this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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This is a common thing in conscription armies. Worse in Russia because they don't have supplies.
Though not all conscripted armies. The Finnish army, which has been doing conscription forever, has excellent esprit de corps.
My guess is that it comes down to how you treat the conscripts. I'll admit that I don't know much about the Finnish army, but I'd wager that conscripts are treated decently, are supplied with everything they need, and get clear instructions from their superiors. Contrast this with Russian conscripts where they're given no supplies, get conflicting orders, and are treated like garbage.
I have a friend I studied with who is Finnish and what I heard from him of his time serving the level of training, supply and esprit de corps was very high. A world away from the russian conscript experence.
It appears that Finland is one of those small countries that has compulsory military service for all adult males. I feel like that's a different situation because it's just a routine part of being a citizen and you grow up knowing it's going to happen. In contrast, Russia's conscription was sprung on the populace in actual wartime (with the war going badly, no less), so it's easy to see how the conscripts would be a lot more upset about it.
No, Russia has conscription to this day, and had it since it came out of the USSR. They just don’t conscript everyone.
I think that might be the important distinction. Or at least, that it depends strongly where along the spectrum of routine-ness it falls. For example, technically speaking, the US has had conscription to this day too (in the sense that the Selective Service is a thing), but since the annual draftee quota has been zero since 1972 it doesn't really count.
Wikipedia says that "as of 2021, all male citizens aged 18–27 are subject to conscription for 1 year of active duty military service in the armed forces, but the precise number of conscripts for each of the recruitment campaigns, which are usually held twice annually, is prescribed by particular Presidential Decree," but nothing in that article mentions how large those precise numbers of conscripts tended to be in the decades leading up to the invasion of Ukraine, so I still don't really have a sense of scale for how Russia falls on the "peacetime draft exists only in name" <-> "literally everybody spends a year in the military" spectrum.