Real Madmen?: Psychiatry and Soldiers during the Soviet-Afghan War

• In Event: Militarized Masculinity and Soviet-Afghan War Veterans in Post-Soviet Russia

Abstract

Russian military psychiatry emerged as a discipline amid the devastation of the early 20th century. The first frontline psychiatric unit was established during the short but disastrous war with Japan, the psychological toll of which is vividly portrayed in Leonid Andreev’s novella The Red Laugh (1904). A marginalization of the field after the establishment of Soviet power meant that by World War II, psychiatric illness was seen as aberrant to not only the military, but socialism entirely. Ultimately, Cold War competition with the United States military and the rise of PTSD as a diagnostic category during the Vietnam War spurred the Soviet state to prioritize psychiatric care within the military - but not until 1980. With the invasion of Afghanistan already underway, it would soon become all too clear how urgent the need was among Soviet soldiers. Frontline accounts from Afghanistan mirror Andreev’s descriptions of desperation, abandonment, and psychosis that had overwhelmed Russian soldiers seventy years prior. Reading the psychological testimony of afgantsy alongside military-psychiatric scientific literature on the war reveals how the traumatic disintegration experienced by Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan paralleled a similar disintegration of the ‘Soviet Man’ entirely. This paper questions why the diagnosis of PTSD may not have been enough to preserve Soviet military masculinity in the 1980s and explores the social afterlife of the disorder in Russian military culture today.

Author

• Sara Ruiz, U of Michigan