The War of Motherland Against Dedovshchina: Two Models of Mentality

Two Irreconcilable Ontologies

On one side stands the national model, where a person fights for their land, their children, the future of their family. On the other — the imperial model, where a person is sacrificed to dead ideological formulas about “heroic grandfathers” who supposedly subjugated peoples and nations.

Ukraine fights for Motherland. Russia fights for Dedovshchina. This is not a metaphor, but a precise diagnosis of two different types of social organization.

The National Model: Motherland as Living Reality

When a Ukrainian soldier stands at his position, he defends a concrete home, a concrete family, a concrete future. He knows that behind him are parents who raised him with love, a wife or girlfriend who waits, children who have the right to grow up in a free country. He protects the possibility to live on his own land, speak his native language, build his own future according to his own values.

This is not an abstraction. These are living people, living land, living connections. Motherland here is a place where relationships of mutual support prevail, where elders pass experience to the young not through humiliation and violence, but through care and love. Where social elevators work based on talent, labor, creativity — not cruelty and willingness to walk over corpses.

In this model, the future matters. Children are more important than myths. Reality outweighs ideology.

The Imperial Model: Dedovshchina as Principle of Existence

The Russian model is built on opposite foundations. Russians do not fight for their future — they fight for memories of someone else’s past. Their motivation is not the defense of their own children, but the cult of “heroic grandfathers” who allegedly conquered half the world. Meanwhile, what exactly these “grandfathers” conquered and for what purpose — is a question with no rational answer.

They subjugated peoples. Occupied territories. Suppressed cultures. And for what? So that their grandchildren would later live in poverty, in villages without sewage, in cities with collapsed infrastructure, in a society dominated by total mutual distrust and cruelty. The paradox of Russian imperial consciousness: we conquer the world in order to live in shit up to our ears.

But most importantly — this is not just external expansion. The imperial model structures all internal relations of society. Russia lives by the laws of dedovshchina not only in the army — it lives by these laws everywhere.

Dedovshchina as the Quintessence of Russian Society

Dedovshchina in the Russian army is not a pathology, not a deviation from the norm. It is pure, distilled concentrate of the Russian social model. The army here is society in miniature, where all principles of imperial organization manifest with particular clarity.

How does the social elevator work in this system? Not through developing abilities. Not through education or talent. The social elevator in Russia is possible exclusively by walking over corpses. Precisely over corpses — not over heads, as in normal societies where the metaphor means competition among professionals. In the Russian model, they walk precisely over corpses — real, material, literal ones.

And the main condition for success is to be a maximally cruel, cynical beast. The more humanity in you, the faster they will destroy you. The more bestiality in you — the higher you will rise. At the same time, it doesn’t matter whose corpses these are — conditionally “your own” or “others’”. The system is equally indifferent to everyone — the main thing is to demonstrate enough sadism and cynicism to be noticed and allowed to the next rung.

But even having risen, you receive no security. Because higher up are the same animal-like creatures who can devour you in an instant. There is no solidarity there, no mutual support, no human relations. There is only a hierarchy of violence, where everyone maintains their position exclusively through readiness to destroy those below and lick those above.

A young soldier enters the Russian army — and from the very first day encounters not training, not transmission of experience, not professional preparation. He encounters systematic humiliation, violence, torture. The “grandfathers” beat the “spirits” not because this is some error in the system — but because this IS the system. The army does not prepare professional soldiers — it prepares people who have absorbed the basic principle of Russian existence: your place in the hierarchy depends on how much violence you can endure and how much violence you can inflict yourself.

We see the same thing throughout Russian society. In production collectives, the same logic operates: management humiliates subordinates, subordinates at the first opportunity humiliate those even lower. In the prison system, dedovshchina becomes an absolute philosophy of life. In power structures — the same principle, only in decent suits: they can destroy you not just possibly, they will destroy you inevitably if you don’t show sufficient cruelty to others and sufficient submissiveness to those stronger.

The most telling feature of this system is the absence of horizontal connections. In a normal society, people of the same level unite, support each other, create communities based on interests. In the Russian model, all connections are vertical: you either beat or they beat you. You either dominate or submit. There is no third option.

Dead Formulas Instead of Living Life

This system requires constant justification. One cannot simply say: “We live in a society of total violence, where everyone eats everyone.” An ideology is needed that will beautify this reality. And here the myths about “heroic grandfathers” enter the stage.

These “grandfathers” are not real people. Most of those called to fight today have no direct connection to participants in World War II. But myth works differently. “Grandfathers” are not ancestors, but an ideological formula, a dead abstraction that justifies any violence here and now.

A Russian goes to kill Ukrainians not because he has some rational goal. He goes because such a place is assigned to him in the hierarchy of violence. His “grandfathers” subjugated peoples — therefore he must do the same. Not because it will bring him a better life — as we have already noted, the result will always be life in shit. But because such is the logic of the system: violence for the sake of violence, subjugation for the sake of subjugation, death for the sake of death.

A dead formula kills living life. Abstract “grandfathers” prove more important than concrete children. The mythical “greatness of the empire” is more important than real well-being. Ideology is more important than reality.

Gerontocracy: Old Men in Power as the Source of the Cult of Death

The attraction to death, the cult of “heroic grandfathers,” blocking any path to the future — all this has a very concrete, material explanation. The country is ruled by rudiments of the past. Literally — by old men.

Look at the top of Moscow and its colonies. This is gerontocracy in its purest form. Putin — born in 1952, he is over seventy. Lavrov — born 1950. Patrushev — 1951. Shoigu — 1955. The list goes on. The entire power vertical, the entire state machine, all key positions — in the hands of people who formed in the Soviet era, who live by Cold War categories, who are physically incapable of perceiving the modern world.

This is not simply old age. This is a fundamental orientation toward the past as the only possible coordinate system. These people cannot think about the future — because they have no future. They have only the past, which they desperately try to reproduce, resurrect, preserve.

Hence — the cult of “grandfathers” as state ideology. Old men in power create a cult of grandfathers in society. This is not a metaphor — this is a direct causal relationship. Gerontocracy needs justification for its dominance, and it finds this justification in mythologizing the past. If “grandfathers” conquered half the world — then grandfathers have the right to rule eternally. If the past is “great” — then one can endlessly live in this past, not letting the country into the future.

The empire is stuck in the past not through ideological choice — it is stuck there through the physiology of its power. When all levers of control are in the hands of elderly people who are no longer capable of change, adaptation, learning something new — the country is doomed to stagnation. It will reproduce old schemes of violence, old methods of suppression, old imperial ambitions — because its rulers know no other way of existence.

Now look at Ukraine. Zelensky — born in 1978. He is in his early forties. However one may personally feel about him, this is a different generation. This is a person who formed after the collapse of the USSR, who does not carry Soviet traumas and Soviet complexes, who is oriented toward the future, not toward reconstruction of the past.

The Ukrainian government is young. Not in the sense of incompetent or inexperienced — but in the sense of open to change, capable of adaptation, ready to learn. These are people who have a future and therefore are ready to fight for it. They are not trying to reproduce some mythical “greatness” — they are building a real modern country.

The contrast is absolute. On one side — old men who cling to power and drag the country into the past, creating a cult of death. On the other — a generation that looks forward and is ready to fight for the right to have a future.

Moscow’s gerontocracy is not simply a fact of biographies. It is the structural cause of the war. Old men in power cannot let go of imperial fantasies, because this would mean admitting that their lives were lived in vain, that their “achievements” were actually crimes, that their “greatness” was actually wretchedness. They are doomed to fight against the future — because in the future there is no place for them.

Existential Choice

The war between Ukraine and Russia is a war between two ways of organizing human existence. Ukraine has chosen the model of Motherland: living land, living families, living future. Love instead of violence. Mutual support instead of mutual destruction. Father and Mother as symbols of care and transmission of experience — not “grandfathers” as symbols of suppression and violence.

Russia is fixated on the model of Dedovshchina: dead myths, dead hierarchies, society as a gigantic army where each level violently suppresses the lower one. There are no parents there — there are only “grandfathers” who beat. There is no family — there is only a hierarchy of submission. There is no future — there is only endless reproduction of past violence.

The Ukrainian soldier knows what he fights for. For a concrete home, concrete child, concrete possibility to live humanly. The Russian soldier does not know — a dead formula about “grandfathers” is enough for him, which justifies his transformation into an instrument of senseless violence.

This is not simply a war of armies. This is a war of two ontologies. Motherland against Dedovshchina. Life against death. Future against past. And in this war, compromise is impossible — because it is impossible to combine love with violence, care with humiliation, the living with the dead.

Ukraine fights to remain a living country of living people. Russia fights to transform everyone into dead elements of its hierarchy of violence. This is a war for the very possibility of human existence.

Oleh Cheslavskyi — independent historian and analyst specializing in deconstructing imperial narratives.

Originally published at spilno.org