Loyalty and disloyalty as relational forms in Russia’s border war with China in the 1960s

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses loyalty and disloyalty among soldiers serving in the Soviet army in the border war with China in the 1960s. It argues that loyalty and disloyalty can be seen as differently weighted patterns of social attachment. In both cases, these are partial and changeable, but the two differ in that loyalty involves a paring down of diverse ties in order to elevate an object of commitment ‘beyond reason’, whereas disloyalty consists in the perverse retention of attachments in contradistinction to whatever has been designated loyal. Ethnography is drawn upon to suggest the actual complexity of individual cases.

KEYWORDS:

• Loyalty
• disloyalty
• duty
• obligation
• Soviet army
• enemy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Vernost’ [being faithful to] is the closest Russian equivalent of loyalty. Loyal’nyi is defined in Ozhegov’s dictionary as staying quietly within the confines of the law or maintaining a benign-neutral relation to someone or something: http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enc1p/27442. Predannost’ is unshakable devotion even in difficult situations and is often held to be a spiritual, not a civic, feeling: https://otvet.mail.ru/question/19523580.

2. Rybakov was born in Ales (Gar, France) in 1947. His real surname is Sechinski, sometimes written Shchetinskii.

3. For historical analyses of this fight and the events that led up to it, see Robinson (1972), Kuisong (2000) and Iwashita (2004).

4. See discussion in Agamben (2009) and Martin (2017) of the oath as always already containing the possibility of perjury (the false oath).

5. For texts of the military oath in Russian, see http://goup32441.narod.ru/files/ogp/001_oporn_konspekt/2013/2013-07-3.htm (consulted 21 March 2016). See Martin (2017) on the significance of a switch from ‘Motherland’ to ‘Fatherland’ in the oath.

6. Mikhailin writes that cursing (mat) was especially banned for women because it was considered a sin from which the land would suffer. He notes that the ‘taboo’ on cursing in civil and domestic life was eroded during the twentieth century, especially after the end of the Soviet Union.

7. See Urbansky (2012) for discussion of Russian media presentations of the Chinese as enemies in this period.

8. In this paper, I quote extensively from the Russian texts of Rybakov’s Tyazhest’ (1977) and Tiski (1985), sometimes with my own translation and sometime from the publication of The Burden in English (1984). I have tried as far as possible to indicate by references the passages that are direct citations. But for reasons of space in a short article, I have had to précis much of Rybakov’s text.

9. Menya prorvalo – literally ‘I was torn apart’; ‘couldn’t stand it’ (Rybakov 1977, 35).

10. The Russian dolg has the connotation of ‘a due’, something that is owed.

11. Obyazannost’ is a word related to a cluster of terms related to binding.