Air University Review, January-February 1984
Dr. Michael J. Deane
Dr. Ilana Kass
ONE of the persistent apprehensions of Soviet leaders has been that the Soviet populace might internalize the leadership's "peace" propaganda that is intended solely for Western consumption. Thus, Soviet Party and state officials, responsible for protecting the Communist system in the U.S.S.R., and Soviet military officers, responsible for promoting ideological vigilance and combat readiness of the troops, have traditionally shared a joint interest in maintaining the citizenry's military-patriotic fervor at the highest possible level. In April 1979, however, vague signs began to surface in a Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) decree that all was not in order. The decree attributed an overall declining trend in the effectiveness of Soviet domestic propaganda to the extent that today's better educated people find the leadership's indoctrination efforts "boring" and "unconvincing." Two subsequent factors have only exacerbated the problem. First, the antimilitary arguments, launched by the Soviets as part of their "peace offensive" against NATO's decision to deploy the Pershing II and cruise missiles in Western Europe, were--as Soviet media acknowledged--boomeranging and finding a receptive domestic audience. Second, Soviet troop involvement in Afghanistan, with mounting casualties but no end in sight, was--as Soviet media hinted--stirring some uneasiness among the Moslem population in the southern sector of the Soviet Union.
Only recently, however, the Soviet media have been more forthright in suggesting that these factors are being fused into a Vietnam-like antimilitary backlash among Soviet citizens. Moreover, during the early months of 1983, there were clear indications that pacifist tendencies had transcended the bounds of individual objectors and were receiving strong reinforcement from at least one major Soviet institution, the educational establishment.
The first step toward a direct and public confrontation was initiated on 11 December 1982, when Teachers' Gazette (Uchitel'skaia gazeta), the central newspaper of the Soviet Education Ministry and the Teachers' Union, printed an explicitly pacifist poem, entitled "We Shall Play War No More." According to Teachers' Gazette, the poem was written in the Daghestan language by Medzhid Medzhidov, a poet-teacher from the Moslem republic in Transcaucasus, and translated into Russian specifically for publication in the teachers' newspaper.
The following is our free translation of the Russian version of the poem:
Please, kids don't play war.
My grandpa never came home from war!
Enough steeling yourself in battles.
Enough shooting sticks made into rifles.
Come on, Aka, get out from the shelter, quick.
And you, Gamid, get down from the watchtower.
Throw down your weapon.
Don't cock your gun.
My neighbor came home from war with both his legs gone.
Old Aina is crying and crying.
War took away her only son.
We shall play soldiers no more.
We shall not kill each other or take each other prisoners of war.
Let's throw all the weapons from the mountaintop down into the abyss
So that such games will forever cease to exist.
Let's break all the cannons, till the last one is gone.
Let's make war forever be gone.
Please, kids, don't play war.
My grandpa never came home from war!
That the poem was translated into Russian and widely distributed in an official Soviet organ, in this case a newspaper targeted at teachers and educators at all levels, is both astonishing and unique. For in essence, the poem goes beyond appealing for an end to war games and hero worship, on which the entire Soviet military-patriotic indoctrination system is predicated, to call for private citizen actions to restrain the militarization of Soviet society and curtail Soviet war-fighting capabilities. As such, the poem cannot but be construed as an overt, direct challenge to the Soviet national ethos by the very institution constitutionally charged, in party and state decrees, with the responsibility for implementation of military-patriotic instruction and indoctrination of Soviet youth from kindergarten through the universities.
It should be noted at the outset that all the Soviet media are subjected to an elaborate, multifaceted, and tight network of censorship and control. Specifically, a poem of this sort should have been authorized for translation into Russian and publication by any Soviet newspaper only with the express permission of high-level officials. Since there can hardly be a mistake as to the actual nature of the poem and, hence, a simple error in judgment must presumably be excluded, one has to conclude that the publication was deliberate and that the poem reflects the perceptions of a significant undercurrent in the populace that the educational establishment desires to support.
The Soviet military, as an institution with a primary vested interest in the continuous militarization of society and effective patriotic indoctrination of future inductees, obviously felt threatened by the publication of the poem and the pacifist sentiments it reflected. The ensuing reaction was most unusual in the Soviet context: utilization of the daily organ of the Soviet Ministry of Defense Red Star (Krasnaia zvezda) to challenge its institutional opponent's mouthpiece, i.e., Teachers' Gazette, and reassert its own position.
The military's first indignant response to the poem's publication was fired by Red Star on 13 February 1983. In an article signed by Colonel A. Khorev, the military charged angrily that the poem "is not a mere poem, but an invocation: children, don't play war and that's that! And the only argument advanced in support of this idea consists of the fact that many soldiers did not return from the last war." Censuring Teachers' Gazette for printing the poem and thereby causing "harm to the cause of military-patriotic education," Khorev asserted that such "incitement to a pacifist concord" is impermissible, particularly "today, when the imperialists are so brazenly brandishing nuclear-missile weapons." Taking its wrath one step further, the military urged the banning of future publications by the offending poet.
Curiously, Red Star reprinted five of the original stanzas of the poem "lest the reader think that the matter pertains only to a few unfortunate lines." In truth, Colonel Khorev deleted some of the most explicit pacifist imagery, including the references to the weeping mother and lost son, the neighbor who returned without legs, and the appeal to "throw down the rifle," crawl out of the shelter, and abandon "the watchtower." Nonetheless, Medzhidov's antimilitarist message was brought to the attention of millions of rank-and-file soldiers and officers who do not read Teachers' Gazette but do read Red Star.
While the poem's key message is universal in its thrust, the poet's nationality and, consequently, the poem's setting in a Moslem milieu (e.g., the Moslem names of the combatants on both sides) are highly significant. For one, at least in the initial stages of the war in Afghanistan, the lion's share of the Soviet contingent sent to fight there was comprised of draftees from the U.S.S.R.'s Moslem republics. The resultant antiwar sentiments were, presumably, superimposed on and fueled by inherent local nationalisim and endemic opposition to the official Russification policy. In this context, the author's appeal to Moslems on both sides--Soviet and Afghan--to cease combat and fraternize on a pan-Islamic basis acquires a whole new dimension.
While these ramifications go far to explain the military's indignation, the clear echoes of the combat in Afghanistan--obvious to the average Soviet reader, who is attuned to and skilled in reading between the lines of the centrally controlled Soviet publications--make the military's decision to reprint even a part of the poem all the more puzzling. For with some 100,000 Soviet troops bogged down in Afghanistan for the third year now and with no end in sight, the message is sure to strike close to home to all Soviet citizens regardless of nationality.
To wit, the military followed up its initial censure, publishing on 27 February 1983 what was purported to be "a mother's response" to the Medzhidov poem and the military daily's censure. The woman, G. Voronina, professed "whole-hearted support" for Khorev's criticism on the premise that "the time is not yet ripe for our children to abandon war games." Emphasizing the positive and active role of parents in "bringing up a citizen and a patriot," Voronina offered as an example her own son's progress from a toddler who dreamed of becoming a soldier and demanded military toys even before he was able to pronounce the words weapon and missile to a proud cadet in a military academy. By way of conclusion, she contended:
Let our children understand from their earliest years, even before an ABC book is placed in their hands, that they have to be their great and peaceloving Motherland's defenders. Let them be made ready not only for labor, but also for defense. Let games help them be like Chapaev and Budennyi. . . .
On 30 April 1983, a Red Star editorial statement recounted once again the entire issue and reiterated Khorev's initial censure. The newspaper also printed some of the alleged "numerous readers' reactions" sent to its editorial board following the 13 February article. According to Red Star's editors, those readers "expressed bewilderment that such pacifist doggerel could have appeared in such a respected and popular newspaper [as Teachers' Gazette]." It was with obvious satisfaction that Red Star took note of the deletion of the offending poem from Medzhidov's "just published book Funny City."
Red Star was considerably less pleased with the reaction of Teachers' Gazette editors. According to Red Star's report, Teachers' Gazette made do with an internal letter addressed to the military daily and signed by a relatively low-level functionary, which vaguely promised "to be more exacting" in the future selection of poems to be published on military-patriotic themes. Showing their displeasure, Red Star's editors characterized the response as "insufficient and unsatisfactory" and advised that "Teachers' Gazette should give its blunder a correct evaluation on its own pages so that none of its readers would take [the poet's] appeal seriously or be misled as to the poem's 'merits.' "
As of mid-November 1983, Teachers' Gazette had studiously ignored Red Star's attacks. Despite the diatribes, Teachers' Gazette has published no readers' critiques and printed no official retractions. For the time being, it would appear that the educational establishment intends to stand its ground.
While this exchange between Red Star and Teachers' Gazette is unprecedented in its nature and institutional ramifications, it was preceded by and should be viewed against the background of recent warning by the military's top leadership as to the "danger of pacifist sentiments" among the Soviet populace.
Central in this regard are the repeated public attacks on declining military-patriotic fervor among Soviet youth by the Soviet Chief of the General Staff, Marshal of the Soviet Union Nikolai Ogarkov. For example, in a major article published in the July 1981 issue of the CPSU's leading political-theoretical journal Kommunist, Ogarkov observed that the thinning ranks of Soviet war veterans are being increasingly outweighed by those who "have no personal experience of what war is" and who are "imbued with the idea that peace is the normal state of society." As a result, said Ogarkov, the issues of war and peace are no longer being approached from the class positions of Soviet ideology but from the purely pacifist standpoint that "any kind of peace is good and any kind of war is bad."
To underscore the seriousness of the problem, the Chief of the General Staff reiterated his concerns in a major 1982 monograph, Always in Readiness to Defend the Motherland, published by the Ministry of Defense publishing house Voenizdat and targeted at the Soviet officer corps. Verbatim, Ogarkov stated that for the postwar Soviet generation "peace is the normal state of society." As a consequence, he continued, Soviet peoples "do not sense and thus underestimate the danger of war, which has not ceased to be a grim reality of our day."
Furthermore, Ogarkov called on all party and civilian organizations to "convey to Soviet people, in a more profound and better reasoned form, the truth about the existing threat of the danger of war." Most pointedly, the Chief of the General Staff charged these organizations to "struggle against . . . the complacency, tranquillity, and elements of pacifism" emerging in Soviet society. In support of Ogarkov's concern, on 30 November 1981 the major party newspaper Pravda mandated that the Soviet media undertake efforts to "resolutely get rid of the touches of pacifism that sometimes emerge in certain information and propaganda materials."
Subsequent pronouncements by officers directly responsible for military-patriotic indoctrination targeted "residual religiosity" among the supposedly atheistic Soviet population and U.S. "propaganda diversion" as responsible for the overall erosion in the official value system.
Thus, for example, writing in a February 1982 issue of Agitator Armii i Flota (Agitator of the Army and Navy), a political-indoctrinational journal for the rank-and-file servicemen, Major General N. Gusev vehemently attacked American propaganda for "attempting to foster ideas of nihilism, indifference to politics, nationalism and money grubbing," so as to "prevent the man wearing the uniform of a Red soldier from being totally devoted to communism."
Similarly, Major General Paiusov wrote in the March 1982 issue of Kommunist Vooruzhennykh Sil (Communist of the Armed Forces), the organ of the Armed Forces' Main Political Administration, the Party's watchdog agency in the military:
Overcoming the harmful influence of religious prejudices on the formation of moral-political and volitional qualities of Soviet troops demands special attention. Here we are speaking first of all about the struggle with ideas of abstract pacifism and religious "humanism," and unnatural "love" for one's enemies, "non-resistance to evil," the antipatriotic spirit of sermons about the "heavenly fatherland," the sinfulness of service in the Armed Forces and so forth, which interfere with the youth's ability to conscientiously carry out its duty of defending the socialist Fatherland.
On another level, the well-known Soviet novelist Anatolii Marchenko, writing in the government daily Izvestiia on 28 January 1982, singled out negative attitudes of adults toward patriotism and military service and their detrimental impact on induction-age youth as the source of trouble. Specifically, according to the author, parental apathy toward international tensions and infatuation with "material trappings of well being" are initiated by the younger generation, resulting in a joint perception of military service as an unnecessary hardship and a "waste" of time.
Today's philistine, who, with zeal worthy of a better cause, instills in his over-grown child the rotten and thoroughly harmful idea that "the years of army service are wasted years," is neither illiterate nor naive. He listens to the radio, turns on the television, and, it must be supposed, looks at newspapers, if only at the headlines. He is informed about events on the planet. But what does he care about the planet or the country's fate. He yawns idly on hearing disturbing reports from some part of the globe far from his own apartment. He wants for his offspring the same quiet life, verging on indifference toward society's concerns, joys, and sorrows. Heaven forbid that this offspring should cough once more than necessary, tense his already puny muscles, or expend a nerve cell!
Not content with merely calling attention to the mounting problem, party and military leaders have undertaken positive steps to remobilize the population and rejuvenate the indoctrination forces. To this end, stimulation of military patriotic fervor has been the central theme of several media campaigns as well as major conferences, such as the All-Union Lecturers' Seminar of January 1982, the All-Union Conference of Primary Party Organization Secretaries of May 1982, the Nineteenth Komsomol Congress of May 1982, the Conference of Ideological Workers of the Army and Navy of October 1982, the Tallin All-Union Scientific-Practical Conference of October 1982, etc.
Throughout recent efforts Soviet spokesmen have asserted that, in addition to love for one's own country, Soviet-style "patriotism" requires "hatred for the enemy." In essence, it is said that one cannot truly love the Soviet homeland without hating the United States. For example, Komsomol'skaia pravda of 18 May 1982 reported the following statement by Komsomol First Secretary B. Pastukhov at the youth organization's Nineteenth Congress:
Education of patriotism is the education of a courageous soldier and defender of the Fatherland, one who is ruthless to its enemies. In the modern world, love for the socialist Fatherland is impossible without class hatred.
Even more explicitly, an officers' indoctrination article, published in a May 1982 issue of Communist of the Armed Forces, directed that "imperialism, headed by the United States," must be the target of "class hatred." The article outlined five reasons why Soviet citizens and soldiers should "hate" the Western "enemy."
We hate it because it is a, break to social progress and the enemy of the world's peoples.
While "love for the Soviet Fatherland" has always been a staple of Soviet military-patriotic indoctrination, the "hate imperialism" aspect was considerably played down during the so-called détente period of the 1970s. Doubtless, its current emphasis is partially due to the worsening East-West climate of the 1980s. Yet it is also clear that the scope and vehemence of the campaign reflects the Soviet leadership's real concern with a festering domestic problem.
IT IS TOO EARLY to project the concrete scope of the emerging pacifist sentiment or predict its probable impact on Soviet war-fighting capabilities. Only the depth of the leadership's current concern to counteract the problem is obvious. Despite this fact, there have been no indications that the indoctrination apparatus has adopted any substantive changes, which might improve its effectiveness in military-patriotic propaganda. Moreover, since the leadership is demonstrating no inclination to cease either its anti-Western "peace offensive" or its Afghanistan involvement, the two main factors fueling the problem are continuing unabated. At most, it is clear that without major changes, the potential for a significant internal challenge to the leadership's prevailing policies and military efficiency looms in the Soviet future.
Bethesda, Maryland
Michael J. Deane (Ph.D., University of Miami) is a Senior Analyst at the Advanced International Studies Institute, Bethesda, Maryland. He has written numerous articles on Soviet political and military affairs. Dr. Deane is an adjunct professor at the University of Miami and a co-complier of the "Strategic Views" of Strategic Review.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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