De dog för att vi skulle leva : Rysslands patriotiska fostran och de levandes plikter mot de döda

Abstract

This article discusses military-patriotic education in Russia, focusing on the example of the nationwide search movement. This civil movement of volunteers is searching for the remains of fallen soldiers left on the battlefields from the Second World War all over Russia. The movement has young people as a main target group, and explicitly wants to make a contribution to the patriotic upbringing of Russia's young. In this work, the movement relates to the official government plans for patriotic education. As the prefix ‘military’ often is used, patriotic education can be seen as one aspect of civil-military relations. In both the government plans and within the search movement, a distinction tends to be made between ‘good’ patriotism and ‘bad’ nationalism, and the article discusses both these notions in the Soviet/Russian context. A number of obligations are central to the notion of patriotism: for the search movement, an obligation to the past, to remember, is the most important