3:33 pm, July 11, 2024Source: Meduza
The funeral of a Russian soldier killed in Ukraine. Gusinoozyorsk, Buryatia. March 5, 2022.
Alexander Garmayev / TASS / Profimedia
In the fall of 2023, researchers from the Public Sociology Lab (PS Lab) visited three of Russia’s regions — the Sverlovsk region, Krasnodar Krai, and Buryatia — to study residents’ views on the full-scale war in Ukraine. During their trip, the sociologists managed to conduct 75 in-depth interviews and compile three detailed ethnographic diaries (each with about 110,000 words). Below, Meduza shares an English-language summary of the team’s report from their work in Buryatia, which has paid a higher price for Russia’s war against Ukraine than nearly any other Russian region.
The Republic of Buryatia in Russia’s Far East is one of the regions that has suffered most from the country’s full-scale war against Ukraine. In March 2022, Buryatia accounted for 3.5 percent of Russia’s losses, despite making up just 0.3 percent of the country’s population. During the mobilization that began in September 2022, residents of Buryatia were called up 2.5–3 times more frequently and were killed on the battlefield an average of seven times more frequently than residents of other regions.
Buryatia’s population is relatively small and characterized by strong community ties, which played a significant role in many residents’ decisions about whether to emigrate during Russia’s mobilization campaign. According to local activists, the tight-knit nature of Buryatian society also makes it riskier for individuals to take part in protests, as the consequences can affect not just participants themselves but also their family members and friends.
PS Lab’s researcher spent a little over a month in Buryatia. She split her time between the regional capital of Ulan-Ude, where about half of the region’s residents live, and the village of Udurg, which has a population of less than 10,000.
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The largest ethnic groups in Buryatia are the indigenous Buryat people, who make up about 31 percent of the republic’s population, and Russians, who account for about 59 percent of the population.
Even before February 2022, the deployment of Buryat troops in Ukraine was a widely discussed topic in both Russian and foreign media. A major theme of this discourse was the idea that Moscow was demonstrating its colonial nature by treating members of ethnic minority groups, including Buryats, as expendable. In conversations with residents of Buryatia, however, PS Lab’s researcher barely encountered these attitudes. Even interview subjects who opposed the war did not bring up the issue of ethnic discrimination except in response to leading questions.
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Some subjects over 30 years old lamented the fact that Buryat language and culture are gradually disappearing. At the same time, PS Lab’s researcher was surprised by how widespread Buryat words are among teenagers and adolescents, for whom knowing Buryat language and taking an interest in Buryat culture is considered “cool” and respectable. One source from Ulan-Ude said the surge of interest in Buryat culture in recent years is partially a response to the global attention on Buryatia following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Buryatia’s identity is largely state-oriented: residents generally associate themselves with the state more than with any religious or ethnic group and believe it generally represents their interests. PS Lab’s researcher observed a great deal of loyalty to state structures such as schools, universities, and local government among the people she spoke to.
Low incomes and high unemployment
The earliest investigations into the numbers of people mobilized to fight in Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine from various regions found that a disproportionate number of draftees came from Buryatia (as well as from Dagestan, Kaliningrad, and the Krasnodar region) in 2022. As of April 2024, the republic is also one of the five regions that have lost the most servicemen to the war.
Journalists from the outlet iStories and researchers from Conflict Intelligence Team have found a statistically significant negative correlation between a region’s average income per capita and the share of people mobilized from that region (the lower the income, the higher the percentage of people drafted). Buryatia is no exception: it ranks among the ten Russian regions with the highest percentage of people living below the poverty line and is in the bottom third of regions in terms of income per capita.
Many Buryatia residents who take part in volunteer efforts to help soldiers don’t do so because they support the war. Instead, sending supplies to soldiers is often viewed as helping “our guys,” referring to men from Buryatia regardless of their ethnicity.
This concept of “our guys” has gradually expanded over time. One lama in Udurg told PS Lab’s researcher that while he observed many women volunteering to help their own relatives and friends at the start of the full-scale war, today he often hears volunteers make remarks like “Even if it’s not for my son, I hope [my contributions] will reach someone and be useful to them.”
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https://meduza.io/en/feature/2024/07/11/our-guys
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