Description
One of the features of Russia's "Special Military Operation" in Ukraine launched in February 2022 is the extensive use of the vocabulary of the Great Patriotic War to legitimate Moscow's actions. This paper focusses on a very specific aspect of that phenomenon: Moscow's securitisation of a particular set of memories constructed around the Great Patriotic War and its militarisation of Russian children and young people to be the defenders of their nation's history. Focussing closely on the activities of state-sponsored youth groups (the Youth Army and the Victory Volunteers), the paper considers how securitisation and militarisation are used by the Russian state to shore up popular support for the war in Ukraine in the short term and lay the foundations for a longer-term project of militarising Russian society.
