.:200). When I visited a military station a few hours from St. Petersburg with The Soldiers' Mothers, I was shocked at how many were recruited to the army in spite of prior depressions, suicide attempts, problems with alcohol and drug abuse or violence in their families.

Faced with the daily losses of Russian soldiers in Chechnya and regular disclosures of violence, disease, murder, and suicide in the army, the majority of Russians favour a reform of the armed forces. In several television-transmitted speeches, president Putin has promised that by 2007 half of the army will consist of contract soldiers and conscripts will no longer be sent to "hot spots" (Izvestiia 2003, May 17). At present, some conscripts are sent to Chechnya before they have even fulfilled the first half year of preparatory service.

The Soldiers' Mothers of St. Petersburg

The Soviet public first learned about the violence in the army during Perestroika (1986-1991) and in 1989 a group of mothers in Moscow formed a civil initiative to protest against the conscription of their sons (Hinterhuber 1999, Caiazza 2002, Zdravomyslova 2004). In the following years, similar groups of Soldiers' Mothers were formed all over Russia. These local and regional organisations and committees differ in the extent of cooperation with the Russian government and military; the two main organisations in St. Petersburg and Moscow stress their opposition to the present structures of the state and defence, whereas some local groups support the president and military leadership's goal of improving the soldiers' conditions in the army and the defence of the nation.¹⁴

The Soldiers' Mothers of St. Petersburg¹⁵ was established in 1991 by a group of women who knew each other from the St. Petersburg civil rights movement during Perestroika and still form the board of the organisation, among them the organisation's two chairwomen Ella Poliakova and Elena Vilenskaia. As it is typical for this type of organisation in Russia, the leaders are charismatic and the organisation very personal.

Besides the two leaders, the organisation had employed four women part-time as staff members who helped with the organisation's daily activities (see below). The two leaders and two of the staff members were Roman Catholics, most of the other staff members and regular helpers Russian Orthodox believers, a priest from the Catholic Church visited the organisation once a week, and meetings at the organisation often ended with a prayer that everybody was invited to join.¹⁶

The organisation worked on a relatively modest annual budget of approximately 50,000 dollars which covered rent, wages for the staff and the expenses for their participation in a couple of international conferences and workshops every year. In the 1990s, The Soldiers' Mothers were involved in bigger cooperation projects with other Russian organisations funded by the European Union, but at the time of my fieldwork they only received small donations from private foundations, the American and some European embassies in St. Petersburg and international democratization, church and peace organisations.

According to the statutes of The Soldiers' Mothers, their goal is to "defend the lives, the health, and the civil rights of servicemen in the Russian army, recruits, conscripts, and members of their families".

In the beginning of the 1990s, one of the leaders told me, The Soldiers' Mothers engaged in formal politics – they participated in political hearings and tried to establish a political party - but disappointed by the political elite, they decided to build up 'civil society' (grazhdanskoe obshchestvo) from the bottom, and their work by the time of my fieldwork was mainly directed towards common people.

The organisation's methods

The organisation claimed, backed by a professor at the St. Petersburg State Paediatric Medical Academy (Levina 2002), that the general health situation in Russia was so bad, that fit young men almost did not exist. They advised young men to prove, with the help of their families, that they were not fit for military service and thereby to achieve a complete exemption from military service (family circumstances and higher education, on the other hand, only temporarily postponed military service).

Apart from physical disabilities, The Soldiers' Mothers claimed, most young men suffered from some kind of neurological or psychiatric disorder as a result of severe environmental pollution and all the genetic diseases that the Russian population accumulated during the wars, famines, and traumas of the 20^th century (I will return to this view in chapter five). A few specialized neurological and psychiatric clinics in St. Petersburg had the technical equipment to detect symptoms of these disorders (e.g. cysts in the brain), and The Soldiers' Mothers recommended families to pay the 150-200 dollars these examinations cost. The medical certificates were to be sent to the relevant institutions of civil and military bureaucracy on local, regional and national level (the draft board or the commander of the young man's military unit and the public prosecutor's office in the city district, city of St. Petersburg and in Moscow) together with a letter of complaint and additional information on the young men's health situation. Later, the young men's mothers or another proxy person presented these documents to the draft board and the military doctors that took the final decision about the young men's fitness.¹⁷

The medical diagnoses were instrumental, in that they served the young men's purpose of being exempted from military service. The military doctors, of course, operated with different health criteria for fitness, criteria that have been reduced during the last decades in order to reach the annual draft quota and thus were instrumental too (Hinterhuber 1999:27). The official percentage of unfit was 40-50% which is still comparatively high by international standards (Human Rights Watch 2002). Military doctors accused The Soldiers' Mothers of fraud and people of "buying" fake health certificates at private clinics. Also many other people I met questioned that the young men were actually ill and took The Soldiers' Mothers' methods for just one among a range of other ways to dodge military service.

Inside the organisation, I never heard anyone question that the young men were actually unfit, as this – the unfitness of the young men being the basis for the organisation's legal methods and the basis on which most of the exemptions were achieved - would have undermined The Soldiers' Mothers' authority. For the families, the claim that their sons were unfit for service legitimized - not only legally but also morally - that they would not become soldiers as men ideally ought to (I will return to people's dilemmas about their moral obligations towards the state in chapter seven).

Depending on the difficulty of the case, the authorities' responses and the mother's efficiency, it took from a couple of months to several years until the young man received his "military ticket" with a stamp that proved he was exempted from serving in the army. E.g. some women went to The Soldiers' Mothers every week and worked to overcome their fear of bureaucrats for several drafting periods before they felt confident to face the recruitment authorities.

Daily activities

The organisation was open for visitors and answered their telephones Monday to Saturday from noon until ten or eleven o'clock in the evening. New comers to the organisation were always asked to participate in "The School of Human Rights", a three-hour introductory lecture held by one of the organisation's leaders twice a week. Here, people were introduced to the organisation, its activities, methods to achieve an exemption from military service, and ideology, that is, how people's meaningful worlds should be reordered according to The Soldiers' Mothers (I will analyze "The School of Human Rights" in detail in chapter five). After "The School of Human Rights", families could receive advice regarding their individual cases, either by the organisation's staff members or by other, experienced women. Participation in the organisation's activities and the consultations were free and no membership was required.¹⁸

At "The School of Human Rights", listeners were invited to take part in the organisation's other activities: Every Tuesday evening The Soldiers' Mothers arranged workshops, the so-called "seminars", where problems encountered while following the organisation's advice were discussed in a smaller, more intimate groups (the functions of the seminars will be discussed in chapter six). During these seminars people learn, among other things, to control their embodied fear which I conceptualize in this thesis as an attempt to reform their habitus.

On Thursdays from five to six o'clock, The Soldiers' Mothers held a picket on Nevskii Prospekt, the main street of St. Petersburg, where they demonstrated against the war in Chechnya. Usually, only a group of five to ten of the organisation's staff members and regular helpers stood there with their placards and banners, and only occasionally other women showed up.¹⁹

Monday and Friday were called "help days" and people were encouraged to come and help the organisation with paper work, telephone calls, and practical errands. The Soldiers' Mothers depended on the support of such helpers who came to the organisation a couple of hours each week, took care of deserted soldiers and gave advice to their families. Helpers were usually mothers who worked to achieve exemptions from military service for their own sons.

Draftees, runaway soldiers, and their mothers

The organisation is situated on Raz''ezzhaia Street 9 in the old part of St. Petersburg. Only a little sign on the thick front door marks the entrance, but the word about the organisation travels from mouth to mouth and hundreds of people find their way to it every week.²⁰ They can be grouped after different criteria. For the purpose of this thesis I find it useful to distinguish between draftees and deserted soldiers and between the organisation's "core" and its "periphery" and to describe how these categories relate to people's social background.

"Draftee" (prizyvnik) is the Russian term for those young men whose fitness is being sorted out by the draft board (which involves 7-10 different specialists and can take some time) and those who have been found fit for military service and have received a recruitment order, but have not yet enrolled. The young men who are mobilized and have begun their two years' conscription service, but have left their military unit are called "runaway soldiers" (begunki) by The Soldiers' Mothers, a euphemistic term the organisation has invented for deserted soldiers. Draftees and runaway soldiers have different legal statuses that decide which actions are necessary to be exempted from (further) service. I estimate that around two thirds of the cases that the organisation dealt with during my fieldwork concerned draftees and one third runaway soldiers.²¹

I found that there was a connection between the son's status when the family came to the organisation and the family's material, educational and social background: As I described in the section about the Russian army above, those young men who served in military stations in and around St. Petersburg usually came from far away and from lower-class families with little education. When they ran away from their unit and turned to The Soldiers' Mothers, their parents had fewer resources to help them; sometimes they could not even afford to travel all the way from Siberia or the far North. In addition, runaway soldiers' cases were usually complicated, because they faced sentences for desertion and were wanted by the police. Some had lived underground for years.²² Among all those people who came to the organisation with a problem regarding a young man who was already in the army, The Soldiers' Mothers estimated that only in 30% of the cases a relative or someone else employed the organisation's methods and succeeded in receiving an exemption from further service. The rest never tried or gave up and the young man returned to his unit, kept hiding from authorities or ended up in prison.

In contrast, mothers in St. Petersburg who had the time and resources to deal with the question of military service before the son was drafted were usually well-educated, had no problems with alcohol or drugs and were less frequently lone supporters of their families. Their chances that the son would receive an exemption were almost 100%. The relatively privileged and well-off mothers also had the time and energy to attend the organisation's seminars regularly, give advice to new comers, and help out with paper work and practical errands. They took a special interest in the organisation's ideology and their own personal development, sometimes combined with an interest in religion, philosophy or psychology. They exchanged phone numbers and formed what they called "groups of mutual support" (gruppy podderzhki) consisting of 3-6 women who went to their sons' recruitment stations together and helped each other to write complaints. Sometimes, they sheltered runaway soldiers or even became their legal proxies. They kept each other posted about their own and each others' cases and news travelled fast through these networks. This lead to high efficiency but was also a potential source of conflict, because they tended to know everything about each other.

These women formed the organisation's "core" and counted around 50 women and two men at the time of my fieldwork.²³ Especially those who already had saved older sons, nephews or colleagues' sons from military service enjoyed high esteem, served as examples for the others and aspired to become members of the organisation's staff. Towards the end of my fieldwork, when The Soldiers' Mothers were harassed by the city administration that threatened to terminate their tenancy, this core of women organised a petition in support of the organisation.

The organisation's "periphery" consisted of new comers and people who only participated in "The School of Human Rights" and seldom showed up at the seminars. Among these were the mothers of runaway soldiers who, faced with the seriousness of their sons' problems, had neither the time nor the patience to participate in the seminars with their rather abstract discussions, and also some of the highly educated women from St. Petersburg who only came for the organisation's legal expertise, but found "The School of Human Rights" and the seminars a waste of time. They were not afraid to face the authorities and did not need the organisation's help to write letters.

The Russian sociologist Elena Zdravomyslova, who conducted fieldwork with The Soldiers' Mothers in the beginning of the 1990s and has kept in touch with them since and whom I met with a couple of times during my fieldwork, told me that the clientele at the organisation has changed to include more educated and middle-class families and that more men also attended "The School of Human Rights". She remembered that the atmosphere at The Soldiers' Mothers in the beginning of the 1990's was dominated by poorly dressed, desperate and crying mothers of deserted soldiers, that is lower-class women with which "decent" and "cultured" people avoid mingling. But as The Soldiers' Mothers increasingly engage in draft evasion – they have recently started to publish special booklets for draftees – the organisation becomes attractive for middle-class families too. I take this to be a sign of the gradual acceptance and normalization of the organisation and its methods, and that people gradually learn to deal with public institutions and gain trust in the legal mechanisms instead of avoiding or bribing officials or using private networks (these alternative strategies are described in chapter four). This is, however, not a marked, general tendency, because, as Elena Zdravomyslova also pointed out to me, common people's trust in public institutions is generally low. This includes NGOs which are regarded as semi-official institutions, and even if people cooperate with them, it does not mean that they believe in their altruism.

Where are the men?

There are many reasons why there were still far fewer men than women at The Soldiers' Mothers: First, in a high proportion of the families I came across, there was no father or other male provider; the women had lost their husband, divorced him or lived with an alcoholic or disabled spouse. Also, it was my impression that The Soldiers' Mothers was a gendered space, which was most obvious at the seminars were the subjects discussed (e.g. giving birth), as well as the jargon and behaviour marginalized men. Men often listened to "The School of Human Rights", but in spite of the organisation's encouragement, they rarely participated in the seminars that demanded more interaction. When the women occasionally brought their sons or husbands to the seminars, they felt uncomfortable, skipped some of the games and exercises and used any excuse to leave early. Apart from that, the gendered division of labour in Russia, both within the family and in the public, assigns mothers the role of caretakers. Practically, it was much easier for women to be admitted into the recruitment centres and military stations. The draftees and runaway soldier risked arrest if they joined their mothers. Many of them simply let their mothers take the decisions for them; the most important thing for them was to settle the question of military service once for all, either by serving or receiving a total exemption. Ideologically, women's activities were not perceived as political acts whereas men risked being accused of treason, cowardice, and lack of masculinity if they openly resisted military service. The theme of gender roles is even more complex and I will return to it in chapter seven.

On top of that, there are some methodological reasons why men – both the young men and their fathers – are underrepresented in my material: I have chosen to focus on the women because their work was most active and most visible – and most accessible for me. I spent a lot of time with some of the runaway soldiers, followed them to court, visited them in the hospitals and so on, but I was simply too shy and found it irresponsible and unethical to ask questions or conduct interviews that might offend them or expose their emotions and experiences of violence and abuse in the army (some of them had been raped or tried to commit suicide, as I could read in their papers).²⁴ Even their mothers did not ask the young men directly about their experiences and some mothers even hid their diagnoses in order to spare them. Instead, mothers comforted their sons and showed them affection by simply being with them, telling them about home and their relatives and friends there, and bringing them their favourite dishes.

Conclusion

In this chapter I have introduced the social and political context around the Russian army and the conscription of soldiers. I have shown that military service, on the one hand, is widely perceived as an honourable duty to one's country and people, but that it, on the other hand, has become less attractive to become a soldier, considering the deteriorating conditions in the army.

I have introduced the organisation of The Soldiers' Mothers, their daily activities and the legal methods they recommend for achieving exemptions from military service on medical grounds. In chapter five and six we shall see how people appropriate the skills to practically carry out the necessary steps of action, such as writing complaints and families' medical histories and confronting the authorities. The people who come to the organisation and actively engage in its methods are mainly mothers and other female relatives of either draftees or deserted soldiers, called runaway soldiers by The Soldiers' Mothers. The mothers of draftees are generally higher educated, come from a middle-class social background and have more time to become committed to the organisation's activities and self-work.

In the next chapter I will describe the course of my fieldwork with The Soldiers' Mothers and the methods used to generate the data on which the thesis is based. Given the sensitive issues I dealt with, I also had to consider the ethical aspects of my fieldwork which I will give an account of towards the end of the chapter.

Chapter 2: Fieldwork and Methods

The course of the fieldwork and my position in the field

On my pre-visit to St. Petersburg in January 2003, The Soldiers' Mothers had accepted me as a volunteer²⁵ for the duration of my fieldwork. Employees at the organization were usually busy, so in the initial phase of the fieldwork I basically followed the two leaders around in their daily work and silently observed their meetings and conversations with draftees, soldiers, their parents and other visitors to the organisation (Russian and foreign journalists, sociologists, doctors and military personnel). I sat in the audience during The School of Human Rights and participated actively in the seminars' discussions, exercises, and games together with the other women who, in return, learned about me, my behaviour and opinions, and the purpose of my stay. Driving home by car with one of the leaders in the evenings gave me the opportunity to ask her about the details of the day's events. In this way, I gained a broad overview of the organisation's activities, and by simply hanging out, I also became a known face and gradually gained people's trust.

The Soldiers' Mothers' role as gatekeepers and intermediaries, who, especially in the beginning, introduced me to people, was crucial in Russia where "strangers are to be trusted only if they are linked to by a common acquaintance who is also trustworthy" (Bruno 1998:181). I tried to get official permission to visit a military unit on my own without any success, but when I went with The Soldiers' Mothers I was admitted without questions. Likewise, when I addressed lawyers or doctors on my own, I got different, more "polished" and official answers. The distance, distrust, and coldness, normally shown to outsiders and foreigners (Nielsen 1987:84-90) stand in stark contrast to the openness and warmth that I met at The Soldiers' Mothers'. They let me participate in all their activities and meetings and gave me access to their files, partly, I think, because it is their aim to do away with Soviet times' tradition of concealing information from the public, partly because they were used to visiting foreigners.

The timing of my fieldwork was well chosen, since I arrived well before the spring drafting period from April 1^st to June 30^th. The activities of the Soldiers' Mothers followed the drafts in cycles, focusing on the problems people experienced at different stages of the call-up. The progress of the cases determined my daily activities in that I seized the opportunity to participate in the whole chain of events, from families' first visits to the organisation, through their contacts with the various levels of bureaucracy, and till they received their documents of exemption a couple of months later. These trips to recruitment centres, hospitals, and military units not only produced insight into institutions and processes but also earned me respect at The Soldiers' Mothers.

Always joining The School of Human Rights and the weekly seminars at the organisation, I became friends with some of the regular participants and part of their large network of interknitted groups of mutual support. These women also invited me home and little by little lost their inhibitions and told me about subjects that were banned at the organisation, e.g. bribery and alternative strategies to get sons exempted from military service. My position in the field shifted between that of a curious researcher, eager to understand as much as possible by asking questions, and that of a friend or even "relative" (see chapter seven) with whom to share problems, but who was also cared for, fed and taken on walks on Sundays and holidays. Since the women were not dependent on me or my sympathy, but rather on The Soldiers' Mothers', I did not feel that they wanted to please me with their answers or give me a certain impression. Still, I can retrospectively see that the women, before they knew me, tended to answer my interview questions in accordance with the organisation's ideology whereas alternative or conflicting strategies were hidden, e.g. one woman whose case I followed for months only "revealed" to me on the day her son received his exemption that they had also paid for juridical consultations in a commercial agency and tried to influence employees at the recruitment station through acquaintances alongside using the methods of The Soldiers' Mothers.

The language at The Soldiers' Mothers was exclusively Russian. I had studied Russian at the university for two years before my fieldwork as part of my bachelor degree in anthropology and could follow everyday conversations, but during the first two months I preferred to conduct in-depth interviews with an interpreter. The first interviews aimed at a broad sample of draftees' relatively simple cases and runaway soldiers' more complicated cases, both from St. Petersburg and other provinces. As I improved my Russian and took a more active role, I followed up cases through phone conversations and repeated meetings with the mothers.

Towards the end of my fieldwork, I spent less time at the organisation and felt confident enough to venture alone into the city's recruitment stations, rallying points, and commercial consultancy agencies. In this way, I got an impression of other people's relations to the army and the drafting authorities. I also paid visits to families who had solved their problems with the help The Soldiers' Mothers some years ago. I found their stories in the organisations' archives and wanted to explore what had happened to them later, and whether The Soldiers' Mothers had changed their perspectives in significant ways. This random survey is too small to make any generalisations, but it adds to the breadth of data, as did my conversations with Elena Zdravomyslova.

To sum up the course of my fieldwork, I moved from observation to more and more participation during my fieldwork which added more and more layers of context to the events I witnessed (Davies 1999:72) as I gradually improved my Russian, developed a social network and gained people's trust.

Methods and material

In a big city like St. Petersburg (population: 5 mill.) with hundreds of families coming to The Soldiers' Mothers every week and thousands dealing in other ways with military conscription, I found myself in "a world of infinite interconnections and overlapping contexts" where the ethnographic field does not simply exist as such, but the anthropologist has to construct the field (Amit 2000:6). As a way to compartmentalize and delimit the field but at the same time accommodate interrelationships and relevant contexts I found inspiration in the concept of 'extended cases' (van Velsen 1967, see also "Studying social change" in the Introduction).

The way I used the concept during my fieldwork was by "following the conflicts" (Marcus 1995:110) of approximately 30 young men, in a few cases systematically and into details, the rest when the opportunity arose: I went with the young men and/or their mothers to recruitment stations, hospitals, and meetings with authorities and participated in the seminars and informal conversations at The Soldiers' Mothers. Here, the women discussed each others' problems and the other women's comments and opinions added yet another layer to the cases. Field-notes from such outings and conversations, the seminars and The School of Human Rights – all situations I did not initiate myself – constitute the bulk of the data. I also analysed a full session and some short excerpts of The School of Human Rights that I taped and had transcribed. Towards the end of my fieldwork I organized a focus group discussion with 12 participants to discuss recurrent themes I had noted during the past months (Dawson et al. 1992).

Often, the conflicts with authorities had started years ago when the young men were first drafted or went through their first military medical examination at the age of sixteen, and in order to record their whole stories from their beginning I collected biographical data about them by interviewing their mothers or other family members (Boulay and Williams 1984:249). All in all I conducted 28 taped interviews; seven of these concerned runaway soldiers, thirteen were conducted with draftees' mothers, and one with a draftee and his father together. I supplemented my own observations and interviews with the young man's health documents and the families' written correspondence with the authorities, which they allowed me to copy. To increase my knowledge of the strategies employed by people who do not use The Soldiers' Mothers' methods, I interviewed a friend's 20-year-old brother about his and his friends' situations.

A range of other material and contacts enabled me to contextualize and triangulate my data from The Soldiers' Mothers: I collected newspaper articles, reports and surveys about the Russian army, obtained law texts and the Russian constitution and conducted an expert interview (Larsen 1995:100-101) with a human rights lawyer in order to understand the legal procedures and court sessions that I witnessed. Throughout my fieldwork I was affiliated with an NGO and research institute, The Centre of Independent Social Research (CISR), where I was invited to seminars and met leaders of other NGOs. I was invited to a Human Rights course for law students, a workshop on alternative service, and an NGO forum and visited six different Soldiers' Mothers organisations on a few days' trip to Moscow, all of which gave me a good picture of the peculiarities of the St. Petersburg Soldiers' Mothers and of Russian NGOs' different methods and approaches to the state and military.

Apart from Elena Zdravomyslova, I also became friends with some sociologists and anthropologists from the CISR who responded to my fieldwork experiences with their professional insights and private views. Another valuable source of information on Russian life and language usage was my landlady and her family. My own everyday life in St. Petersburg and not least my troubles getting registered and renewing my one-month tourist visas by crossing the border to Finland, gave me my own, mildly arduous experiences with Russian authorities and red tape.

Ethical considerations

The ethical obligations of anthropological fieldwork concern first and foremost the safety, privacy, and dignity of the people that we do our research with (American Anthropological Association 1998). My ethical considerations regarding this study revolved around how I could avoid harming my informants or bringing them into trouble, to what extent and in which form I should write about the data, and how I could best treat those people with dignity who have shown me so much trust and help.

In Russia, the line between which actions are legal and which are illegal is blurred and the enforcement of laws and regulations unsystematic; for example, there is always at least one so-called "control-checkpoint" at the entrance of military units and hospitals, but the guards never controlled my ID.²⁶ I do not know in which situations I, alone and together with others, have violated regulations or trespassed areas off-limit or which documents or information I have acquired and brought home illegally. Neither do I think that it is possible to get a clear, reliable picture of this. But as a consequence – to protect myself and others as well as possible - I do not name exact places and persons in the thesis. During my fieldwork, I always presented myself and my project to people I met at The Soldiers' Mothers', obtained their consent and let them make the decision to reveal my identity or not when we visited military institutions or other places together (usually I was introduced as a relative or not introduced at all). All things considered, I do not believe that I increased the danger for my informants or their fear, both of which were the conditions of their undertakings.

Apart from the organisation's two leaders who are known to the public and openly express their political views, I have given my informants pseudonyms. Some of them might not agree with my analysis, but by presenting their views and stating my arguments clearly, by writing the thesis in English and making it available to them through The Soldiers' Mothers, I hope to do them justice and give them a chance to see the outcome of my work.

Chapter 3: Populating an intermediate social space – civil society revisited

I take the creation of civil society to mean the population of an intermediate social space – between the level of households and that of the state itself – with organizations and institutions not directly controlled from above (…) The near-emptiness of this space in most socialist societies was the direct consequence of the absorption of resources to the political apparatus and of the disablement of all organizations external to it. (Verdery 1991:432)

In "Theorizing Socialism. A Prologue to the 'Transition'" (1991) Katherine Verdery describes 'civil society' as an independent, intermediate social space between private life and the state which after decades of "near-emptiness" or "near-vacuum" in the post-socialist states is going to be "populated" (ibid.:432). In this chapter I will use the image of an intermediate social space to conceptualize civil society, describe the historically developed configuration of the public/private dichotomy in Russia and propose that The Soldiers' Mothers are engaged in giving the space new meanings and filling it out with formal legal mechanisms and new forms of interaction.

Civil society – a contested social space

Though it is widely agreed that the creation of 'civil society' is essential for the democratization of the former socialist states, there is little agreement about the term's meaning. Keane (1998:36) has suggested that we should think of 'civil society' as a "polysemic signifier", because it is a global ideological concept with different meanings in different contexts.²⁷ Those intellectuals in the socialist countries in the 1960s to 1980s who yearned for civil society had a different picture in mind than that of the neo-liberal economists that sought to control the direction of change in these countries after the fall of communism, whose opinions in turn differ from those of local politicians or Western NGOs today.²⁸

The concept of civil society rests on an opposition between the modern state on the one hand and primary groups of families and kin on the other, with civil society as an independent third realm in between (Hann 1996:6).²⁹ In post-socialist Eastern Europe, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have become indexical of civil society, leading to the situation where western development agencies measure civil society quantitatively by counting NGOs, a high number of NGOs equating a healthy democracy (Sampson 1996:128). But in order to arrive at a useful analytical concept to understand how an organisation like The Soldiers' Mothers contributes to the recreation of people's meaningful worlds, I take 'civil society' to be more than a question of establishing organizations and institutions. I will rather see it as a social space constituted through action that exists in every society (Hann 1996:20).³⁰

Not least feminists have reminded us that the public/private divide is an aspect of ideology and a rather powerful one³¹ (Gal and Kligman 2000:37). What is considered public and what private is object to historical change, but at any time it shapes the organization of political and economic life, e.g. when the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia, they sought to destroy traditional family patterns and reconfigure men's and women's public and private roles (Ashwin 2000). The ability of a social actor, institution or movement to shift the boundaries or introduce new topics is thus a source and sign of power, and the private/public dichotomy is best conceptualized as "a field of disagreement and conflict" (Gal and Kligman 2000:40-41).

I will argue that The Soldiers' Mothers are engaged in this field of power and contestation and that they challenge the meanings of "public" and "private" which they want to interlink in new ways. "Public" and "private" are analytical abstractions that do not exist as such in the real world. Nevertheless, many people also think of their society in this way; e.g. many of my informants operated with distinct notions of "us" (the people) and "them" (the power holders) that were essentially different and worked towards essentially different goals (see also Gal and Kligman 2000:51-52). At one seminar, The Soldiers' Mothers arranged a specific exercise officials with the goal to make people realize that bureaucrats were human beings too and that, ideally, state officials only worked to execute the decisions of democratically elected politicians – and that means, The Soldiers' Mothers explained, that bureaucrats should be under "our" command.

In order to understand what The Soldiers' Mothers are up against when they want people to reorder their ways to perceive the social order, let us first take a look at the historical development of the public/private dichotomy in Russia.

Public and private life in the Soviet Union and thereafter

In opposition to theories of totalitarianism which hold that there was no separation between public and private life in communist states and thus no privacy, many sociological and ethnographic accounts (Kerblay 1983 [1977], Nielsen 1987, Shlapentokh 1989 and Verdery 1991 to mention only a few) describe a historical process towards the division of post-Stalin Soviet society into two sharply separate realms: An ideologized public to which people gave surface allegiance and a private life which became the repository of all that was authentic and meaningful, with a "near-vacuum" (Verdery 1991:433) or "gap" (Nielsen 1987:73) in between.

The relationship between the public and the private spheres was changing during the course of the Soviet Union's 70-year history: Since rational redistribution of production surplus was the central legitimating principle of the socialist state, it was the goal of the Bolsheviks to control and colonize all activity between the households and the state in order to eliminate any competition for central power (Verdery 1991:420-421). From private economic initiatives to leisure activities, all public institutions mediating between the family and the state were either outlawed or converted into administrative organs under the control of the state and ultimately of the communist party. Simultaneously, the private sphere was targeted for fundamental change not only through the elimination of private property but also through child care, legislation on divorce and abortion and other steps running deep into the heart of family life (in chapter seven I will return to this complex issue and argue that the state was symbolically legitimated as a "father").

In the post-Stalin period, beginning with Khrushchev's thaw in 1956, the ideological control of the Soviet citizens fluctuated. Disillusioned with the system and experiencing that it paid off to abuse their access to public goods via the work place rather than to fulfil official goals, people withdrew from the public sphere and diverted their energy from the state to their families and closed circles of friends. Many observers note that people operated with different sets of rules for private and public behaviour and charged the two realms with different moral principles; Nielsen (1987:78-90) vividly describes the difference between intimate "warmth" and formal "coldness", Gal and Kligman (2000:51-52) tell that people distinguished between the trustworthy, private and familial "we" and the untrustworthy, public "they", and Shlapentokh (1989:14) terms it the "two-level concept of Soviet mentality".

These two different movements – first the states colonization of the public sphere and then its retreat and the retreat of people to private life – neither of which were ever complete (the state still retains much control and many people are still dedicated to the communist project), led to an increasing alienation, "vacuum" or "gap" between public and the private life. Shlapentokh (1989:14) has named this ongoing historical process - that lead to the stagnation of the Soviet economy in the 1970s and, ultimately, to Perestroika - the "privatization" or "destatization" of Soviet society.

The increasing "vacuum" or "gap" has to be understood metaphorically in the sense that the there was no legitimate integrating form of power providing formal institutions, forms of communication, patterns of behaviour or information channels interlinking the public and the private besides the state organs which people avoided (Nielsen 1987:72-76). Independent political parties and even clubs for artists beyond state control were prohibited, no independent newspapers or television channels were allowed and private economic activity banned. Of course, a social space can not be literally empty: It was filled by a range of illegal and semi-legal ways to pursue one's interests avoiding formal procedures, which were developed by people in order to fulfil all those needs that the state with its stagnant economy and failed planning did not. People had to make do with their personal networks (blat) which they used to solve all kinds of everyday problems, from the access to information (e.g. illegally distributed literature or simply the mouth-to-mouth method), to the influence of official decision-making (e.g. instead of officially applying for a holiday trip through one's work-place, people contacted the employee distributing holiday arrangements personally). One of the women at The Soldiers' Mothers explained how her family obtained a new gas stove through acquaintances (who siphoned it off a state-owned factory) and had it installed by a friend of a friend (who was a state-employed plumber, but helped out acquaintances and made an extra earning after working hours) - "and that in spite the state officially guaranteed all a new stove when the old was more than 25 years!", she added. The compulsory military service was also target for such network activities, e.g. in the late 1980s my landlady managed to ensure her son a position in a military orchestra through personal contacts in order to prevent him from being sent off to the war in Afghanistan.

The informal practices were to some extent tacitly tolerated by the state in the post-Stalin period, but there was always an inherent insecurity in using the unwritten codes, because authorities could crack down on people's arrangements any time and punish them with arbitrary sentences.³² E.g. there were examples of people being imprisoned for years for reselling a motorbike, an activity that was termed 'speculation', which covered all kinds of private buying and selling with the purpose of making a profit; others, who had connections, however, might only be punished by reprimand (Ledeneva 1998:78). These conditions are best captured by the Russian phrase "nel'zya, no mozhno", which can be translated as "nothing is legal, but everything is possible" (ibid.:1).

With the fall of the Soviet Union the Communist party lost its ideological control over the bureaucracy and jurisdiction, politics and economy. This did not, however, mean that people stopped avoiding the system and gained trust in public institutions. According to one of my informants, the experience of insecurity and arbitrariness meant that Russians still feared contact with the police and dared not to take anyone to court, especially not state organs. When Gorbachev's campaign of glasnost' during Perestroika revealed some of the 'dark spots' of the past and confessed some of the political mistakes, large parts of the Soviet population became even more disillusioned with the system and their disbelief in public institutions was even strengthened (ibid.:192).

Many of the formerly forbidden or tacit practices were legalised during Perestroika and in the post-Soviet first years, some withered away or stayed illegal but commonplace, new ones arose and generally the way of "getting things done" changed rapidly. Money became a real means of payment and the language of blat (the use of personal networks and informal contacts to obtain goods and services, as described above) turned into a language of vziatki (bribes) (Rivkin-Fish 2002, Ledeneva 1998:183). E.g. today the most common way of avoiding military service is by bribing military doctors or other officials.

Speaking in terms of the alienation, "vacuum" or "gap" between the public and the private, one might say that it increased. The Soldiers' Mothers want to curb this trend. When they say that they want people to follow the laws and force bureaucrats to adhere to them too, they are not only opposing the "legacy" from Soviet times, but also the new strategies to get things done in illegal, semi-legal and informal ways that grew out of the Perestroika and the first post-Soviet years. The Soldiers' Mothers want to contribute to the creation of legitimate public institutions by filling out the intermediate social space with new meanings and patterns of behaviour by presenting people to their alternative worldview and lend them practices based on legal mechanisms (legal authorizations issued by notaries) and formal institutions (e.g. courts where complaints can be lodged).

Conclusion

I have suggested that civil society may be conceptualized as an intermediary field of power and contestation between notions of the private and the public which are object to historical changes. Based on ethnographic descriptions of the Soviet Union I have established an understanding of the intermediate space between the public and the private as an increasing alienation, "vacuum" or "gap", that is, an ungoverned space lacking legitimate institutions and officially recognized patterns of behaviour. Instead, personal networks and various informal, illegal and semi-legal practices offered ways to bridge the gap, but only provisionally, since people never knew when the system would crack down on their everyday survival strategies. Many of these practices were invalidated or altered due to the social, political and economic changes after the collapse of the Soviet system

The Soldiers' Mothers want to reorder these meaningful worlds of people, that is, their ways of perceiving and enacting the social order. In the following chapters we shall see how they, concretely seek to fill out the intermediate social space with new forms of communication, patterns of behaviour and information channels which, ultimately, will change the political system in Russia.

But first, the case of a mother and her deserted son in the next chapter demonstrates how The Soldiers' Mothers ideas and methods differ from people's expectations and from their alternative strategies to "get things done" that they made use of prior to their contact with the organisation and in some cases continue to pursue.

Chapter 4: Arriving at The Soldiers' Mothers

The office of The Soldiers' Mothers was usually staffed from one or two o'clock in the afternoon until ten or eleven in the evening. Visitors had to enter a dark staircase through a double iron front door and ring the doorbell to the organisation's premises on the ground floor. Passing through another three doors, one entered a hall where "The School of Human Rights" and seminars were held and where people waited to talk with someone from the organisation in one of the two rooms adjacent to the hall. Behind one of these two reception rooms, there were two small offices reserved for the staff. This "innermost shrine" was where the organisation kept its files and three computers.

A month into my fieldwork, one of the leaders gave me a set of keys, so I could come early and open the doors for people. On normal days, there was already a runaway soldier hiding on the staircase or some relatives waiting to get in. One of them was Nastia, a poor-looking middle-aged woman, who told me her story and anxieties while we waited for someone from the staff to help her:

Nastia had arrived by train from her home town a few hundred kilometres from St. Petersburg early in the morning and headed for the organisation straight after lighting a candle in the famous Vladimir Cathedral nearby. Her 19-year-old son Andrei had been drafted a month before and was immediately sent to a military station in the Northern Caucasus in spite of his high blood pressure and fainting fits. She showed me the only news she had received from him since then: two letters, the first telling of beatings and humiliations from the older soldiers and the other, sent shortly after from a military hospital, reporting a concussion and urging his mother to save him from this hell. The beatings continued in the hospital and his company was about to be transferred to Chechnya. Andrei had underlined the words "to Chechnya", and in the end of the letter he threatened to take his life by cutting his veins if his mother did not help him.

In the letter, Andrei instructed his mother to ask aunt Lida – who turned out to be a doctor – to forge a document stating that his mother was hospitalized with a heart attack. Only that would allow him two weeks' home-leave for family reasons, plus the ten days it takes for the travel home. Secondly, Andrei requested his mother to raise 22.000 roubles (700 USD) by lending them from a friend. This was the sum asked by a military psychiatrist he had met in the hospital to declare him unfit for military service.

But Nastia, having heard about the Soldiers' Mothers of St. Petersburg from an acquaintance, decided to ask the organisation for help instead. Maybe, she thought, someone from the organisation travelled to the Caucasus from time to time and could sort things out with the officers in Andrei's unit. With her she brought the slip of a telegram that she had sent to the commander of Andrei's unit. In the telegram she asked reproachfully why her son was hospitalized and why they kept beating him. Why did her only son have to serve in the Caucasus, despite his bad health and her being a pensioner, still earning an additional salary as an employee of the national postal service?

When the organisation's leader Lena arrived, she wanted Nastia to write an official complaint, but Nastia did not know to whom such a letter should be directed. "To you?", she asked sheepishly between tears, thereby linking the organisation to the military system. Lena lost her temper, cut off Nastia's lamentations, and told her that she was absolutely ignorant (bezgramotnaia) and that it was her own fault that her son's rights were violated: "If you had bothered to read the law on military duty and military service before your son was drafted, you would have known that he was not fit for service right from the start!" Confronted with Nastia's telegram to the commander, Lena shouted: "Oh my God, what did you think of? Did you think the military does not know what is going on? Did you think they would help you? When will you stop thinking of the state as someone kind (milii)?!"

Nastia shrugged her shoulders.

Lena advised Nastia to travel to the Caucasus, "steal" (ukrast') Andrei from his military station, and bring him to St. Petersburg for medical examinations by independent, civilian doctors in order to prove the violations. Since it is a criminal act to encourage or be accessory to desertion, this advice was not directly stated.³³ Nastia was hesitant about the whole idea, because they would have to leave Andrei's passport and documents at his military unit. Neither did she understand why they were advised to go to a notary upon their return to St. Petersburg to issue an authorisation for her to act in Andrei's name: "I am his mother, isn't that enough?"

Andrei's letter and Nastia's conversation with Lena show how The Soldiers' Mothers methods and ideology differ from people's other ideas and practices that the organisation wants to do away with. The strategies people deployed to deal with their sons' problems differed a lot, depending on their personalities, age, and gender, their social and educational backgrounds and whether they came from a big city or from rural areas. The Soldiers' Mothers, however, viewed the parents' ideas and patterns of behaviour as results of their socialization in the Soviet Union and as expressions of their "Soviet mentality" and "totalitarian minds" that they passed on to their children and that kept Russians imprisoned in a mental state of passivity and powerlessness.

"Soviet mentality"

Nastia's immediate response to her son's problems had been to write a letter to the commander of her son's unit, appealing to his conscience. During my fieldwork I saw many similar letters, in one of which the mother directly asked the commander if he was able to sleep at night because one of his soldiers was beaten by the others. As one of the effects of people's withdrawal from the public sphere, which I described in the previous chapter, it was common for people to avoid official contact with bureaucrats (chinovniki) and approach them on a personal level instead. Ledeneva (1998:83) calls this tendency the "personalisation of the Soviet bureaucratic system" and traces it back to pre-revolutionary practices. The Soldiers' Mothers wanted to do away with this kind of interaction between citizens and bureaucrats and spoke of people's appeals as "begging on ones knees", failing to recognize that officials were supposed to fulfil their professional duties to citizens in accordance with the laws and regulations and not some diffuse morality that people had to invoke.

Emphasising her roles as a mother and a state employee, Nastia reminded the commander in her letter that she, on her part, had fulfilled her obligations, raised children and worked for the state, but that the state, in turn, lets her down. But The Soldiers' Mothers wanted people to perceive of their relationship to the state as legal instead of moral. Accordingly, Lena scolded Nastia for thinking of the state as "someone kind" (milii, literally "a kind (person)"). Hereby, she hinted at people's common perception of the state as a "father" that provides for its citizens and with whom one engages in a reciprocal relationship (I will return to this in chapter seven). In the same way, Nastia should not simply claim her moral authority over her son, because she is his mother, but obtain a written authorization at a notary. Then she could prove in front of authorities that she was her son's legally appointed proxy and had the formal right to participate in all meetings and medical examinations, so that no officials or military doctors would intimidate him or scamp with his records (as was often the case if nobody controlled their actions).

When Nastia voiced herself as a pensioner, retired from work for the national postal service, this corresponds to the way in which the Soviet system distributed welfare benefits to people through their workplace (Anderson 1996). In contrast, The Soldiers' Mothers taught people that they have universal civic rights that are ensured by the Russian constitution, irrespective of other circumstances and irrespective of the various documents and passports (e.g. the residence permit (propiska), military ticket (voennyi billet) and work book (trudavaia knizhka)) that were used to prove one's entitlements and which Nastia was so afraid to loose.

As in the case of Nastia, many people are not familiar with such legal mechanisms. Russian NGOs report that people turn to them, because Soviet times' well-known public channels for help (e.g. the party committees at people's workplaces and letters to the editor in the official newspapers) have disappeared (Hemment 1999:36). The Soldiers' Mothers answered people like Nastia, who thought that the organisation was a semi-official structure that dealt directly with military officers. They themselves had to take action, write letters of complaint, become their sons' proxy persons and see that the sons become exempted from further military service.

Post-Soviet responses

Strategies like Andrei's were rejected by The Soldiers' Mothers, because they did not want people to avoid the authorities either. In his letter, Andrei asked his mother to obtain a fake certificate which would permit him a short home-leave. One option was not to return to the unit, but hide from authorities and the police like many other deserters did, another was to bribe a military doctor to declare him unfit for military service. It was not that The Soldiers' Mothers advised the young men to stay in their units – as the appeal to his mother to "steal" him shows – but they warned runaway soldiers against bribery and against simply hiding from authorities, because it did not settle the case in a legal manner and they might get into further trouble.

Born 1982-1986, the draftees and soldiers who came to the organisation belonged to the post-Soviet generation that has few memories of life in the Soviet Union, but were influenced by their experiences of economic turbulence and lack of rules of the post-Soviet years. It was typical for the young men who came to The Soldiers' Mothers to have very little trust in the authorities and not to care if they had to bribe policemen and other officials, as long as they could live in peace and the state did not interfere in their life. In the opinion of his father, a young man I interviewed had such a cynical attitude towards society that the father interrupted our conversation and accused him of not possessing any values or sense of morality. The son replied that values had not helped him, when he was cheated by a former employer and when rich and influential parents had "bought" their children access to the prestigious colleges that he was denied to enter, even with the best marks in the admission tests.

Conclusion

Nastia spent the whole day at The Soldiers' Mothers talking with the staff and the other women, but left St. Petersburg in the evening. I don't know if she ever returned to the organisation. Often people listened to The Soldiers' Mothers' recommendations but in the end decided to solve their problem by other means; and sometimes they returned after half a year or more when the situation had worsened.

The meeting between Nastia and The Soldiers' Mothers could, however, also have been the first step in a long course of actions where she learned to use the organisation's methods to get her son exempted from further military service, joined "The School of Human Rights" and engaged in the seminars' self-work. I saw many arrive at The Soldiers' Mothers for the first time in a state of shock, tears or hysteria – and two months later, some of them were calmly explaining new comers what to do and telling me, in interviews, about their personal transformation.

Of course, even those who belonged to the organisation's "core", served as examples for the others and took leading roles in the "groups of mutual support" when they went to recruitment stations, hospitals and courts also relied on some of those strategies that The Soldiers' Mothers wanted to do away with. It was, for example, common to stress one's moral authority as a mother, to appeal to bureaucrats', officers' and judges' conscience and to give doctors a bottle of cognac or a box of chocolates. Neither did The Soldiers' Mothers want to dispose of all the practices that resulted from the Soviet system and the unregulated intermediate social space; the organisation built to a great extent on personal networks and, not least, the organisation's ideology and methods belong to the "Soviet lifeworld" (Nielsen 1994:2-3) since they derive from Soviet dissidents.

It is the goal of The Soldiers' Mothers to teach people like Nastia how to write complaints and use the Russian laws and legal mechanisms to pressurize the military and bureaucrats to adhere to the laws. Yet, their goal is also to make people "get up from their knees" and behave different in front of authorities. In the next chapter, we shall see how the women engage in the organisation's methods, which is perceived as embarking on a transformational "path" and plotted as a narrative.

Chapter 5: The Path to Freedom

When I first came here, when my son was 17, I too did not know what to do. I went here once, twice, three times, because the first time you obviously don't understand anything. You have to come here five times [!] before something starts to reveal itself to you. Then I simply began to do what the organisation taught me. I wrote letters of complaint, went to the military commissariat with my son, let him be examined at the Bekhterev Institute [a private neurological and psychiatric clinic in St. Petersburg], put together his medical history, and sent all the documents. (…) Now [approximately a year after the first contact with The Soldiers' Mothers], the head doctor at the military commissariat ran up to me and said: "You will receive your 'military ticket' [exemption from military service]." That was yesterday, and now I feel like a "victor".

From a presentation at "The School of Human Rights"

Sharing the story of one's son with other women and listening to other women's stories is an important reason why many visit The Soldiers' Mothers again and again. At "The School of Human Rights", dismissed soldiers or women who have succeeded in freeing their sons from military service (so-called "victors") are invited to tell their story, and the organisation's seminars are introduced with a round of short presentations by each participant. It struck me how similar most of these presentations and stories were. They typically began with a short account of the son's situation and of how far the mother had gotten in her endeavours to save him. The events were usually ordered into a narrative plot following the lines of action suggested by The Soldiers' Mothers' methods. Then the narrators were encouraged to say a few words about their own life and state of mind. This is considered crucial for success; self-esteem and a positive attitude are beneficial, The Soldiers' Mothers believe, while fear and insecurity only hold people back.

However, I also noticed that the women often picked up the same story-lines, events, and themes and repeated their emotional frustrations when telling their stories in other contexts - in informal conversations, to a stranger on a train or to me in interviews. The stories were, in other words, not only staged for the benefit of the organisation, but meaningful in other contexts too (Steffen 1997).

Why do so many women express their experience in similar stories, where does this pattern come from, and why is it meaningful for the narrators?

This chapter is divided into two sections: In the first, I will argue that the women's stories reflect their experience of going through a personal transformation, when they follow the methods of The Soldiers' Mothers. What goes on at The Soldiers' Mothers can be compared to the interstructural "liminal" phase of a rite of passage, where the "initiates" are secluded from normal society. "Liminality" is a stage of reflection where initiates are encouraged to think about their society, question its accepted ideas and reconfigure its elements (Turner 1967: 105-106). Through rites of passage, in Turner's conception (1967), initiates both "transform from one kind of human being into another" and take up traditional social roles upon their return to the structured secular society (ibid.:106-108). Similarly, the women "reintegrate" into society and their families as mothers, albeit with a new understanding of this role (see chapter seven).

I compare "The School of Human Rights", that all new comers to the organisation are urged to attend, and the performance of "victors" to a ritual performance³⁴ that expresses the women's experience of transformation (Kapferer 1986). The transformation that the teacher and the "victors" describe is promised to come true for the audience too. Such accounts being presented the first time people come to The Soldiers' Mothers and repeated again and again at seminars and in other interaction, stories of personal transformation not only reflect individual women's experience, but also structures their experience as a dominant narrative that "defines and illuminates inner experience" (Bruner 1986:6). I refer to the overarching narrative as the "Path to Freedom" (put' k svobode), an expression that The Soldiers' Mothers' leader once used, because this expression reflects the fact that the organisation's suggested steps of action, frequently spoken of as "the path", simultaneously outline a practical way of achieving freedom from military service for the young men, and also postulate a personal, existential transformation from a "totalitarian" to a "free" state of being for their mothers.

In the second section, "Own and common stories", I explore three common themes that the women deal with while they follow the organisation's "path": The experience of child-birth, fear, and militarization which the parental generation have deeply embodied and which The Soldiers' Mothers urge them to realize and come to terms with. As the women express their private experiences and emotions in public, The Soldiers' Mothers hope to create a new version of Russian history.

Expressions of personal transformation

The School of Human Rights

The introductory lecture of The Soldiers' Mothers, "The School of Human Rights", is held twice a week. Usually, I counted around 100 participants, one fourth to one third of which were young men or their fathers. The rest were women, primarily mothers of draftees or soldiers. At the height of the drafting season, up to 200 people were cramped into the assembly hall and even more had to wait outside the door because they had been unable to secure a seat.³⁵

As part of the introduction to the organisation and its methods, passages from the Law on military service, the Russian constitution, and the Universal Declaration on Human Rights are read out and explained, because most listeners only have vague ideas about the practical workings of laws and civil rights. Many fear the police and do not know that they are not obliged to open the door for unwarranted searches of their private homes. Neither are they aware of their right of access to their health documents at the polyclinic nor of the right to appeal a draft commissions' decisions. Only a few have ever written an official letter of complaint or know that one must sign an authorization at a notary's in order to act on the behalf of even one's own son, so these concepts are carefully explained and followed up by concrete advice to each family after the lecture.

The necessary steps of action to obtain an exemption from military service form successive events in a chronologically ordered narrative plot (Ricoeur 1981:167), which the leaders refer to literally as a "path" that people are invited to follow step by step: To receive an exemption – marked by an entry in the "military ticket" (voennyi billet) that all men carry as card of identification (Höjdestrand 2003) – each family has to study the medical requirements in the Law on military service carefully and prove that their son is not fit. The documentation that must be obtained includes diagnoses by specialists, transcripts of the boys' "children's medical cards" from their local polyclinics, teachers' statements, and detailed accounts of their medical history. In the medical history, the mother (since she knows best, it is claimed) reports chronic diseases, war traumas, violence, and alcoholism among family members and tells of her son's birth and childhood illnesses. This documentation then has to be sent to 10-12 specific civil and military authorities. Finally, a legally authorized person, usually the mother, has to face the military-medical commission and the drafting board as a guardian for the young man.

Practical guidance and existential transformation

Many of my informants used the "path" as practical guidance and spoke of it as "the path". They memorized and enthusiastically discussed the exact order in which to do what, worked out detailed schedules and agendas for themselves and each other, and used a stock of common phrases to become acquainted with each other: "Whom are you defending?", "What step are you at?", and "Are you on track?" In this way, the narrative plot worked not only as a retrospective ordering of events but also as a line of orientation for lived life, in the sense that the women "emplotted" their actions with a "sense of an ending" (Mattingly 1994). For the women, each step became meaningful in relation to the overall narrative, and every successfully accomplished step gave them the strength to take the next.

The "path" outlined at "The School of Human Rights" describes a transformational process "from one state of affairs (a beginning) to a transformed state of affairs (an ending)" (Mattingly 1994:819), in both a practical and an existential sense. According to The Soldiers' Mothers, the practical steps the women take to free their sons from military service lead to a mental process of freeing themselves from their "totalitarian minds" (see chapter four). Their reasoning goes like this: To help your son, you have to know the laws and be able to convert them into action. And to fully understand the legal mechanisms and believe in them - with the heart, as one mother told me - you have to work with yourself and change your ignorance into knowledge and fear into strength. This change comes about when you deal with your own role in society by contemplating your family history, your experiences of giving birth, your previous contacts with authorities, and all the "hard" but "real" work implied by The Soldiers' Mothers' methods. As this existential transformation is gradually accomplished by more and more persons, society as a whole will change. "When every person takes responsibility, the situation in Russia will change", as one of the leaders put it. In this thesis, I have conceptualized these two processes as "reform of people's habitus" and "reordering of their meaningful worlds".

At the "School of Human Rights", the teacher describes the personal development symbolically as rising from one's knees: In the beginning of the lecture, participants are asked how they feel about the draft and why they have been unable to solve their problem. In response people express their fear, despair and lack of self-confidence. Later, the teacher brings in these emotions as a sign of people's totalitarian state of mind which she illustrates on the blackboard as a person crying on his knees in a cage.

Lena: You can, of course, stay in this state of mind, sit on your knees and cry and wait for them³⁶ to open the cage (…) But in reality this cage is created by your own imagination, by your own fear.

This state of mind, the teacher explains, is an illusion that can be vanquished:

Every man is born free and when you realize this and speak the word "I", then you realize that you have dignity (dostoinstvo) and that you can stand up, like a person who knows his roots and stands normally on the ground. This is what we do at "The School of Human Rights".

Here, as a symbol of freedom and dignity, the teacher draws a blossoming flower with deep roots and the word "I" (Ia) in the centre.

The teacher referred to the turning point where one "gets up from one's knees" – usually a series of breakthroughs with the authorities that give people a feeling of personal transformation – as a "victory", and people who received their (or their son's) "military ticket" and thus achieved freedom from serving in the army were called "victors" (pobediteli/pobeditel'nitsy).³⁷ This imagery was reinforced when dismissed soldiers or mothers, who had successfully fulfilled their tasks and freed their sons, were invited to tell their stories in front of the audience. The young men were generally too ill or too shy to tell about their experience at length and very few of them actually embarked on The Soldiers' Mothers' "path" on their own, so their presentations took the form of testimonies to the horrors of army life and thus emphasised the importance of taking action. As in the short excerpt of a mother's presentation at the beginning of this chapter, the women tended to adopt the organisation's narrative structure and report their son's case and their personal development as parallel movements.

In the excerpt, the mother recounts how puzzled she was in the beginning but how her endurance and persistence finally brought her a revelation and led her to success. After a detailed account of all the letters she wrote, medical examinations the son went through, and encounters she had with authorities, she ends her presentation with the triumph of receiving the son's "military ticket". While regularly dozing off during the leader's lengthy monologues at "The School of Human Rights", the audience always follows the "victors"' stories attentively. When the mother came to the culmination of her story, the promised "military ticket", sighs of relief and affirmative exclamations filled the air.

Throughout "The School of Human Rights", the teacher establishes the organisation's world view with its fear of bureaucrats that one must overcome by one's own force and its symbols of "human dignity" (the flower), much like the Sinhalese cosmology with demons and deities becomes present in the exorcist rituals (Kapferer 1986:199). And akin to the stage of intense music and dancing at the peak of exorcist rituals (ibid.:197), those assembled at "The School of Human Right" are drawn into the ritual action as they empathize and identify with the "victor"-mother during her presentation. They are located in the same relation to the military and the "path to freedom" as her and thereby share the experience of the hardship that she went through and the feeling of relief and victory when her son received his "military ticket".

This shared experience of victory, and the shared experience of being "on the way" towards victory that is produced when the women tell their stories to each other in the dominant narrative form of The Soldiers' Mothers, is a key to understanding why the narrative also becomes meaningful as a line of orientation for their practical actions.

With a crisis of life and death (the sons'), a process from one state to another, and a turning point, the narrative bears resemblance to illness narratives and accounts of therapeutic treatment (e.g. Mattingly 1994 and Good 1994). The Soldiers' Mother offer each woman practical guidelines to save her son from military service and at the same time to overcome her own fear of bureaucrats. But in The Soldiers' Mothers' ideology, the process of betterment exceeds the individual as society as a whole also has to recover from its pathological state and return to its "normal" state.³⁸ In the following section we shall see how The Soldiers' Mothers seek to establish such a connection, when the women's private stories are told in public.

Own and common stories

Jackson (2002:292) proposes that storytelling is both a way in "which private events are translated into public stories, and (…), reciprocally, publicised events penetrate our private lives and shape our unconscious imagining". As we shall see, this dual process is at play at The Soldiers' Mothers, and I will add to this the political potential of common stories created through the organisation.

From a generational perspective, the women who came to the organisation shared similar life courses which unfolded in the same period of social history, since they grew up in the Soviet Union in the 1950s to 1970s and gave birth to a son who is now about to be recruited to the army. In this section I will show how their individual experiences of child-births, fear, and militarization are conceptualized at The Soldiers' Mothers so that they fuse into a common history of totalitarianism.

Birth traumas

The Soldiers' Mothers ask people to fill in a questionnaire about their sons with detailed information about their health situation. The questionnaire is used to advise the mothers on how to write their sons' medical history, and a copy of it is saved in the organisation's files for statistical purposes. It contains a long list of symptoms under the headlines "pregnancy", "birth", "development", and "personality" that have to be ticked off. I noticed that an extraordinarily high proportion of young men were said to have suffered from a birth trauma and that the mothers had generally had complicated deliveries and pregnancies characterized by bad health, trouble in the family, alcoholism, and domestic violence.

Sexuality was seldom spoken of, but in confidential situations some women told me about their experiences of birth-giving and repeated abortions which were the primary form of birth control when they were young³⁹. The women focused on the lack of anaesthetics and on being rendered helpless by doctors and nurses in the overcrowded birth clinics. They attributed the birth traumas to the common practice of taking away the new-born from their mothers and only bringing the babies in to be breastfed, sometimes only after a couple of days. The carelessness and indifference of doctors and nurses often meant that mothers fell so ill that the babies were not breastfed at all. Sociological surveys and underground feminist writings from Soviet times confirm the bad state of female health, birth clinics, and maternity wards, as well as the impressions given by the women of the bad hygiene and medical procedures (Holland and McKevitt 1985, Maltseva 1984, Mamonova 1984). In spite of all the system's plans and policies, women often had to use personal connections and social networks to receive decent treatment (Holland and McKevitt 1985).

At The Soldiers' Mothers', birth traumas were considered one of the reasons for the neurological or psychiatric syndromes that boys who lacked physical disabilities that would be sufficient to substantiate their unsuitability for military service were often diagnosed with in special neurological clinics. Many families considered it the last way out to get an exemption on psychiatric grounds, because they feared the consequences of having such a diagnosis stamped into the young men's passport, but The Soldiers' Mothers insisted that the diagnosis did not concern civilian life but only fitness for military service with its risks of stress and war shocks.

The birth traumas, however, matter not only for the sons' medical records and the mothers' practical endeavours but also for the women's existential transformation. One woman finished her horrifying account by confiding in me: "I was only 24 and I thought it was normal to give birth in this way. Now I understand that my son is ill because of that." Like her, many women came to see their pregnancies, abortions, and births in a different light. The Soviet standards were no longer considered normal but inhuman, and Soviet birth practices were seen as an offence against a person's innate dignity (see also Rivkin-Fish 2001).

The women's reinterpretation of their experiences of giving birth fits The Soldiers' Mothers' ideological image of a totalitarian state that takes away children from their families, both at the time of their birth and now again, when they are recruited to the army. In a way, The Soldiers' Mothers generate a popular claim for rehabilitation, where family medical histories testify to common people's suffering, much like the organisation "Memorial" collects testimonies of Stalin's purges and the GULag. These sides of Soviet-Russian history were neglected by official Soviet historians, and are, according to The Soldiers' Mothers, also neglected by the current government⁴⁰. The Soldiers' Mothers confront the state, which needs to man its army, with the proof that so many women and children suffered in Soviet birth clinics and hope thereby to get the state to recognize its past mistakes, to acknowledge people's sufferings, and to respect people's dignity in the future.

I have focused on births, but The Soldiers' Mothers also blame the totalitarian Soviet system for the prevalence of alcoholism, domestic violence, and broken families, and use the recurrence of these sociological symptoms in draftees' and runaway soldiers' medical histories to back their reinterpretation of Russian history. They also regularly use their own statistics and runaway soldiers' statements about their health for press releases.

Fear

Another prevalent theme was fear which was connected to Russia's violent and war-torn history. Almost everyone I talked with had initially been afraid to do anything about the son's situation out of fear of the police, military, or authorities in general. There were concrete reasons to be afraid of the police; every year the media reports illegal round ups of young men in the streets and metro stations (Human Rights Watch 2002), and during my fieldwork there were also instances when young men's health documentation mysteriously disappeared from the local draft administration and he was drafted in spite of obvious disabilities. A close informant told me that Russians in general did not expect the state to deal justly with its citizens. Many people were afraid to take anyone to court, because they had heard terrible stories of people ending up in Siberia; as one common saying goes: "Open your mouth and you will end up in Siberia". Some women at The Soldiers' Mothers were almost paranoid, saw "traps" everywhere and would run away if they glimpsed a person in uniform.

People's fear, however, also took the form of an inexplicable panic - I call it habituated - that paralysed them when they had to deal with authorities, even if they knew what to say and how to act. Some women told me that they had lived with the fear of their son one day being taken away from them ever since they gave birth to him. One of them was Anna. She was a faint-hearted woman who had spoken a lot about fear at the organisation's seminars. When I interviewed her in her home in a suburb of St. Petersburg and asked about her experience with The Soldiers' Mothers, she immediately started talking about her fear:

Anna: [When I first came to the organisation] I felt fear, I was terrified, I had a feeling that, finally, I clashed with this enormous terrible problem [the draft] that I could not budge. I was so small, so f-f-fragile (laughs), yes, and I just couldn't fight against any of these bureaucrats, I was very scared. (…) Thanks to them [the organisation] I could overcome that fear (strakh), the fear of bureaucrats (chinovniki).

Anna described her fear as "an explosion that blows you away and you no longer exist" and thanked the organisation for having taught her to deal with this once so overwhelming and incomprehensible feeling, so she was now able to speak about it. She recounted all the small steps she had taken and how every "little victory" had given her the strength and courage to continue. As for many other women, Anna's "victory" was a question of conquering her fear. When I asked where her feeling of fear had come from, she explained:

Anna: It was born from our Soviet realities. I think that they were the fears in my family, my childhood fears, yes, and these fears came from real events. How many wars have we had… how many people have died! (…) It is as if the fears come from reality and from our parents – they lost their parents during the war. My mother's parents died in the war when she was five years. She grew up in an orphanage. My father was twelve years when he lost his parents too and grew up in an orphanage. And these two people, who had no parents, lived with all this fear, the fear from the war, and it formed the psychology of their children.

Anna's description of her fear as something she inherited from her parents echoes The Soldiers' Mothers' concepts of "genetic fear" and "fear accumulated through generations". These concepts offer an explanation for Anna's feelings and enable her to tell her family's muted history, however fragmented it is.

The fact that conversations about fear often turned toward the war was probably in part triggered by the risk of their sons being sent to Chechnya, but many women like Anna connected their fear with experiences of war or violence in past generations. Russia has an exceptionally bloody history during the 20^th century, with civil war, famines, forced collectivization, purges, the First and Second World Wars, deportations, and labour camps. Almost every family has its victims. Many women remembered fragments of what they had heard as children about their grandparents who died in WWII, starved to death during the Blockade of Leningrad or mysteriously disappeared, but their memory lacked concrete descriptions. Pahl and Thompson (1994), who recorded the life histories of 46 Russians born before 1965 in Moscow and Leningrad in 1991, observe that their informants' knowledge of their family histories was full of gaps (ibid.:136-8). Pahl and Thompson attribute this fact to a habit of "politics of forgetfulness" by which Soviet citizens omitted information about e.g. their ancestors class background from their life stories out of fear for repressions (ibid.). But this does not explain why such memories were still seldom mentioned inside families after the thaw following Stalin's death, indeed, even after the breakdown of the Soviet Union. My material suggests that it is embodied fear rather than a rational fear of certain consequences that holds people back from remembering.

Anna did not know how her grandparents died, because her parents never spoke about it; maybe even they did not know, she said. But all her life she had carried a deeply embodied feeling that something inexplicably terrible had happened to them. In this sense, "genetic fear" means that Anna, incorporating in her habitus "the objective structures of history", carries "part of yesterday's man [that] makes up the unconscious part of ourselves" (Bourdieu 1977:78-79) and through The Soldiers' Mothers she became engaged in reforming her habitus.

Certain occasions, such as confronting authorities, rouse this horror in her. Similar feelings of fear were the reasons many people gave for avoiding contact with the authorities, and many could not stand to visit e.g. military stations. So when The Soldiers' Mothers take up the theme of fear and their methods force people into situations that produce fear, they are up against powerful forces that hold people back. This can, in part, explain why some people at The Soldiers' Mothers struggle with the problem of the draft for years avoiding to face the authorities at the recruitment station. In chapter six I will analyse The Soldiers Mothers' exercises to work with and overcome this habituated fear.

Militarization

Apart from this deeply embodied fear, the parental generation is also marked by their socialization in a militarized Soviet society that demanded obedience and preparedness for war. In an interview, the father of a draftee traced his initial inability to oppose the draft order of his son back to his childhood experiences of militarization and submission:

When I was in the army, there was the command "rise!" and we all got up, "fall in!" and we ran to the canteen - in formation! And I remember it was the same in the Pioneer camp and in kindergarten. They were not the military, but conditions were militarized. From childhood we learned to obey orders, they didn't even have to be pronounced. (…) You knew it, but you didn't realize it.

This man told me that it was only through The Soldiers' Mothers that he had realized that he was unconsciously "led" by a vast force that would also take away his son if he did not learn to resist it. The post-war generation learned to be suspicious of enemies and prepared for war and – at least in public life, e.g. in school and at the Pioneers' – to express their loyalty to the socialist state.

Once, when I was travelling on a suburban train together with Olga from The Soldiers' Mothers, a young guitar player struck up the tunes of a song about a soldier going to war. Olga expressed her discontent: "Why do Russians always have to sing about war? It would be much more normal for a young man to sing about love and beautiful girls!" She had just explained to me that people all over the world just want a normal, decent life, and the sight of the musician was her proof of how far away from that ideal the Russians are.

The tendency to use metaphors of war in art and music is widespread in Russia. Asked about the prominence of war in his songs, the famous Russian artist and songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky (1938-1980) once said in an interview in Canada: "You know that we all grew up on material from the war… (…) The songs are written by someone who lives now, for people who are not through with this history either… So it is clear that they contain something which made me write them now" (cited in Nielsen 1984:17). Vysotsky was one of the few public persons in the Soviet Union, who understood these complicated and pent-up emotions and expressed them in his chansons about ordinary Soviet life, and when he died thousands gathered in the streets to mourn (Nielsen 1984). "War" permeated his songs, Vysotsky seemed to say, because people still lived in a society permeated by violence and suffering.

As Hannah Arendt writes, it is in "storytelling and generally in artistic transposition of individual experience" that "the greatest forces of inner life (…) are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance" (Arendt 1998 [1957]:50). The Soldiers' Mothers offer such a context in which people's fears and anxieties are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized into a common story.

Private into public stories

The women's stories at The Soldiers' Mothers work to reorder their meaningful worlds on three levels: On the individual level, with concepts such as "accumulated" or "genetic" fear, women like Anna receive a framework to comprehend their emotions and family histories and to express them in public. "The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves" (Arendt 1998 [1957]:50), so when the women tell their stories at The Soldiers' Mothers' they gain a new sense of self, not only in relation to themselves but also to others⁴¹.

On the second level, the women's life stories achieve meaning on a collective level, because they insert their individual stories into The Soldiers' Mothers' recreated version of Russian history. Skultans, in her analysis of Latvian life stories collected in 1992-1993, describes how dominant narratives of experiences of the Soviet state's arrests and deportations of people to Sibiria offer Latvians both meaningful individual autobiographies and a collective national identity (Skultans 1997:766). This requires of the narrator to build "links between the self and the social and cultural landscape" (ibid.:767). Such links to the social and cultural landscape are offered to people by The Soldiers' Mothers, so e.g. memories from Soviet birth clinics testify to "totalitarianism" and childhood experiences from the kindergarden and Pioneer camp explain citizens' blind submission to a militarized state.

The third level concerns The Soldiers' Mothers' political goal to change society from the bottom as they strive to elevate their version of Russian history to an official level, partly through engaging more and more individuals, partly by putting pressure on the state via draft evasion and publishing reports on the state of soldiers' health in the army. There is a tradition for eye-witness testimonies of war and suffering in Soviet-Russian historiography (e.g. Dickinson 1995 on the Blockade of Leningrad during WWII), but in the Soviet Union, people's suffering was interpreted as their heroic sacrifices to reach communism. After the Communist party lost its monopoly on 'history' and information in general, the need of a new future orientation arose – and here ideology of The Soldiers' Mothers offers one option.

In the context of the Latvian history of Soviet occupation from 1940-1991 and independence in 1991, personal stories of arrest by the Soviet secret service, deportations to Siberia, exile and finally return to the homeland metonymically become tales of Latvian national destiny with a strong potential to become a national myth after Latvian independence (Skultans 1997:777). In Russia where "private grief over state-perpetrated violence was more rigidly repressed than in the Baltic countries" (ibid.), however, the social and historical landscape is another and the alternative version of Russian history that is promoted by The Soldiers' Mothers, Memorial and certain groups of intellectuals is marginal.

Conclusion

In this chapter I have analysed The Soldiers' Mothers' introductory lecture, "The School of Human Rights", and the stories that the women tell as "victors" in this forum as well as in other settings. I have shown how the organ