Pulled into the war: teenagers turned war volunteers

After Russia invaded Ukraine, many local charities started helping the Russian army. Children and teenagers are often involved, volunteering “for the good of the frontline”. As our reporters found out, some help soldiers because “they have a calling”, whereas others volunteer to accumulate special “hours” and get bonus points when applying to university.

The article is part of “Novaya Vkladka”’s Documentary Story Workshop

“You have to open people’s eyes”

”Yes, I know: you shouldn’t watch too much TV. But my parents had a completely different upbringing method: they switched on the TV and sat me down in front of it,” says Tomasz, the protagonist of the play “Black Milk, or a Tour to Auschwitz”, which premiered mid-May at a school in Penza. Tomasz is a Polish policeman from Auschwitz who hates everything Germany-related.

On the door of the auditorium hangs a poster of the play “Black Milk”, up top is the date and place of the premiere, and below it are the portraits of the three characters, played by the students of the same school. Underneath the photos of the actors, the organisers specified that all proceeds would go “to help those fighting in the Special Military Operation”. 

Schoolchildren are slowly streaming into the corridor in front of the assembly hall. Only high school students are allowed in. The tickets are 50 roubles. A tenth-grader waiting in line says she had to sift through her change to be able to come to the performance.

“Our teacher was begging us to go see the play, otherwise everyone would have to stay at school for one more lesson,” she says, looking around.

Behind her are five small easels displaying children’s drawings dedicated to Victory Day. The school is still decorated for Victory Day: inflatable balloons in the shape of red stars on the ground floor, windows covered in cranes cut out of paper and portraits of students’ relatives who died in the Great Patriotic War.

A few minutes later, the auditorium doors open. Most of the senior pupils go to the back of the hall and sit on one of the last three rows. Only a few people decide to sit at the front, including the teachers who have also come to see the play.

A short man in his thirties with an earring in his left ear comes in. He frowns for a few seconds, then walks towards the back of the room.

“Grades 10 and 11, move closer to the stage! He shouts, then starts clapping his hands and stomping his feet. Come on, this way!”

The teenagers reluctantly get up and make their way to the front rows, someone quietly says “faggot”. A few people remain in the back rows.

The principal’s counsellor starts counting the teenagers. Of the four classes, that’s almost a hundred people, a little less than half have come to see the play, and most of the seats in the hall remain empty.

“Why are there so many of you? the teacher with the earring jokes. Where are the others?”

“Well…. It’s, you know… Well, you know, these are the times we’re in,” says a 17-year-old with glasses sitting in the second row. The finals are about to start, the snot.

The vice-principal, a tall, middle-aged blonde woman, comes up to the stage. She is in charge of almost all activities at the school. The play “Black Milk, or a Tour to Auschwitz” written by the contemporary Austrian author Holger Schober was put together by her, too.

“Today’s play, it’s about …”, the deputy director makes a long pause, looking for the right words. “It’s not about anything specific. It’s not about the Great Patriotic War or any other events, it’s psychological. You should all have an internal dialogue with yourselves. I want you to think about who surrounds us and the different situations we can end up in”.

The lights go off, and all that can be seen now is the stage, with a few burning lamps above it, and a large slit underneath the front door.

Thomas, the protagonist, is a German schoolboy. After a trip to Auschwitz, he tears up his German passport and decides never to speak German again. In the play, Thomas is played by Matvey, a large, tall tenth-grader who is a volunteer and a school activist: aside from the play, he represents the school at various competitions and festivals and takes part in solidarity events with people with autism. For Matvey, the play became “the first thing connected with the Special Military Operation”.

On the young man’s right arm is a transfer tattoo, which he put on especially for the performance. Matvey’s classmates come to the stage and examine it. They have to wait a few minutes before talking to him.

“I just heard: “a charity concert, Special Military Operation”, and it was like a rush of blood to the head. I have to participate, says Matvey. I perfectly understand what the play is about”. And after a pause, he continues: “It’s about us. Ukrainians and Russians can be friends if it’s a normal khokhol [a derogatory Russian term for Ukrainians, Editor’s Note]. You know, like he’s denounced his regime. But in this play, Thomas burned his passport and only then became friends with a Pole.”

The “pole” is the second protagonist in the play, the Polish policeman Tomasz. His grandmother Monika, the third character in the play, is raped by a German soldier in 1943, after which she commits suicide. The German soldier who committed the crime remains unpunished.

In the present day, Thomas is arrested in Auschwitz without papers and ends up at Tomasz’s police station. There, Thomas and Tomasz find common ground and start getting to know each other.

Matvey says he would do a play every day to raise more money for the Russian military or help them with “any other cause,” but “there’s no talk about it at school yet”.

“Even first-graders collect humanitarian aid, but we don’t, Matvey says, perplexed. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not fair. Damn it, we need to open people’s eyes, we need everyone to participate so that we don’t have traitors and everyone is united”.

He points out that, neither he nor the other actors, did not get a single volunteering hour for the performance. “We don’t need them anyway… We do it because we believe it’s the right thin, and it’s even better that way,” the tenth-grader assures.

“Well, at least you came in useful somewhere”

Alina, a schoolgirl from Penza, first heard about how useful the “volunteer book” can be for getting into university from a YouTube video. In the 4-minute video, Mikhail Derbenev, an expert from the portal “Admission Navigator”, a man dressed in a black dinner jacket and tie, explained that universities give additional points to those with a “volunteer book”, thus increasing the chances of admission. He also talks about other “individual achievements” for which universities give points: a Civil Defence badge, a diploma with honours, and school tournaments.

“I sat there and counted with my fingers. It turned out that the only thing I could do was volunteer, and maybe my final essay wouldn’t be that bad. But tournaments and sports are really not my thing,” says Alina.

She says that as early as in primary school she already knew she got “very unlucky with the brain she had been given”.

“I remember the scene: I’m sitting in the kitchen, my grandmother is next to me, and I can’t learn some linguistic rule in Russian. I just can’t. In the end, I didn’t learn it, and my grandmother just gave up. And then everybody gave up. They just accepted I was dumb,” Alina sighs.

After the 9th grade, Alina chose the humanities concentration for high school: she hadn’t yet decided what she wanted to do and didn’t want too many changes. She passed her final 9th grade exams [GCSE equivalent — Editor’s note]. She got C’s in geography and maths and B’s in social studies and Russian language. “I saw the list of admissions for my class. Everyone was ranked from best to worst. The coolest — on top, and the worst — at the bottom. I was like 3rd or 4th to last,” Alina recalls.

In the autumn of 2023, she decided to take up volunteering seriously for the first time. At school, they were given volunteer books and explained how to register on the Dobro.rf platform. After watching Mikhail Derbenev’s video about applying to universities a year earlier, she knew one thing: “Volunteering is my only way to get somewhere, and here I barely have to do anything”.

The Dobro.rf platform was created in 2016 to unite all organisations looking for volunteers. In 2017, the project received official support from Vladimir Putin, on December 6th he spoke at the All-Russian Volunteer Forum in Moscow. A year later, the federal law on charitable activities and volunteering officially included the website as a unified information system in the field of volunteering development. In total, Dobro.rf has more than 6 million registered volunteers and more than 120 thousand registered organisations.

The first time Alina went to help medical staff at the Penza Clinical Centre, but she didn’t stay for long. “It was like a full-time job. At the end of this volunteering, I wanted to ask, ‘Where is my money?” Alina was so disappointed by this first experience, she didn’t volunteer for a long time after that. 

Her classmate Lisa made her change her mind. They were born on the same day and got along well. Lisa’s grades were a bit better than Alina’s, but she wasn’t particularly successful either. Sometimes Lisa “was smart enough” she could cheat on a test paper or just pretend to be sick and not come to school, Alina says. She doesn’t have that gumption.

Liza has been a volunteer at the organisation “WeTogether”’s headquarters since the start of mobilisation. “WeTogether” is a mutual aid campaign aimed at supporting Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine and their families. Alina came to the “WeTogether” headquarters with her classmate in November.

“It felt like coming home. We wrote letters [to the military], and collected parcels. Sometimes we helped the soldiers’ families. Nothing difficult. You sit in a circle of people who are just like you and feel part of a big idea,” Alina says, adding that she felt the shared “Russian soul” then. “Everything here is real, cosy. I can’t imagine a place like this somewhere in America or Germany. It’s impossible”.

Alina would come to the headquarters at least once a week: she was happy that every day a few hours “dripped” into her “account”. The hours were added chaotically and she’d rarely get more than three per day, but Alina was quite happy with that. The university she plans to apply to gives two points for volunteering out of a total of ten. To earn these two points, you need to accumulate 100 hours.

Everyone in Alina’s class quickly found out that she was a “WeTogether” volunteer: sometimes the staff could get the girl out of classes for an event by sending a note to the principal. Alina felt her authority growing: “I was being respected,” she said.

“Well, at least you came in useful somewhere”, Alina recalls her teacher saying and admits that it didn’t offend her at all. “Yes, my country needs me. I don’t see anything offensive in it,” she says.

Alina admits that she has never understood politics and does not intend to get into it: “I have always only known the president. Our job is to help whoever needs it, whoever we are asked to help. We are not politicians at all”.

Zero “good deeds”

On the profile photo of the “Combat Brotherhood” group in “VK” there’s a large letter Z in the form of a St. George’s ribbon [a symbol of Victory in World War Two in Russia — Editor’s note], with a hashtag “We don’t abandon our own” underneath. Members of the Penza branch of the veterans’ organisation go around schools and talk about how they search for soldiers’ bodies in the war, hold shooting competitions and distribute camouflage nets to OMON fighters.

For Victory Day in 2023, the organisation held a motor rally as “a tribute to the participants of the Great Patriotic War and as a sign of support for those participating in the Special Military Operation”. Back then, the head of “Combat Brotherhood” volunteer corps, Viktor Kolgatin, talked about how many people don’t understand the meaning of these kinds of events.

“They say: “Why are you doing this? They [the soldiers] won’t see it anyway. But they will! The guys see that they are not abandoned and that people support them. Everyone understands what these guys are doing and the burden they are carrying on their shoulders,” Kolgatin said.

Viktor had first agreed to talk to our reporters, but then cancelled the call, supposedly because “the leadership was against it.”

The “Combat Brotherhood” counts a total of 90 thousand members, 951 district branches and another 623 primary branches across Russia. One of the volunteers’ tasks is to organise various events. In that same school in Penza, where the play “Black Milk” premiered, “Combat Brotherhood” organised a game dedicated to the Second World War.

According to one of the volunteers who worked on the preparation of the game, Emma [not her real name — Editor’s note], she needed the volunteering “hours”, though she is indifferent to the war in Ukraine and is “apolitical”. She told our reporters that almost the entire game was prepared by the students themselves. Kolgatin wrote the script, but he did not participate in the organisation of the event. A history teacher who knew Kolgatin, helped teenagers, Emma says. Through the teacher, they tried to find the props and computers needed for the quest. Kolgatin had promised to come to the school and run through the game with them in advance, but in the end, he only arrived on the day.

Emma doesn’t remember how many “hours” the school students were credited with for preparing the game, which took 11 days, but she says it was less than ten in total.

The Penza branch of Combat Brotherhood is registered on the Dobro.rf platform and eight volunteers from the organisation are also registered there. However, according to the website, all of them have done zero “good deeds”, meaning they have zero “hours” registered in the system.

“The feeling of a weapon that people used to defend their motherland in your hands”

“It’s wrong, and it shouldn’t be like this, says 16-year-old student Polina. She has been volunteering for a year and a half with the Penza Veterans’ organisation, the name of which she prefers not to disclose. We all help the Motherland, but people come here and say: “Can we just sit here and do nothing? Please understand the situation we’re in”. No way.

Volunteers in Polina’s organisation visit veterans of the Great Patriotic War, collect humanitarian aid for Russian soldiers fighting in the war in Ukraine and help their families. The teenagers who come there “to get points for their book” don’t realise what they are doing, she says.

“They don’t realise that the Special Military Operation is ongoing, they don’t realise what position we are in now!”, Polina raises her voice and gesticulates furiously. For the rest of the interview, her hands lie neatly on the table in front of her.

Until the invasion, Polina didn’t understand what was happening in the country in which she was born and grew up either. She knew the names of the president, his press secretary and a few “celebrities”: Mishustin, Zhirinovsky, Shoigu. Since the start of the war, Polina became interested in what was going on around her: “Back then, I would only watch political content and began to understand a lot of things.” Before the war, the girl dreamed of moving to the USA, but now she says that it was a “mistake”.

“For a long time, I kept scolding myself for having that dream. I was just a silly child, and that’s probably what the propaganda did to me,” Polina says.

In the first months of the “special operation” the girl would talk for hours with her friends and classmates who opposed the war, laying out “obvious facts that they somehow did not know”. She saw photos of the crimes that Ukrainian soldiers committed against Russian prisoners. After that, she stopped talking to a Ukrainian girl she knew, because she “wouldn’t tolerate Nazism”. “I just got sick of talking to her. I wanted to cover myself in a sheet and forget that such rotten people existed”, Polina says.

In December 2022, Polina first learned about a veterans’ organisation that helped Russian soldiers. At the beginning of 2023, she was a regular at their office, because “her soul called her to help”.

At first, Polina packed humanitarian aid to be sent to the front, but later the head of one of the branches “dragged her into the war”. Polina became fascinated by military artefacts: helmets, shells, and weapons.

In the summer of 2023, she remembers sitting at and trying to clean the rust from a shell dating back to the Great Patriotic War with a shoe brush: “It sounds crazy, but the feeling of a weapon that people used to defend their motherland in your hands… you can’t put it into words”.

Polina doesn’t have any friends at the veterans’ organisation yet. She is dedicated to the work and cannot be distracted by anything else, she says. The other volunteers understand and accept it.

“Without getting a taste of what it feels like to help your country in a time of need, you will never understand life. I understand all of our soldiers very well. They are out there falling in love with the war, Polina looks to the left and up and corrects herself. With the Special Military Operation, because they have gotten a test of a new life. I’m getting a taste, too”.