Hardliners in Russia have been calling for a full-scale mobilization for a while, however thus far Vladimir Putin has resisted the temptation for a full call-up resulting from its anticipated unpopularity. As a substitute, Russia is making an attempt to steer 1000’s of males to enlist voluntarily as contract troopers. The Kremlin’s recruitment marketing campaign is designed to enchantment to their sense of nationwide satisfaction and injured masculinity. However my analysis with working-class males – the first targets of the marketing campaign – counsel it’s unlikely to succeed.
Utilizing gender as a political technique has been central to Putin’s success. Within the early days of his presidency, he appreciated to painting himself as an all-action navy man, and later organized photoshoots of himself fishing and using horses bare-chested within the Russian wilderness. Putin used these shows of masculinity to venture energy to a public for whom Russia’s weak spot through the Nineteen Nineties had been personified by his often-drunk predecessor Boris Yeltsin.
This efficiency of a robust masculinity clearly had a broad enchantment, as evidenced by the hit pop music: A Man Like Putin:
A person like Putin, so filled with energy.
A person like Putin, who would not get drunk.
A person like Putin, who would not harm me.
A person like Putin, who will not run away.
But it surely was additionally focused at specific sections of the Russian voters that Putin got here to depend on most for assist. Well-known incidents, corresponding to his humiliation of oligarch Oleg Deripaska for not paying staff at an aluminum plant, made it clear that one of many planks of his recognition was his skill to focus on those that had misplaced out within the new, brutal market setting of the Nineteen Nineties and craved some stage of stability. This was an earlier occasion of the populist enchantment of Donald Trump to America’s “left behind”.
Against this, these males who have been extra profitable within the new service and client economies – a lot of whom got here to demand extra political freedoms within the protests of 2011-13 – have been by no means an essential constituency for Putinism. And, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, they left Russia of their droves.
Wanted: cannon fodder
Russia at present must enlist extra males to its armed forces. The nation has already squandered tens of 1000’s of lives in its disastrous battle in Ukraine – together with a lot of these mobilized within the autumn of 2022. As half of the present recruitment campaigns a TV commercial depicting a safety guard, a health teacher and a taxi driver apparently questioning the manliness of their job and opting as a substitute for the military. The marketing campaign exhibits it is atypical working-class males – most of whom have navy coaching – to whom Putin is interesting.
The shortcoming of males to dwell as much as the expectations of them as breadwinners was one of many elements explaining the Russian mortality disaster of the Nineteen Nineties, when male life expectancy dropped as little as 59 years. This affected working-class males greater than some other socio-demographic group, with psycho-social stress, accidents, suicide and alcoholism all that includes extremely.
However my analysis with younger and middle-aged working-class males in provincial Russia means that they’re neither as determined nor as insecure – to not point out patriotic – because the marketing campaign assumes. So they will not be swayed by these appeals to their insecurities to stop their jobs and go to the entrance.
A practical working class
Working-class males from provincial cities corresponding to Ulyanovsk, the place I performed analysis from 2004-2015, are virtually universally conscripted into the military after leaving vocational coaching faculties on the age of 18. In distinction to Marina Yusupova’s analysis, through which males from a variety of backgrounds did every part to keep away from navy service and have been broadly essential of the military, my respondents have been usually optimistic each concerning the prospects of military service earlier than they left, and about their experiences upon returning.
Military service was framed pragmatically, as a chance to construct bodily energy and private self-discipline. It was additionally considered as a way of bettering one’s incomes capability as a handbook employee – actually “turning into a person”. Serving within the military additionally opened doorways to a variety of civil service careers, as numerous branches of the state – the police drive, the jail service, inland income, for instance, all of which have been strengthened all through the Putin period – recruited them as they have been finishing their service.

EPA-EFE/Zurab Kurtsikidze
It was exactly their pragmatism that enabled most of the younger and older males in my analysis to make use of their expertise and contacts and the alternatives afforded them to attain their aim of turning into bread winners. They have been in a position to safe mortgages and begin households, regardless of their precarious financial circumstances. Many arrange their very own companies. They grew to become builders, dispatchers, merchandisers, tire-fitters, cell phone repairers and the like. Not like the lads of the Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s, who have been brutally displaced by the collapse of the Soviet economic system, they’ve been in a position to adapt.
So it is troublesome to think about a marketing campaign focusing on perceived insecurities round breadwinner standing or easy patriotism having a major impression, even on members of a socio-demographic group that has been the first goal of Putinism.
An unspoken goal of the present recruitment marketing campaign, then, is to offer a veneer of consent for what can now solely be achieved by way of coercion. A full-scale mobilization of the male inhabitants – for which the current (presumably false flag) drone assaults in Moscow could act as a pretext – would verify as a lot.
Males will nonetheless be discovered to be despatched to the Donbas, however few will go there willingly.