The Russian Army Death Cult

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'The Russian man is glad to see death, including his own - it reminds him of the end of everything that exists. He contemplates the ruins and fragments with pleasure…' This author has watched thirty YouTube videos of Russian soldiers committing suicide. This has been possible thanks to the revolution that has taken place on the battlefield with the proliferation of cheap drones fitted with cameras. One slit his throat. It took him almost a minute to die. Twenty-two shot themselves. Seven killed themselves by detonating grenades: the first held the grenade at arms-length and looked away; the second held the grenade to his chest; the third detonated two grenades against his ears (the head vanished); the fourth also blew his head off; the fifth, a corpulent individual of Asiatic appearance, detonated the grenade under his body armour; the sixth was an individual hiding behind a vehicle wreck; and the seventh held the grenade in front of his face. How many Russian soldiers have committed similar acts unrecorded by Ukrainian drones can only be speculated. Historically, we might associate such extreme behaviour with the Imperial Japanese Army. More recently we think of the fanaticism of terrorist organisations such as ISIS or Al Qaeda. But we would not normally frame the Russian Army in this way. This article begs the question: is the Russian Army a death cult? Suicide in Russian culture In Russia, suicide, or more broadly disdain for life, is modern and rooted in the revolutionary tradition. The most famous suicide is the poet Vladimir Mayakovsy (1893-1930). The cause however was a love affair, not revolution. His funeral was attended by 150,000 people, the largest public mourning event in Bolshevik Moscow after the funerals of Lenin and Stalin. Rejection of life - as revolutionary act - finds origins in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (1862) which popularised the phrase 'nihilism' through the character of Bazarov: 'At the present time negation is the most beneficial of all [acts] -and we deny…everything.' Nihilism mixed fanatical asceticism with self-mortification. Life mattered little or nothing. Turgenev actually created the character as lampoon of the 'men of the sixties', but paradoxically Bazarov became an anti-hero to young Russians seeking change. The nihilism became violent through the agency of the so-called 'new men' - Lenin's predecessors - the best known of which were Varfolomei Zaitsev (1842-1882), the archetypal nihilist but unknown in the West (and the character of Shigalev in Dostoyesvky's The Possessed); and Sergey Nechaev (1847-1882) (the character of Pyotr Verkhovensky, also in The Possessed). The 'Nechaev affair' was the great cause célèbre in Russia of the period, but also remains completely unknown outside Russia except to Russian historians. The Tsarist authorities were so alarmed by the young man he was gaoled and deliberately starved to death, dying at the age of thirty-five. Before he died he co-authored with Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) one of the most famous tracts of revolutionary literature in world history: The Revolutionary Catechism. It starts with the famous proposition 'The revolutionary is a lost man…no interests of his own, no affairs of his own, no feelings, no attachments no belongings, not even a name if his own.' It then goes on to describe a being who 'despises', who is 'hard with himself', who 'hates', and whose object is 'ruthless destruction'. It could be a description of 'the Orcs', as Ukrainians describe the Russians they face on the other side of the trench lines. While it is undeniable that a life-denying fanaticism coloured Russian revolutionaries (and radicals and anarchists across 19th century Europe), we must still ask, but were the revolutionaries born from a wider Russian cultural substratum that disregarded life, or were they atypical of their society. Suicide in Russian society Russian men die young. Roughly one quarter die before the age of 55, mostly due to two causes: tobac...