War and the Pull of Life

Ex-Combatants in Putin's Russia

A moving and unsettling ethnography of veterans living under the shadow of ongoing war and militarism, War and the Pull of Life traces how war makes its way into daily life in Putin’s Russia. Based on research in St. Petersburg, the book describes how war veterans struggle to "find a place" for themselves and their wartime experiences in language, in ties of kinship and friendship, and within the state.

Hervouet-Zeiber shows that, for veterans, war is not an interruption. It seeps into everyday life as veterans try to create a domestic space, play hockey, discuss illnesses with friends, drink alcohol, loiter, joke, and envision the future. The book attends to the texture of these soldiers’ lives, refusing to typify their experiences into predefined pathways to rehabilitation or to absorb them unproblematically into the language of a militarized existence. By viewing the ongoing presence of war as a concrete feature of these lives, the book explores the tensions and alignments between war and a pull of life.

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