“That’s Not Patriotism, It’s Teaching Kids To Barbarically Romanticize War”: An Interview with Wife of a Conscript Maria Andreeva

We spoke with Maria Andreeva, a member of The Way Home, a movement of relatives of conscripted men. Their activists are fighting for the return of their drafted husbands and calling for the complete demobilization of Russia’s civilian population. The Way Home has been one of the most visible protest movements in Russia over the past year; its women have even successfully staged street protests, using a white headscarf as their symbol. However, many opposition-minded Russians criticize the activists for not explicitly framing their protest as anti-war.

How does The Way Home operate internally? Are there debates between different groups of conscripts’ relatives? We discuss these and many other topics with Maria Andreeva, a pediatrician on maternity leave who has spent the past six months working to bring her husband back home from the war zone. During a rally commemorating the 500^th day of the mobilization, Maria put herself in the way of a police truck carrying arrested journalists.

Interview questions by F. Serebrennikova and D. Serenko
Transcribed by Borya
Cover photo: Reuters/Scanpix/LETA

Maria, we know that you just put your daughter to bed before this interview. What does your life look like now, with your husband off at the ”Special Military Operation”[1]? You’re on your own, juggling activism and motherhood—it must be challenging.

I also went back to work back when my husband was still home, working half-time remotely. So I’m juggling motherhood, activism, and work. (I couldn’t just abandon my coworkers.)

My husband was very involved in caring for our daughter. He would come home from work and then he was immediately there for her: they played together, and he could always feed her, too. He’s not one of those fathers who shy away from small children. You often see that in Russia—men are kind of left out of parenting until the kid is old enough to talk—but my husband was involved from day one. So our situation was quite different from that of most Russian families. Of course, that makes it really difficult for me now, because my husband used to get up at night to help our daughter when needed; we divided up the responsibilities so that we could each get a decent amount of sleep and feel okay. Unfortunately, that’s not the case anymore.

It’s very hard both mentally and physically.

You are a pediatrician, right?

Right.

As of now, all the interviews with you describe you only as a “wife of а mobilized soldier.” But you‘re not just a “wife”; we’d like to share more about you as a person overall. What do you like? What do you care about?

Well, I have a medical degree, and currently I am on maternity leave. I do have quite a wide range of hobbies. For example, I draw a bit; I attended an art school as a kid for a short period. When I was in school, we did have “patriotic education” lessons, but they were presented differently than they are now. I always went to all the events about World War II, where we would usually read poems and go visit the neighborhood monument to the People’s Militia—there was one in a park near our school. We would read poems by Robert Rozhdestvensky there. Elderly people would come join us. It was all about ensuring that no such thing would ever happen again, you know? But now it’s framed the opposite way, like, “World War III? Bring it on!” I’m obviously against that; that’s not patriotism, it’s teaching kids to barbarically romanticize war. That scares me, because I have a young child who will start school at some point.

When it all started and my husband was taken away, I coped with the stress by knitting. Knitting really helps. There was a time when I didn’t know what was happening to him; he had just texted me to say that they had been dropped off somewhere in a forest, told to take out their SIM cards, and he didn’t know where he was or when he would be able to get in touch.

That was December, a while after he was drafted. We had assumed that their training would eventually end, and they would be deployed straight to the conflict zone. So I thought they were being deployed, but, thank God, they weren’t; they were just waiting to be transferred to their unit. Those two weeks, knitting saved me. It’s actually a great activity because it involves routine, monotonous movements. The key is to choose a low-stress pattern that isn’t too complicated; then your hands can get into the zone and your mind can relax.

I had had some time off before I started my residency, and that was when I got into decoupage. I love all kinds of crafts. After the baby arrived, it was harder to do, because varnishing is a pretty smelly and dirty business. If you’ve ever tried it, you know what I‘m talking about: coating your project in alkyd varnish stinks up the whole room. My house always smelled like gasoline—paint thinner, that is—plus the varnish itself. You can’t have such a smelly hobby once you have a kid. There’s a lot of unfinished pieces lying around my house right now.

Just look at what they’ve done! Forcing an ordinary woman to become an activist.

Now I go out to protest, when I could be sitting at home crocheting, or knitting, or cross-stitching, and not getting involved in anything. And when the cops come knocking to lecture you about extremism, you think, “Sheesh. You guys want to come investigate my craft supplies, too? Real extreme.”

At what point did you realize that you had to move from the accumulated feeling of injustice to action?

It was that spring [of 2023], when [chair of the State Duma defense committee] Andrei Kartapolov so kindly informed us that mobilized soldiers were not entitled to any rotation, and they’d be there until the end. Of course, about a week later, he rolled over and said that they were entitled to a rotation. But by then it was too late, because his flip-flopping in September had already pushed many of us past the point of sitting around writing letters and signing petitions. We realized that we were going about things the wrong way.

Before that, on December 21, 2022, Shoigu had told the Defense Ministry collegium that all army soldiers would be on contracts, and mobilized citizens in the forces replaced if necessary. All year long, they’d been telling us that contract soldiers were flocking to enlistment offices and our numbers were growing. We thought they’d have everyone they needed soon. But it turned out that they weren’t being recruited for the purposes mentioned [by Shoigu] in December; it was for something else. Now we realize that they were putting us off our guard. We should have rung all the alarms and stated our disagreement right away. Instead it seems like, once our guys were already out there, the Ministry of Defense said, “Look, they’re handling their duties well—why bother replacing them?” They always take the path of least resistance.

Were you ever afraid?

I think that fear is a natural experience for living creatures. It’s a basic instinct; we need it. I experience several kinds of fear. I am afraid that I will go to jail (judging by recent articles about me, I am already at the top of their list).

But I am much more afraid of one day having to face my conscience and my daughter asking, “What did you do to stop it?”

Maybe I’m exaggerating, and she’ll never ask me that question, but I’ll ask myself. I’m much more afraid of facing my own conscience. I can’t just tell it to shut up.

The Way Home has been around for six months—that’s quite a journey. Do you feel that your views or your perception of the situation in the country have changed since it’s been around? And if so, then in what way?

The start of the special military operation came as a complete shock to me; I couldn’t believe that something like that could happen in the 21st century. I objected to that undertaking on an emotional level, like, “How could they do such a thing?!” And as events have unfolded, I have only grown more firm in rejecting it. As for our movement, The Way Home is not homogeneous. And our group is not the only one. There’s at least two other pretty significant groups. The catch is, at a certain point, we disagreed about which path to take, which is very disappointing.

Originally, there was a group led by Olga Katz called Bringing the Boys Back [Vernem reb’iat]. They collected petition signatures, but opposed doing any rallies or active protests; they just wrote and wrote. They were also opposed to media outreach. There was another group in St. Petersburg called Time for Conscripts to Come Home [Mobilizovannym pora domoi]. They’re writing to this day.

They have this slogan, “Replace the conscripts,” but they don’t specify who to replace them with.

The first wave of mobilization was quite painful for the nation, and for us. So if you talk about “replacing” the conscripts, you need to either constantly clarify that you want to replace them with contract soldiers and a professional army, not another wave of the draft, or just throw out that demand. Because they’re not getting that much popular support, but they are casting a big shadow over us. Once we found about our mobilized relatives being forced to sign contracts, we realized we needed to move away from that demand. That’s why The Way Home stands for demobilization and for the repeal of Decree No. 647; we oppose any further waves of mobilization and any civilians being involved in the conflict zone. We even approached [Duma] deputies to propose that the army be made up of law enforcement officers—from the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Emergency Ministry, and the National Guard. Plenty of them want to rise through the ranks quickly, and you can do that faster during wartime, so take any of them who want to serve! I suspect that they are being saved for a much different purpose—fighting against us, conscripts’ wives, the real extremist threat to Russia.

People who have no connection to the armed forces at all should not be in the conflict zone. That’s what we are trying to convey. We also say that soldiers who have signed a contract for, say, one year, should have the right to go home once it expires, and it should not renew automatically. As of now, the Ministry of Defense does not give them that right.

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When The Way Home’s [Telegram] channel first started to grow, it was hard for journalists from opposition media to get interviews with you. You were understandably wary of them, because that kind of public affiliation could cause trouble for your Russia-based members married to conscripts. But now you are give interviews to everyone. Clearly, in the eyes of propaganda, this makes you a target. Why are you no longer afraid?

When all this started in September, I got in touch with one journalist. In fact, he was the one to reach out to me after I had posted a video from a meeting with United Russia deputy Viktoria Rodina. [Translator’s note: rodina means “motherland” in Russian.] Despite her last name, she knows basically zero about her country. The journalist told me that we, the wives, needed a hook. If we did something newsworthy enough, we would be picked up by the media. Our “hook” ended up being a Communist Party rally. We came prepared; assuming that we wouldn’t even be allowed to unfurl our posters, another girl and I did a few small interviews and took photos with our posters before the rally.

But the word spread like wildfire. Everyone started asking for interviews. I thought that if I gave some, the other girls would join in. Actually, very few did, but we had to keep going.

Of course, a lot of journalists were “foreign agents,” although it seems like that’s basically everybody these days. What other options did we have? There’s the international media outlets. A lot of them are accredited by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, so they have the same rights as Russian state media. It does mean exposing yourself outside of Russia, but it also means that if anything happens to me, people will find out immediately. That’s why I feel safe. The more interviews I give to international media, the faster the news will spread if something happens to me or my husband. Then people will start questioning Russia’s treatment of its own citizens. We’re already doing that, but then people around the world will join in. I believe that the more publicity you get, the more visible you are, the better. Still, we’ve recently been seeing news about people being jailed for reposts and comments [on social media], even though the freedom of speech is actually enshrined in our constitution. Yes, we have a constitution, and everyone should go study it (though I prefer the old one, pre-2020). The constitution is our fundamental law, and nothing can go against it. The government is taking advantage of the fact that we don’t know our rights. But no one will teach them to us; we need to go read them for ourselves.

We wanted to ask you about your encounter with journalist Anton Rubin. He asked you questions in a very aggressive manner, and then publicly shared what you had said off the record. Did you have a personal emotional reaction to this story? Did it affect other activists’ willingness to speak to the media?

We’re very grateful to Mr. Rubin in retrospect. After his extremely unethical interview, many journalists have made sure to approach us with completely different rhetoric, which is very nice. Now they treat us with great care. Whatever happens, happens for the best. Obviously, me and the girls debriefed afterwards and thought about how to avoid getting into such a mess again. We decided that if something seems sketchy, and you don’t know how you would do with said conversation, it’s better to pass the job to a more experienced colleague. He behaved unethically. Journalists have ethical standards, and his actions caused outrage in the professional community. But in the end, we are only better off.

It’s so sweet that you say “me and the girls,” because we also talk like that in our group. Our next question is a question from one organization to another: we really want to know how you operate. How do you come up with ideas together? Where do you get protest ideas, and do you ever vote on things? Anything you can tell us about what goes on behind the scenes—writing Telegram posts, a manifesto, holding protests.

We have our main channel on Telegram, and then many small group chats for the activists. We used to have one main channel plus regional chats, where people would talk about what events to attend, who to contact, maybe break up into working groups. Whoever had a bit of legal background would draft petitions that we then edited. Once we started organizing protests, obviously, we made closed chats for coordinating our activities.

The events where we lay flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Solder came about spontaneously thanks to one of our members. We had just recorded a video appeal to the president, ahead of his annual call-in show. (This was in Losiny Ostrov park.) We had spent two hours outside, freezing, so we stopped at a café to warm up—and that’s where the idea of the flowers was born. A lot of members were scared, because the memorial is right in the Kremlin Wall, so only a small few of us showed up for the first event, five girls (which you could see as a failure, although many more people voted for it). We raised our hands to say who was going, who wasn’t, and who might go. Th, they didn’t even want to tell the military guards that we had arrived to lay flowers. But I let it slip that if they didn’t let us in, I would tell journalists that they had disrespected the fallen soldiers. After that, they immediately called a guard over, he lifted up the chain, and we did what we came for. At our next event, about ten people showed up, then fifteen, which is our average. But even at this harmless event, police were coming up to me and saying, “Beware of provocateurs.”

I told them that dealing with provocateurs was their job, and that we weren’t going to do it for them by cancelling our event.

I had applied for permission to hold a rally, and even gone to court; I had done everything I could to politely but firmly make our problems known. Since we had been ignored, we decided to go a different route. We did whatever events we came up with. No one could kick us out of there, because we brought our symbol, white headscarves, and our flowers.

We don’t have that many people actually running things, so our YouTube channel is completely neglected. We also have a group on VKontakte. But running a VKontakte group is like pissing in the wind; they’ll ban you and delete your posts in a heartbeat.

When the Valdai Forum was taking place, they had left their comments section open, so our girls quickly teamed up and started commenting about demobilizing the draftees. The comments were immediately closed, and they started purging the ones with certain keywords. Our Telegram channel also has issues; we’ve been operating with the little “fake” badge we got about two weeks after appearing at the Communist Party rally. Allegedly there’s another channel with the same name, which somehow wasn’t an issue until that point. But we carry on.

How do you write your posts?

We work on them together. We all have different backgrounds—some have legal training—and each of us uses our talents to the fullest.

A question about security: I was absolutely amazed to see that your petition isn’t hosted on Change.org. You put it on CryptPad, just like real underground activists! How do you train each other on security?

We are working on our security protocals; we ask each other for advice. By the way, we have a petition up on the Russian Public Initiative site that you helped out with. Thank you very much! The government is supposed to consider it, but the issue is that not everyone is comfortable with [the state-run online portal] Gosuslugi. It’s a stalemate: the government will only consider your petition on that one site, but when users open that page, they get told they need to verify their identity with Gosuslugi. So it’s never going to be as popular as petitions on websites that are more user-friendly to sign.

Propaganda likes to imply that there are “good” conscripts’ wives—they meet with Putin (and support him and the “operation”)—and then there are conscripts’ wives who protest, and they’re actresses hired by Ukraine to lie, undermine the country, and stop justice. How often do you have to prove that you are really the wife of a mobilized soldier?

That’s easy for me to prove—I have the receipt stub from my husband’s draft notice in my wallet. When the police came to visit, I joked that, according to Kartapolov, they were dealing with a double Ukrainian- and US secret agent. (Those were Kartapolov’s precise words of praise.) We had a good laugh. The police hadn’t even heard his latest interviews—come on, do your homework before you come knocking! As for us being actresses, I don’t hide my full name; you can look up my tax returns and see my income. The police can even get video footage from nearby buildings’ surveillance cameras, and getting all my bank records would be a piece of cake for them. Anyway, so far we have just laughed off these made-up stories, but at some point, we might get offended and file a defamation lawsuit. We could make such a big deal of it that they will have to apologize.

Have you been following the Council of Wives and Mothers initiative? Did any of them join your group?

No, I haven’t been following it. I missed it because right after the mobilization started, my husband caught pneumonia. He was in the hospital, then in rehab, and I kept waiting for them to realize that they shouldn’t enlist someone in such bad health. Maybe someone of them is with us, but I think they are unlikely to make it public.

Are you inspired by any women’s initiatives? Women’s protests have often had anti-war and anti-violence agendas. When we saw that your symbol was a white headscarf—a reference to the protests [of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo] in Argentina—we were amazed, because we had also posted about them.

The first time we used the white scarf was in a video address to the president. We cut the video into small clips, and I sent them all to the call-in show myself. But none of our videos made it onto the show; only the eggs did. The white scarf is a universal symbol because anyone can put one on, and if someone takes issue with it, say, “Since when did white scarves become illegal?” But it is also quite recognizable; you can spot a group of people in white scarves right away. The Argentine women’s story is very similar to our situation.

Russian draftees have been left with absolutely no rights for the indefinite future. They can’t even openly complain or say that they are tired—that would make them deserters.

Let’s dispel one myth: other than their draft summons, our draftees have no relation to the Ministry of Defense at all. They didn’t sign any contracts. Even getting a copy of their official enlistment documents is a massive undergoing. If they get a whiff that you need them for something other than idle curiosity, they’ll never give it to you. And there is a lot of interesting information there, from with what time they counted as training, to the moment when you were deployed to the actual conflict zone. You need to know these dates to see what’s going on.

But the overwhelming majority of draftees haven’t received this document. Even the veterans—most of them haven’t gotten their IDs, only notarized copies.

The government now also recognizes white scarves as a symbol, and they might detain people for wearing them. We had a situation where we held an action, Women in Black, across Russia, where women in dozens of cities who wanted to stop the bloodshed dressed in black. But at some point, police started arresting them. They even detained a random person for wearing black clothes who had nothing to do with us. After that, we became afraid of repeating the protest because we didn’t want anything bad to happen to people. Have you had similar situations?

So far, we have not faced any problems because of our symbol. I think they are just not ready to risk touching the draftees’ wives and mothers, because what if you accidentally mess with the one from the interviews. I’ll be honest: it was no coincidence that I went out to the Zhukov monument on Manege Square. There were a lot of young police officers itching to show off, which they did, and my detention got a million views in three hours on Sota.vision. If you are in the public eye, it’s harder for the authorities to mess with you; if you are not visible, they have an easier intimidating you. That’s the same reason why I mentioned in my interview that the police had paid me a visit.

What kind of pressures are your members’ relatives in the army facing?

The pressure on us started after the Communist Party rally. Our men were pressured to tell us to shut up. It happened to my husband. First he got mad at me, and then I got mad at him. I explained to him in detail what was going on. The soldiers get told that if we just shut up, they’ll be left alone, they won’t get sent into combat—but in reality, if we shut up, they will get sent into combat. As long as we keep speaking, they are safe.

Why do you think there is so little support from ordinary people, our fellow citizens? How can Russians support you now?

I think there’s little support because of the shadow cast by a certain group when they talk about replacing the draftees. Every other family that hasn’t been affected yet thinks, “Replacing them? With who, our husbands and sons? Screw off!”

Not that I don’t relate to those ladies, but they need to work through their stages of grief a bit faster; they seem to have gotten stuck at the wrong stage. Our group always says that we don’t want other people to have to go through this. We learned things the hard way; now you can learn from our experience.

Give us your support today so you don’t have to come asking for our advice tomorrow.

If you want a peaceful life in the future, you need to show your support in the present. Go to protests, or at the very least, comment supportive things on our videos. Then the government won’t be able to divide us, which is exactly what’s happening now: they divided women into a big group and a small one. The big group will go after the smaller one as it goes through all the stages of grief, and no one will realize what is actually happening with the country and society.

If we don’t speak up against mobilizing civilians now, I am confident that, when they announce a second wave of mobilization, they will say they acting in accordance with our wishes. The government will scapegoat us to look good, and people will go after us again. Divide and conquer. If the people stood united against the mobilization, we could move on to other demands.

Women are anti-war by definition; we don’t have children to satisfy other people’s ambitions.

We have kids so that they can survive and thrive. Women are pro-peace. For now, we can go outside and say as much. Women got together during the Chechen wars to demand an end to the offensive. If we were to call for a ceasefire now, delusional Putin–die-hards and far-right conspiracy theorists would shut us down in a second. I don’t even think they need the government to send them; they harass us of their own accord. Such stupidity can only be genuine.

The Way Home held a meeting with [presidential candidate] Boris Nadezhdin. How did it go? Do you think that if he had real power, he would comply with your demands?

Mr. Nadezhin expressed support for us. We initially thought of the event as a press conference for us, a platform to gather people, talk about ourselves, get some media coverage. It was a bigger risk for Mr. Nadezhin to appear with us than it was for us to appear with him. He set up the meeting, and we shared our proposals there; it got a lot of coverage, with people calling for voting for Mr. Nadezhin as the anti-war candidate. The upcoming elections are not to choose a president; they are a referendum for or against the war. I think our government doesn’t want to see the real numbers. It’s hard to say how much support Nadezhdin can give us. Our meeting with him is just one small stitch in a huge tapestry, one link in the chain mail; we know that it won’t bring our men home next week. There are a lot of things we do just for the sake of doing them. For example, I went to court to challenge the ban on our protest in order to get media attention and to have those documents in case we ever need. We take a lot of actions that may not have an immediate impact, but that will help us down the road.

In my personal opinion, it’s very important to have a long-term strategy, because at some point, your current activities could hit a dead end, and you’ll have to figure out what to do next. Are you already thinking along those lines, or do you think it’s too early?

We are thinking ahead about rehabilitating draftees, since the state is not going to do it. This involves a huge number of questions. We will need to work more closely with rehabilitation centers. A bunch of them have just now sprung up, but I don’t think they very effective as institutions; they are more of a PR stunt that in reality is absolutely useless.

We’re working on some other long-term things, too. We need to ensure that no civilians are sent to war for someone else’s ambitions. No more “bring it on” talk —we won’t win World War III, nor do we want to.

We paid our taxes: now give us a decent, happy life, and if you can’t, leave. Remember, democracy is when society tells the government what it wants. It’s not enough to complain in the comfort of your own home; you need to take a stand. Where is our freedom of speech? Where is our freedom of assembly? How long will you hide behind COVID [restrictions on public gatherings]? There’ll be another pandemic soon, and you’ll still be hiding behind the old one.

Historically, it has been the case that women’s anti-war movements gained enough momentum to help stop wars. Do you believe that a large women’s coalition could emerge in Russia in the forseeable future? (We’ll leave aside the question of its success.)

We’re working on it. Our group tries to deal with our grief; we say that we don’t want it to affect other families. We are trying to explain to the women’s groups advocating for replacing draftees that their stance is unproductive. Once we unite, others will begin to unite around us, too. But to get others to unite around you, you have to earn it. First, you need to realize that just because you’re suffering, that doesn’t mean that everyone else should suffer, too. That’s what the provocateurs try to get us to say, but once we are so calm that they can’t get to us, people will see that we are in the right frame of mind and be open to our side.

No one wants to be on the side of toxic people grieving.

It’s hard. To win people to your side, you have to stand for something. The mother of all questions is, what will happen after the election? That’s why we need to deal with our own inner demons as quickly as possible.

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[1] Editors’ note: We use the phrases “Special Military Operation” and “conflict” in the interview for our interlocutor’s safety.