Over the past five years, poetry by so-called “patriots of Russia” has demonstrated just how rapidly the image of the war is changing. Whereas before 2022 poetry promised a swift triumph of the Russian will, it now accustoms the reader to war as a process that can last forever. Pro-war poets claim allies wherever they can even plausibly find them — from Mozart and early 20th-century author Osip Mandelstam to the metaphorical forces of light and darkness. This hodgepodge reflects the Kremlin’s lack of coherent arguments for continuing a “special military operation” that, after nearly five years, remains nowhere close to achieving its stated objectives.
The war is short, the war is long
Over the nearly five years of full-scale war in Ukraine, neither Russian film, nor theater, nor even literature has produced any memorable works about the “special military operation.” In this respect, pro-war poetry provides the only exception — likely owing to the peculiarities of the genre. A poet is forced to be concise, and therefore more meticulous in the choice of images and words. As for the underlying messages, the pro-war poets, if they waver at all, do so in perfect alignment with the official narrative.
According to literary scholar Mikhail Edelstein, all “patriotic” poetry after Feb. 24, 2022, offers a brief recap of the events that had unfolded since 2014. Many authors who have made a name for themselves in this genre extolled, glorified, and even called for war before 2022, promising Russia a swift victory and world domination.
For example, the poem “Pre-Winter” by Igor Karaulov (from the poetry anthology “I Am the Wounded Earth: Russian Poetry on the Crimean Spring and the War in Donbas,” 2017) reflects classic dreams dating back to tsarist times:
What we will eat tomorrow,
Or how our clothes will be cut — are trifles.
Many winters passed, and we’re alive again
As long as there is vodka, Crimea, and the straits.
The word “straits” in 19th-century propaganda meant roughly what Crimea does in modern-day Russia: the epitome of the empire’s existence. The straits in question were the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, which would finally give Russia access to the southern seas. (These hopes, needless to say, have still not been realized.)
The word “straits” in 19th-century propaganda meant roughly what Crimea does in modern-day Russia: the epitome of the empire’s existence
War was expected to fulfill a range of personal hopes. Ultranationalist poet Alexander Pelevin (not to be confused with bestselling novelist Viktor Pelevin) offers his reflection on the popular expression “war will write everything off”:
War will write it all off: your debts, payments, bills,
Your deadlines, projects, books you never wrote,
A clean slate, your new chapter in life,
Last year’s draft you never meant to complete.
(2018)
“Patriots” also pinned their hopes on a war to cleanse Russian society from the “liberal delusion” of perestroika and the 1990s — along with purging culture of the much-hated “postmodernism,” which they tend to use as an umbrella term for all things alien to a patriotic heart.
“Having cleansed itself of the delusion of the liberal agenda — LGBT+, postcolonialism, radical feminism, permissiveness bordering on Satanism, and other postmodernist discourse — [poetry] has become visible again,” poet and critic Oleg Demidov writes when explaining the origin of pro-war poetry.
In a 2022 interview, the poet Olesya Nikolaeva (wife of Russian Orthodox Church priest Vladimir Vigilyansky) characterized the war in Ukraine as “a clash of civilizations: Christian, on the one hand, and one that has renounced Christ and sunk into paganism, if not Satanism, on the other.” The Satanists, one must understand, are Western civilization.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 turned out to be neither swift nor victorious, with Russian troops taking months to capture every tiny village — only to lose it after a few more weeks of intense fighting. For now, Mala Tokmachka remains as inaccessible for Russian patriots as the straits for the 19th-century empire. Yet throughout 2022, inertia inspired poets to keep holding onto their pre-war mood of swaggering overconfidence.
That year, Igor Karaulov wrote a humorous poem that begins with the line: “Let us split Poland right in half, like the sweet iceberg of a Kyiv cake...” — as if the division of the “Kyiv” cake were still a foregone conclusion, a prelude to Russia’s conquest of its old lands further west.
The poet Maria Vatutina, whose poems are now available both on the YouTube channel of Russia’s National Guard and on the TV channel Russky Mir, borrows images of “liberator warriors” from Soviet propaganda:
The old men wept upon his chest,
The roadside villages shone bright,
They’re planting flowers in Mariupol,
And bringing textbooks to the schools.
Hopes for a swift redrawing of the borders across the post-Soviet space are reflected in Alexander Pelevin’s “In the City of Limonov” (2022), in which the author renames the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, the hometown of Russian writer Eduard Limonov (1943-2020):
In the city of Limonov
Padded jackets fill the streets
Public holidays and street names
Will be changing before long.
As we’re rising in our millions,
Like we did when we were young,
In the city of Limonov,
Kharkiv Region — that’s the one.
We are not bad people — our history is the problem
By 2026 the full-scale invasion of Ukraine had long since evolved into positional, trench warfare — striking in the irrational number of casualties taken for every captured kilometer. Poetry has to somehow justify such a high price, but after 2023, the names of captured settlements appear less often in propagandist art while the poet’s gaze turns to the metaphysical depths of the war. This change of optics helps to soothe the anxious reader — and the poet’s own conscience.
As could be expected, pro-war poetry usually chooses the “warrior of light” as its lyrical hero. But in moments of doubt, a characteristic ethical reversal kicks in, familiar to us from the Kremlin propaganda after 2014. Generally, “we” are the best, kindest, and most honest. But in the absence of extolling arguments — as in the case of Russian athletes caught doping — the “ethical reversal” kicks in, with propaganda whispering that “everybody does it; we are not the bad guys — everyone else is no better.”
The poet Alexander Pelevin employs this device when reflecting on the future:
There will be no “good Russian” passports for you,
Who’s good and who’s bad — who can tell from a trench?
We live in grim times, and since we are the bad guys,
Well, glory to Russia — what more can I say?
This marks an important turn: the “patriotic” poet realizes that a “good war” is no longer possible, and advises his readers to get used to being bad. He grasps at big ideas to justify this new position: the image of an ominous “History” appears in Pelevin’s poetry, an entity that simply exists regardless of people’s will. And this “History” of his is by definition a malevolent, cruel actor, meaning outsiders are not entitled to hold our actions against us:
History smells of death, history smells of sh*t,
History is burned-out vehicles, rust-covered metal scrap,
History is when they say: wherever you see him, kill him.
History is what happens when some people kill other people.
Propaganda in 2023-2024 also turned to a “historical” argument as justification, portraying the war against Ukraine as inevitable — the legacy of the Soviet Union’s collapse postponed by 30 years, something that “had to happen” and “could not have been avoided” (a thought Dmitry Medvedev expressed in one of his articles in the spring of 2023).
Seeking resonance with these ever-changing “root causes” of the war, propagandist poets mimic the state’s arguments: “we did not start it,” “we were set against each other,” and besides, Ukraine is “torn by civil war.”
Propagandist poets mimic the state’s arguments in their poems: “we did not start it,” “we were set against each other,” and besides, Ukraine is “torn by civil war”
The poet Sveta Litvak works in the genre of playful performance — a deliberate device reminiscent of “children’s poems” in the spirit of Agniya Barto. A brisk stepped-line verse seems intended to help readers memorize the theses of propaganda by heart:
You know, Sergeant, we’ll have company tonight.
The hostile silence shrouds the town before the fight.
As long as brother murders brother,
After one battle comes another,
Placing an end to war beyond our sight.The wind from the Atlantic brings us hostile hordes,
One nation set against the other by their lords.
(2024)
In trying to explain the length of the war, nationalist poetry first relies, in the spirit of state patriotism, on the thesis that this war is not new but rather a “continuation of the Great Patriotic War,” which supposedly never ended:
Our great-grandfather drove out the plague,
was captured and escaped,
and held his head high in Berlin, and to us
bequeathed his fate — to beat the enemy
Imagine that, one with its center in Kyiv.
(A poem by a mobilized man named Nikita that came out in 2023 in the collection “Resurrected in the Third World War,” distributed free of charge through the public services portal Gosuslugi)
There is also another argument, borrowed from the Soviet playbook of the Cold War era, that has come to the pro-war poet’s aid. This is “not just any war” but the Third World War, the worst fear of all Soviet children. The anthology of pro-war poetry that came out in early 2023, edited by pro-Kremlin author Zakhar Prilepin, is called exactly that — “Resurrected in the Third World War.” (It sold roughly 10,000 copies).
Following Putin, who has repeated many times that the “special military operation” will last as long as it takes to achieve the mysterious “goals” known only to him, the poet Anna Dolgareva — nicknamed the “Valkyrie of the special military operation” — gives this message a simple and clear form:
Death is inevitable (here, a shot booms like a chord).
“How much longer?” As long as your sense of duty can last.
For in Russia one must live long
And die fast.
Russian pro-war poetry stands out from among other genres of propaganda by sometimes letting slip the truth — even if inadvertently. In the classic definition of a totalitarian state, a citizen has only one duty: to die for their fatherland quickly, without thinking and without asking questions.
Igor Karaulov, a representative of an older generation, is in no hurry to give straightforward explanations. In a 2023 interview he frankly admits that he had not expected the war to drag on. And to the question “Who are we fighting?” he gives what seems to him a paradoxical and wise answer: “Ourselves.”
Russian pro-war poetry stands out from among other propaganda genres by sometimes letting slip the truth — if inadvertently
The main prewar mythologem held that, as a result of a hypothetical war, Russian society was supposed to “be cleansed.” But since society has yet to cleanse itself fully or sufficiently, the war cannot end in victory. This presents an example of outstanding semantic acrobatics on the part of poet Karaulov, who demonstrates just how elastic a patriot’s logic can be: cause and effect, the horse and the cart, easily switch places if need be — whenever and however is convenient for the author.
To justify the number of casualties and the length of the invasion, pro-war poets have to keep expanding its purpose. Karaulov himself writes:
A stock of warmth, a stock of hardtack,
My dear old lumbering bear,
Our motherland’s rockets streak overhead,
A Mandelstam lying facedown by the bed.
In a bout of remarkable cynicism, the author rhymes Osip Mandelstam — who was tortured and killed by the Stalinist regime and was far removed from any motives of military conquest — with Putin’s missiles.
Remarkably, this device closely follows the state’s own approach. In 2017, educational posters printed to mark the occasion of Moscow’s 870th anniversary appeared on the capital’s streets and in the subway, illustrating the city’s history with the fates of its outstanding residents. The city administration did not hesitate to claim for itself the achievements of Great Terror victims like the geneticist Nikolai Vavilov or the poet Osip Mandelstam.
Not all metaphorical allies have to be native-born. The poet Olesya Nikolaeva, claims for herself a composer from a country that modern-day Russia treats as unfriendly:
Who stands with us? Our kin, our blood,
The running river, rustling forests, love,
The golden skies, the secret breath of spring,
And all of Mozart, and prophetic dreams.
And yet, in the fifth year of war, poets and composers alone will not do: higher powers have to be called in. As a result, in Anna Dolgareva’s poems, God, angels, and camouflage-clad saints often descend into dugouts, don body armor, smoke with soldiers, and share the hardships of war. This running plot can be seen in other pro-war poets as well.
God is with us; so is the sun; and so is the rain
that loaded its sniper rifle.
(Anna Revyakina, the poem “The Miner’s Daughter”).
In Sofia Yudina’s poem “To the Hospital,” God comes in a greatcoat (in this image one recognizes, however, rather an earthly god — Joseph Stalin):
It is as though God comes home every night,
Takes off his shabby army greatcoat, hangs it
On a hook, then stomps to shake the snow off his boots,
Turns on the light, and looks — and through the blizzard
Starlight begins to glimmer over weary earth.
Alongside furious appeals to the forces of light, propagandist poetry also takes pride in a secret ability to “make hell” on earth. Speaking on behalf of the light, poets do not miss the chance to wink at the lower tier. Dolgareva again:
The commander said it as a simple fact:
“We raised hell
On sectors facing not battalions —
But whole brigades.”
They were foretold
To burn up, not hold out for long.
They offered a preview —
Showed what hell is like.
Chumminess with hell is a distinct feature of Russian pro-war poetry — a device that could be interpreted as a perverse way of “making peace with the war.” Hell, blood, coffins, and the cross that must be borne are frequent images in the work Dolgareva and others, where blood, guts, and mud are invoked not to appall the reader but as a kind of paean to this hell on earth:
And yet,
Even if my tongue should die,
I will pronounce this all the same
Into this
Horror mixed with the remains of bodies,
Into this sunset pink
And air blue,
To my last breath:
“Russia,
Glory be with you.”
As literary scholar Oleg Lekmanov noted in 2024: “The candy-sweet prettiness with the epithet and the noun swapped places (‘sunset pink,’ ‘air blue’) is no accident next to ‘the remains of bodies’ — these images are meant to be perceived in one row. It looks as if today’s [pro-war] poets have gotten hooked on the cruelty and blood of war like heavy narcotics.”
Finally, one more way to justify war is a paradoxical and deliberate admiration for it, a kind of infernal bravado. The collection by the poet Dmitry Artis is titled “He Walks Through the War,” cynically paraphrasing Gennady Shpalikov’s anthem of the Sixties generation. Philologist Mikhail Edelstein calls Artis “one of the bloodthirstiest poets in this crowd.” His deliberate cruelty contains a disinterested rapture before death:
War is a piece of happiness,
a blood-soaked chunk,
A gem of freedom
without a slavish cut…War is the very best mother
That we could have,
The taste of porridge
She gave us when we were young.
Over the past five years, the meaning of the war in Russian “patriotic” poetry has performed an astonishing somersault from the promise of a swift national victory in 2022 to a wish in 2026 for everyone involved to have “a good death.”
At his infamous meeting with the mothers of killed mobilized soldiers in 2022, Vladimir Putin quoted lines by the celebrated Soviet poet and songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky: “To go this way is better than from vodka and from colds.” The Kremlin’s attempt to enlist even Vysotsky as an ally in its deadly escapade is no more cynical than everything else. After all, the very idea of a “sacrificial, meaningful death” is a trademark device of Soviet propaganda. Unsurprisingly, this motif also appears in the poems of Igor Karaulov:
Others flee to the front to escape their death.
Where steel goddesses rage, where the guns never tire.
Where the grain that must perish will never expire.
The image of fallen soldiers “sprouting” after death in the form of grass is another popular trope — in the work of Maria Vatutina, in particular:
Like stalks, we shoot up, bud by bud,
We sprout, dead, through tight-packed soil,
We lift our heads, beginning to be heard.
Soon we will reign as kings, as wordsmiths of the world.
Literary scholar Mikhail Edelstein unambiguously interprets this passage as presenting an image of the resurrected dead who will come to “reign as kings,” and more than that, this infernal side of pro-war poetry also marks the evident exhaustion of rational arguments for the war among poets and officials alike. This is called magical thinking: when reality does not match the basic myth, one has to pile up ever more new myths.
Instilling the idea that one must get used to an endless, pointless war is the only purpose poetic propaganda can serve today. The same goes, indeed, for Kremlin propaganda as a whole.
