Hardliners in Russia have been calling for a full-scale mobilisation for some time, but so far Vladimir Putin has resisted the temptation for a full call-up due to its expected unpopularity. Instead, Russia is attempting to persuade thousands of men to enlist voluntarily as contract soldiers. The Kremlin’s recruitment campaign is designed to appeal to their sense of national pride and injured masculinity. But my research with working-class men – the primary targets of the campaign – suggest it is unlikely to succeed.
Using gender as a political strategy has been central to Putin’s success. In the early days of his presidency, he liked to portray himself as an all-action military man, and later arranged photoshoots of himself fishing and riding horses bare-chested in the Russian wilderness. Putin used these displays of masculinity to project strength to a public for whom Russia’s weakness during the 1990s had been personified by his often-drunk predecessor Boris Yeltsin.
This performance of a strong masculinity clearly had a broad appeal, as evidenced by the hit pop song: A Man Like Putin:
