Peace, a word in decline in Russia

The word peace was a key element in the official rhetoric of the Soviet Union, and it reflected a sincere feeling among the inhabitants of that country, which had lost tens of millions of lives after being invaded by Hitler in 1941. The word peace was present in the private and the public lives of the Soviet citizens who, on holidays, toasted to peace inside their homes with their families and friends and who, on the occasion of International Labor Day on May 1, went out into the streets chanting the slogan “Peace, Work, May” (in that order).

Even after the disintegration of the USSR in 1991, whenever one discussed negative events with a Russian, a Ukrainian or a Belarusian citizen — all of whom carried memories or remembered stories about the war — the speaker was likely to be cut off with the following exclamation: “As long as there is no war!”, thus indicating that this was the worst thing that could possibly happen to someone, much worse than any personal misfortune.

In the Soviet use of the word peace, there were certainly some nuances, and official representatives added a dose of opportunism to the rejection of the horror left behind by the war. Made official in institutions such as the Peace Committee, in slogans and in rhetoric, it served to justify the participation of the USSR in the arms race with the United States, which it presented as an instrument to achieve a state of peace, understood as an indisputable goal. The disarmament promoted by the presidents of Russia, Mikhail Gorbachev, and of the United States, Ronald Reagan, in the 1980s was preceded by massive international pacifist demonstrations against the installation of missiles in Europe, and the agreements reached by those leaders were steps towards peace.

Today the situation is different. The word peace and its meaning have been devalued in a process of global degradation that not only affects Russia, a country where the phenomenon has its particular characteristics related to the war in Ukraine. Russian leaders do not want peace understood as a compromise, but rather a victory, understood as the imposition of their own agenda. Since 2022, Russians can be arrested and sentenced to up to seven years behind bars for “discrediting the army,” a crime of ambiguous interpretation that can affect those who declare themselves in favor of peace: 4,440 people were fined in 2022 and another 2,361 in 2023, according to judicial statistics. In the second year of the war, 50 individuals were tried criminally and nine of them were sentenced to two years in prison.

The fear of peace has reached absurd limits. The activist Konstantin Goldman was arrested in April 2022 for standing in the gardens attached to the Kremlin while holding a copy of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, and in December 2023 the police asked a bookstore in Saint Petersburg to remove a sticker with the word peace that had been on display in the shop window for more than a year. So it is not surprising that after raising awareness about the risks of the word peace, in the popular marches on the occasion of Labor Day this year in Russia, the term had disappeared from the classic slogan, “Peace, Work, May,” now reduced to “Work, May.” In different places, the word peace was replaced by krut (translatable in that context as super or cool), according to journalists and spectators. Since 2022, Russian officials have been evasive when they receive messages wishing for peace, for example, for the New Year. A Russian friend says that when an official with whom he had a relationship congratulated him on his birthday, he responded: “You’d better wish me peace.” After a moment of silence, the official added curtly: “Peace, only after victory!”

Even in the Orthodox churches of Russia today, people pray for victory, and there is a new prayer that was released by Patriarch Kirill in honor of Holy Russia. Any priests who have dared to replace the word victory with peace are suffering reprisals and being removed from religious services. Shortly after the invasion of Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin made it clear that he does not want peace, even in the form of advice. This much was experienced by four senior officials from various international policy institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who were among the 126 national and foreign experts who signed an open letter in favor of a cessation of hostilities, that is, in favor of the peace. By adding their names, Alexey Gromyko, director of the Europe Institute; Alexandr Panov, former deputy foreign minister of Russia; Sergei Rogov, academic director of the U.S.-Canada Institute; and Alexandr Nikitin, director of the Euro-Atlantic Security center at MGIMO [State Institute of International Relations], were excluded from an advisory body, Russia’s Security Council, by Putin’s decree.

The four respected experts were not dissidents, but their natural instinct was to seek a peaceful solution to the Ukrainian conflict; that is to say, they acted in the spirit that emerged from World War II. Meanwhile, the Kremlin remains impassive in the face of the atrocious verbal aggressiveness of people like the businessman Konstantin Malofeev and the philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, or the incendiary rhetoric of television propagandists who demand the annihilation of the enemy. The war in Ukraine continues to enjoy broad social support in Russia. In January of this year, 77% of Russians supported (fully or partially) the action of their Armed Forces, and only 16% were opposed, according to a survey by the Levada center. The poll showed that 52% were in favor of peace talks and 40% were in favor of continuing military action. Previous data indicated that, the vast majority, in favor of peace, wanted it without giving up territorial conquests.

Now that the 79th anniversary of the end of World War II is being commemorated, it would be desirable to return to the lessons of that war without waiting for new horrors to unfold, just as it would be desirable for peace not to be synonymous with victory at any price, as the Russian leaders are proposing after deforming and privatizing the pain and sacrifices that Russia shared with Ukraine and other republics of the Soviet Union.

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