The road from contract soldier to violent criminal has become all too familiar in Russia in recent years. At least 500 civilians have been killed or seriously injured by returning veterans since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and the tide of violence shows no signs of slowing.

Tune into the state’s propaganda channels, however, and a different picture emerges. On 31 December 2024, a handful of “Special Military Operation” veterans in immaculately pressed uniforms were feted as heroes at Goluboi Ogonek, Russia’s glitzy televised New Year’s light festival, alongside the usual cavalcade of pop stars and celebrities. They sang the praises of their government, their country’s war, and their comrades-in-arms.

Similarly glittering visions of soldiers, hymned as the saints of the Kremlin’s cult of war, are plastered over Russian state-owned media. The image of ordinary soldiers returning from the front, flush with cash, to acclaim and accolades is everywhere in popular culture. Billboards with the faces of the “Heroes of Russia” sprawl across highway bridges and loom over city streets throughout the land. The Russian Orthodox patriarch sings the praises of veterans from the pulpit, claiming that to die in Ukraine “washes away all sins”.

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On top of this choreographed public zeal is a deluge of advertising that promises up to $60,000 (USD) to those who enlist and survive a year as a kontraktnik, a contract soldier. The adverts promise Russian men that they can be rich and successful — which, stuck in the underdeveloped, stagnant regions outside wealthy cities, most ordinary Russians cannot otherwise hope to be. And it’s not just talk: as much as 1.5% of Russia’s GDP is being spent on these bonuses. The mostly uneducated men who seize the chance and survive their year in the “meat grinder”, which has left hundreds of thousands of Russian men dead in Ukraine, brag on social media about the cash lining their pockets. Yet there is nothing to brag about during their time at the front, where they are initiated into Russia’s particularly brutal way of warfare which embraces violence, torture, rape, and the murder of combatants and civilians alike.

Russian soldiers are promised the very best treatment on their return from war. The Kremlin has created a special “Defenders of the Fatherland” foundation, led by Vladimir Putin’s cousin Anna Tsivileva, to advocate for veterans. State-run groups on VK and Telegram — two of the country’s most popular social media platforms — run Q&A sessions for those seeking to maximize the new benefits the Kremlin is supposedly offering, which include access to family and child support, employment opportunities, and healthcare. The media explains how soldiers and their families can access free trips to luxurious recuperation sanatoria; meanwhile, the wounded are supposedly cared for at hyper-modern rehabilitation clinics. In reality, such benefits are available only for the lucky few who can navigate their way through Russia’s arcane veterans bureaucracy.

Behind the Kremlin-orchestrated spectacle, however, lurks an angry, violent group of veterans. The state deliberately leaves its demobbed troops in a perpetual battle mode, firing them up with social and mainstream media campaigns that promise that, since Russia is surrounded by enemies at home and abroad, the battle is never over. Men who have killed for the state are told that they may have to fight again to defend their meager gains. Those who return home are thus often left unrecognizable. As one wife commented on social media: “My husband returned home from the war. But this isn’t my husband, he’s not the man I knew before. Sometimes it feels like he was killed. His body came back, but not his soul. He’s become irritable. Everything angers him. Me, the kids, and everyone around him.” All over the country, Russia’s ex-soldiers seem incapable of interacting within a peaceful civilian milieu.

Meanwhile, murder after murder hit the headlines. A veteran beats his friend to death with a chair; another stabs his ex-girlfriend to death while her daughter watches; a Chechen man is butchered at a bus stop. These stories don’t receive much coverage in the Russian media, even as the violence conducted by ex-soldiers let loose on civilian society spreads. Serious crimes are punished with heavy jail terms, but the spiraling cases of domestic violence result in fines as small as $55 — pocket change for men who have made thousands of dollars by fighting in Ukraine. There is little real justice, and the state barely pretends to care.

When soldiers are demobbed from modern Western armed forces, they are offered psychological and reintegration support to help them leave their identity as soldiers — as killers — behind. But in Russia, no widespread programs exist for the hundreds of thousands of men Putin has sent to fight in Ukraine. The few rehabilitation centers that do exist are overwhelmed and poorly equipped to treat deep psychological trauma. And for those who develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — a diagnosis barely even acknowledged in official media — help is scarce and stigmatized. After all, the state has no intention of transitioning these soldiers away from the violence of war — and that violence continues to offer plenty of rewards.

Problems are glossed over in the stilted bureaucratic language of the administrative state: “We have faced a shortage of rehabilitation institutions with highly qualified personnel,” explained one official this summer — but now the problem is “solved”. Wives are expected to support their husbands instead of psychiatrists, reinforcing the state’s strict gender rules about women’s roles as supporters of male violence. Yet even the Kremlin does not pay more than lip service to the idea of instructing women on how to stem the rising tide of violence. One Moscow psychologist running a private practice told me they have treated a handful of former soldiers, but have been contacted by many more distraught wives — terrified of and for the men who came back from the front.

To those familiar with Russia’s history, this might seem par for the course. Over the past century, Russia has embroiled itself in vast wars that have left millions of men and women engulfed in post-traumatic nightmares when the guns have gone quiet. At times, this has tipped the country into outright chaos: would the Civil War have seen a wave of unfathomable brutality sweep across the country, resulting in at least eight million casualties, had the Eastern Front of the First World War not been so violent? Would post-Soviet Russia have been so dominated by criminal thuggery had a generation of young men not been sent to fight in Afghanistan, then welcomed home with a shrug as the USSR collapsed? Would the nihilism of the late Nineties, before Putin swept to power on promises of masculine and national renewal, have been so acute if Boris Yeltsin hadn’t sent a generation of conscripts into a conflict in Chechnya?

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Each time Moscow sends its young to kill and be killed, it promises personal and collective triumph but delivers disillusionment. As one veteran of the Afghan war explained in Nobel prizewinner Svetlana Alexievich’s seminal study of those who had returned from that conflict, Zinky Boys: “I wanted to be in a war, but not like this one. Heroic World War 2, that’s what I wanted.” Successive regimes have seemed determined to treat the mass of their soldiers as human capital more than as heroes. These angry bands of ex-soldiers have plagued the Kremlin’s incumbents with criminality, opposition and uprisings.

It might, therefore, appear that Putin is repeating the mistakes of the Eighties and Nineties as he foments another generation of angry soldiers who behave as brutally at home as they did at the front. But the state has done little to stymie what is an obvious problem. Instead, it almost seems to encourage it as a means to keep the entire population on edge, ready to engage in what the Kremlin claims is an endless war against enemies that are out to destroy Russia.

Putin has chosen to pursue a particularly bloody form of warfare in which soldiers are rewarded for committing violent atrocities. When they return home, the Kremlin’s soldiers are in turn offered opportunities to act as its agents of violence by enrolling in the domestic security services, taking up positions of power in the war economy, and advocating for further conflict. This is the approach Putin took in the 2000s, when he offered the disillusioned and criminal veterans of Afghanistan and Chechnya paths into the hierarchy of power as municipal police, security agents, mayors, governors, and even Duma deputies as a means to placate them. Now he is repeating the trick at a far larger scale.

These violent men do not represent a threat to Putin’s regime; in fact, they are key to upholding it. The Kremlin has put the country on a constant war footing, ensuring it is always ready to fight the next battle, which leaves it with little incentive to aid veterans. It thus pretends to help ex-soldiers while counting on those embittered and psychologically broken men to keep Russian society enveloped in a cycle of conflict and repression that Vladimir Putin’s allies claim is essential to the nation’s survival (and, of course, to their own hold on power). The soldier who lives by violence may prove necessary to an increasingly draconian regime that is struggling with a faltering economy, spiraling inflation, and a lackluster war effort. After all, history tells us that oppression at home and conflicts abroad will be far more easily waged by bands of men who are psychologically traumatized by war and convinced that violence is simply part and parcel of political life.

Meanwhile, back in Chelyabinsk, Sergei Moskalenko is awaiting trial for the murder of his wife. Should he be convicted, he may not languish long in jail. Almost 200,000 Russian prisoners have already enlisted to, as the Red Army’s propagandists in the Second World War christened it, “atone for their crimes by blood”: to fight in return for their freedom. Moskalenko, in this case, may be back at the front within months — free to abscond, free to serve out his time, and free to return home, just as full of violence as when he left.

But for how much longer will we remember those ghosts? This week marks the 80th anniversary of VE Day — the moment the war ended in Europe. The youngest surviving veterans are now at least 98. And of the millions of British people who served in the war, only tens of thousands remain: perhaps 0.01% of Britain’s total population.

But perhaps the question should rather be: what will we remember? In theory, an event doesn’t need to be within living memory to be memorialized. In practice, though, as the generations change, the meaning of even the most notable historic moments will waver and mutate. We still mark the foiled attempt by Guy Fawkes to blow up the Houses of Parliament, for example, but few remember the details of what Fawkes was trying to achieve.

Similarly, when I was a child, there were still First World War veterans alive: I remember interviewing Bill, a local veteran of both wars, for a school homework assignment. He had lied about his age to volunteer in 1914 when just 14, and was in his nineties when I spoke to him. He would spend all day sitting on a pavement bench, in full uniform including medals, nodding and smiling at passers-by. He talked vividly about his war memories for my project, but seemed largely oblivious to the modern world. That long-ago war was, for him, still all of meaning and reality, along with most of his personality.

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What did that war mean, though? My school history lessons presented its origins as murky, and largely driven by longstanding European rivalries. More recently, though, now that the last of its veterans has died, I’ve noticed this war increasingly repurposed as a Goodies Versus Baddies fable about “freedom and democracy”. And so it may soon be with the Second World War, however many of its ghosts still haunt Britain’s woodlands.

This week, ceremonial officialdom creaked into gear for the four-day celebration of “VE 80”, complete with military parades, fly-bys and appearances by the Royal Family. But as I watched BBC coverage of dress-uniformed soldiers marching down the Mall past the King, two things struck me. Firstly: each group was neatly formed, beautifully trained — and teeny weeny, mere pocket-sized mini-units dwarfed by the scale of a thoroughfare designed for huge parading battalions. It felt like a vivid metaphor for a Britain that rattles around in architecture built for an entirely grander state. And second: that as living memory of the Second World War fades, much more is about to pass from us than the last of the Greatest Generation.

Who were they, that generation? And how do we remember them? Two days before the military mini-units marched down Pall Mall, the ghostly airmen of my local woodland seemed briefly as though they might see another modern-day echo, when a Spitfire crash-landed in a field in Kent. All on board were, mercifully, safe — but it felt like an omen. For there is something especially emblematic about these twin-engined fighter planes.

The excitement and admiration that has always clung to folk memory of Britain’s role in the Second World War also flew on twin engines: technical inventiveness, and manic bravery. While my step-grandfather was a POW in Colditz, for example, he hand-built a glider with which he planned to escape over the battlements — a staggeringly risky engineering project only interrupted by rescue when the war ended.

Perhaps more than any other symbol of the Second World War, the Spitfire stands as an emblem for this mix of can-do engineering and wild risk-taking that enabled Allied airmen, some still teenagers, to take to the skies in the legendary 1940 “Battle of Britain”. But though we won the Battle of Britain, and eventually VE Day too, all of Europe lost the war. It was civilization-destroying. With it ended industrial, imperial Europe, and in its aftermath arose a new civilization centered on America: one only superficially in continuity with what it succeeded, and whose explicit foreign policy it has been ever since to ensure the Old World never regained its pre-1945 bellicosity.

This policy was, of course, not simply imposed on Europe. For the most part it happened with the active support of at least the leadership class, among European peoples shattered and traumatized by the bloodshed. But its effects have been far-reaching. Under the new order, nationalism was decried, and the universal fraternity of all peoples extolled. A new aspiration to global peace and cooperation based on institutions and rules took shape, even as national borders and peoples were encouraged to become ever more porous, fluid, and intermingled.

We have lived within the resulting consensus ever since. These days we often refer casually to “the West”, as a collective; implicitly we mean by this the alliance within which the post-war consensus holds, underwritten by American hard power. The center of the world is now Washington. All that remains of imperial Europe is museums, architecture, and some carefully-preserved examples of the machines that enabled both that era’s manic bravery, and also the horrific war it produced. And those surviving machines which are not in museums or private collections have been repurposed for the central cultural activity of the successor civilization, “the West”: individual consumer experience. An hour-long “Battle of Britain” flight with Fly a Spitfire, the company whose plane crash-landed over the weekend, costs £6,750.

1945 was thus a rupture in more ways than one. Fully 95% of Britain’s population today comprises those who grew up in “the West” that succeeded it. Like shepherds grazing their flocks among the ruins of the Colosseum, this much-reduced successor Britain trots its dinky military along vast avenues, or turns its palaces and vintage machines into tourist spectacle, or simply builds over the traces of a bygone culture and worldview largely opaque to us.

Now, as the remaining Second World War veterans approach their own centuries, and even the lovingly maintained museum-piece Spitfires are struggling, it won’t be long before even those who remember how it ended will be gone. What will VE Day mean then? I don’t think it’s a coincidence, in this context, that we are once again witnessing land war at the edges of Europe itself. Nor do I think it’s a coincidence that Second World War and even Holocaust revisionism is on the rise, in the bowels of the internet. Such revisionism often involves a worryingly sketchy or actively malign twisting of historical fact; and its bedrock enabler is less ignorance as such, which is surely a human constant, than the events themselves passing from living memory.

As this proceeds, long-settled narratives are showing signs of increasingly volatile contestation — and not just in the more lurid corners of the online Right. The meaning of the Second World War, and its memorials, is a target for progressives as well: a fact signalled by the orange crash barriers surrounding the flag-draped Cenotaph, in a photo posted on Monday by the Ministry of Defense. This casual mix of pre-war grandeur and ugly, plastic safetyism epitomizes the dispiriting contrast between pre- and post-war British sensibilities. But it also points to the increasing politicization of war memorials in general. The Cenotaph in particular has become a popular target for protest, and sometimes vandalism, by (usually) far-Left protesters with grievances from Gaza to climate change. So frequent and provocative a focus for publicity-seeking political actions have war memorials become that there have even been nativist counter-protests. In 2024, the Government criminalized climbing on such structures during political actions.

By the time the Bank Holiday Monday VE Day ceremonies reached the Cenotaph, the crash barriers had been removed and serene solemnity reigned. But there was a time when no barriers would have been necessary.

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Some disgruntled Brits attribute this, and other purported signs of indifference to VE Day, to demographic change. Given that only 37% of London residents are white British, perhaps rather fewer of the city’s contemporary majority feel an emotional connection to sacrifices made almost a century ago, for a country to which their own ancestors sometimes had very different relationships. As a byproduct of the utopian softening of borders, this demographic change is, itself, an effect of the post-war internationalism that characterized “the West” as it has existed since 1945. And, as underlined by recent Gaza protests, the cultural pluralism that results is undoubtedly accelerating the loss of shared reverence for British war memorials.

But the fading of VE Day is not, or not only, a matter of multiculturalism. Were this the case, we might expect celebrations to be as enthusiastic as ever, in those parts of Britain where most inhabitants have ancestors who served. My Shires town is one such area. And yet there were, to my knowledge, no local events to coincide with the grand parades in London. To the extent that it accelerates the loss of shared reverence for the lessons of the Second World War, then, the post-war internationalism embraced by “the West” is indisputably hard at work dissolving its own legitimizing consensus. But demographic change is more an effect of this dissolution than its principal cause. This is, in the last count, simply a matter of time.

The Second World War itself was a cataclysm so immense that it obliterated almost everything Britain had previously been. Poor shattered Bill dressed in full military uniform every day into his nineties; and it’s as though Britain somehow did the same, at the scale of a whole country. So as we salute the last of the Greatest Generation, perhaps we can also feel a sense of relief at the prospect of letting those memories fade a little, in time. We should not forget the effort, the sacrifices, or the courage. But letting that era pass beyond living memory may also, in time, grant us more room to take stock of the kind of place Britain is now.

What will we conclude? It need not be defeatist. I dare say some of those ghostly airmen long to rest; if we could only grant this, perhaps those of us alive now might feel more able to do away with the figurative crash barriers and take up their legacy of inventiveness and daring. Then, perhaps, in holding our past just a little more lightly, Britain might one day be free to have a future again.