Art Hiding in Plain Sight: Soviet Conscript Demobilization Albums and Artistic Forms of Commemoration ^†

Abstract

In 1967, the Soviet government altered its expectations and procedures for mandatory military service by reducing the overall length of service and instituting biannual call-ups. This article looks at the demobilization albums created by several generations of conscripts as their time in the army or navy approached its end. These sources have received little attention to date, despite the wealth of information that they contain. The focus here will be on the artistic styles and different media commonly employed by the young men who made such scrapbooks and how these connect to the overall commemorative aspects of their creations. After discussing how some soldiers literally used parts of their uniforms to fashion their albums, thereby establishing an embodied memory of their time in the armed forces, the focus shifts to the ways in which picture postcard collages commemorated geographic locations and introduced a touristic aesthetic into the albums. Next the article considers the ways in which paintings and cartoons were employed to express concepts of time as experienced by the conscripts. The final section of the article is devoted to the private photographs that were included, specifically those taken to commemorate the friendships built while the young men endured a common rite of passage.

1. Introduction

In 1967, the Soviet government introduced mandatory military service for young men aged 18 to 20 (21 if they served in the Navy). What military officials did not anticipate, or for the most part sanction, was that generations of conscripts would choose to commemorate their time in the army and their demobilization by creating albums—scrapbooks of a sort—in the final months of their service. Usually made surreptitiously by conscripts while still at their posts, the young men were not in danger per se if they created an album. However, they could be reprimanded or punished if caught and their scrapbook would, of course, be destroyed.

These dembel’ albums, as they are known, are literally hiding in plain sight.1 Tens of thousands were made; yet no archive outside of Russia has ever sought to collect them, and few scholars have turned their attention to these sources2 (Sarkisova et al. 2025; Druzhinina 2001). Each dembel’ album serves as a personal museum, curated to highlight different activities and experiences of the conscript who made it and they are noticeably different from the albums created by Western soldiers who saw combat in WWI and WWII in that they avoid anything that directly references mortality (Struk 2011). While creatorship is often ascribed to a single soldier, most albums were collective endeavors, frequently used scavenged materials and often required both the skills of artists who, on paper at least, were attached to each regiment as well as favors from fellow conscripts who possessed better or more varied artistic talents.3

This article will highlight the array of artistic styles and different media commonly employed by the young men who made such albums and how these connect to the overall commemorative aspects of their creations. The first section will show how some conscripts used parts of their uniforms on (or as) the covers of their albums, thereby offering a notably embodied memory of their military service and the individualized persona that went with it. Next, we will describe how collages created from picture postcards commemorated the geographic places where conscripts did their service or visited during their time in uniform, while also lending their impressions an overall touristic aesthetic. The focus then shifts to the ways in which paintings in gouache or watercolor and satirical cartoons expressed notions of time as experienced by the conscripts. Finally, we will end by discussing the photographs that the young men included in their albums that commemorated the friendships that developed between them at a pivotal moment in their lives.

2. Dembel’ Albums and Embodied Forms of Commemoration

Military uniforms are distinctly visual items and markers of identity. Purposefully meant to strip conscripts of their individuality, they signify membership in a group, and only that group, for they also serve to suppress any other identities that someone may have as a citizen (Joseph and Alex 1972, pp. 720, 722). With only a quick glance, a person’s position within the military hierarchy is rendered legible, as are aspects of their particular training and expertise given that these are denoted by the various insignia, badges, pins and ribbons that become affixed to soldiers’ uniforms over time. Moreover, uniforms are “perceived to reflect the ideology of the wearer,” making them, in essence, a presumed “public statement of belief in a system,” whether that is, in fact, the case or not (Kikkert 2005).

With that knowledge in mind, it is striking to see how often Soviet soldiers incorporated aspects of their uniforms into their dembel’ albums—a full 20% of the albums that we are working with in fact feature such covers—and in ways that defy the totalizing effects that uniforms were meant to have. In essence, such albums renegotiate the collective life of conscripts and personalize it to a remarkable extent. Sometimes this only took the form of using buttons and pins, as in Figure 1 where they serve to decorate the edges of the album’s front and back covers. Even in such a limited fashion, however, unique pieces of soldiers’ stories come through. In this case, for example, the only pin amidst all of the buttons shows that the conscript served in a construction unit.

In other instances, the presentations are far more complex, as when fabric from coats and uniforms forms an integral part of the album’s actual construction. Soldiers were not expected to return such items when their period of service ended. Mass produced and assumed to have limited service lives, pieces of clothing were not collected and reused by the military. Instead, conscripts were free to dispose of them as they wished.

That certainly had to have been the case with whoever made the early 1980s album seen in Figure 2—one that we acquired in May 2025 and always refer to as the “Stolby album,” after the word that is emblazed in scavenged metal lettering across its cover.4 Russian for “pillars,” it is an apt moniker given that the photographs inside commemorate a day trip taken by a group of Ministry of the Interior conscripts. The young men were based in Krasnoyarsk, which has a nature preserve, the Krasnoyarsk Pillars, located 10 km south of the city.5

Here, the cover has been hand-fashioned from a general issue great coat. The specific model is made of camel hair and follows the design that was formally adopted on 26 July 1969, in accordance with order No. 191 signed by the Ministry of Defense.6 Its fastener is made from a standard formal button, likely taken from the same coat. The rather ingenious diary-like clasp that holds the album closed was created by shortening the khliastik, the decorative piece that usually sits roughly at the base of a soldier’s spine and gathers the folds of the back of his coat. Several inches have been removed from the khliastik, and the jagged sewing indicates that it was done by hand and not particularly deftly. While its construction may not be aesthetically perfect, the fabric used for the cover is extremely durable and strong, which is likely the reason why other conscripts turned to old coats when making their albums as well. At present, our collection contains five examples that use great coats, although this is the only one to repurpose the khliastik, and three albums whose covers were constructed out of navy pea coats (morskoi bushlat).

Although less durable, the cloth from old tunics could also be reworked into covers for demobilization albums, as one sees in Figure 3. This example is eye-catching in that the hand-crafted cover mirrors how the conscript’s chest would have looked wearing the tunic on a daily basis. All of the man’s awards, pins and badges are correctly positioned according to military regulations and they offer a detailed sense of his time in the military (Hollingdale 2016). Moving from left to right, the pin bearing the number “3” is a Specialist Third Class pin signifying that the wearer was trained to operate some kind of sophisticated technology. Next to it is a special 60th anniversary pin for the conscript’s unit; soldiers were expected to know the history of their units in great detail and take pride in its past achievements. The giving of pins such as this one were ways in which to instill an intergenerational sense of identity and pride in the young recruits, to make them feel like they were part of something bigger than themselves. Rounding out that row, the badge with the hammer and sickle emblem is an outstanding soldier (otlichnik) award, given to the most exemplary service members. Prior to the Second World War, there were more than 20 types of specialist badges—everything ranging from outstanding machine gunner to outstanding pontoon bridge builder to outstanding cook. After that conflict, the military got rid of the specific categories in favor of simply having generic otlichnik awards. Underneath these three, we see two pins associated with sport, specifically athletic running qualifications. The red and gold one is a 1st class award while the green one signifies 3rd class. Finally, on the other side of the tunic, the young man has affixed his Soviet youth organization (Komsomol) membership pin.7

This use of uniforms and related personal objects is significant and demonstrates one way in which demobilization albums functioned as personalized commemorative archives or museums. Institutions like that, when set up by governments or state organizations, frequently “recreate the lives of great men through the vestiges of their existence, … [with] clothes and personal belongings metonymically replacing the individual to whom they used to belong” (Voronina 2025, p. 208). Dembel’ album covers like the ones we have discussed so far do likewise. Despite functioning on a much smaller scale and without any state official voice, the covers still speak to what noted historian of material culture Laurel Thatcher Ulrich calls the “mnemonic power of goods” and to the diversity of the Soviet conscript experience (Ulrich 2001, pp. 149, 418). The nature of what items the soldiers employed also matters. The readily available buttons, coats and tunic have all had direct contact with their bodies, and in the case of the latter, its soft texture in fact can be said to mimic the feeling of skin when touched by someone handling the album. In other words, handmade album covers become a kind of effigy, marking not only the conscript identity of the person who formerly wore these clothes, but also the moment of its shedding as part of the demobilization process.

3. Collages and Conceptions of Geographic Space in Demobilization Albums

Viktor Skorokhodov was lucky when it came to his assignment as a conscript in the Soviet Army.8 As his fall 2025 interview with us revealed, he was born in Berdiansk in the late 1960s, but lived in Sokol, a town on the banks of the Sukhona River in Vologda oblast’, roughly five hundred kilometers from Moscow, when it came time to do his military service. Already a leading member of a local Komsomol group, and someone who often served as a disc jockey for the organization’s events and had a knack for tinkering with stereos, speakers, and portable music players, Viktor had a keen appreciation for, and solid skills using, modern technology. In other words, he was seen as a reliable young man and a good fit for a communications battalion in Moscow (which was a plum assignment), so that he was where he passed the period from 1986 to 1988.

In our conversation with him, Viktor related that during the final two months of his mandatory service, at night when he was supposed to be standing watch on sentry duty, he instead worked clandestinely on his dembel’ album. That album is book-ended by a pair of exquisite collages that have a remarkable sense of geometry. They depict the place where he came to reside—Moscow—and the region where he was from. As should be readily apparent from Figure 4, Viktor used picture postcards to make the collages. He told us that he was fortunate in a sense because he was often sent on weekends into the city to obtain various supplies or run some kind of errand, and while there, was able to purchase things he needed to make his album, including the picture postcards of Moscow. Things were a bit more complicated when it came to the collage evoking his past, for Sokol was not a big enough town—according to the 1989 Soviet census it had 46,604 residents—to merit having postcards made.9 So, instead, he used postcards that his mother sent to him of Vologda, the administrative center of his home region.

Viktor was not alone in using this technique to anchor his memories to specific geographic locations; the conscripts who constructed other albums in our collection often did likewise, proving that collage was one of the most important and common artistic forms of commemoration associated with Soviet demobilization albums. It was also less demanding than say trying to accurately render landmarks and scenery in pencil or paint. A handful of picture postcards, some scissors and a pot of glue were all that a soldier needed. The picture postcards were key since their thickness meant that wrinkles could be avoided—something that was a notable problem when soldiers took to gluing paper or cutouts from magazines into their albums. The collages that we see in dembel’ albums feature crisp cuts, a strong sense of how to effectively use color and lines of symmetry, and often a desire to ensure that no negative space intrudes to give the work an unfinished or poorly executed quality. Instead, they are very visually appealing. The star-shaped collage of landmarks in Pskov in our “St. George’s Ribbon” album is another prime example of this kind of artwork [Figure 5].

These collages harken back to the kind of folk art and craft that was produced prior to the 20th century, and that featured prominently in private scrapbooks, rather than say to more recent modernist works created by professional artists (Elliott 2019; Gowrley 2024). The designs were in no way meant to challenge the primacy of painting as an artform or present a post-modern sense of the world. Instead, they resemble the ways in which space was commodified for and consumed by tourists. In other words, while Viktor and other dembel’ album makers might have been in uniform at the time, and it was their military service that was responsible for them bring them to new places, their impressions were often similar to those of people on holiday.

Specifically, the conscript-made collages bear a strong likeness to “Greetings from” postcards, meaning they co-opt an aesthetic from the very materials from which they are made. Such postcards emerged in Germany in 1890, but within a decade examples were available across the globe, including in Russia; this kind of postcard continues to be produced to the present day. The typical “Greetings from” postcard incorporated pictures of prominent landmarks and small city views into its design. For tourists, these wares “informed their notions of seeing and shaped perceptions of what was important and picturesque about a given location” (Rowley 2013, p. 22). They also imposed commonalities for the postcards did not encourage travelers to seek out or explore sites and landmarks that were not suggested by them. The photographs that were used typically celebrated both the infrastructure associated with modern industrial societies and visible markers of the past in the form of churches and historic buildings. The collages in demobilization albums did the same. For instance, Viktor Skorokhodov’s collage of Moscow used the Kremlin as its starting point and symbolic center, but also includes Luzhniki Stadium, Moscow State University, and VDNKh metro station. His visual tourism “confirm[ed] the industrial prowess of a modern Soviet Union as exemplified by large construction projects of postwar rebuilding” (Gorsuch 2006, p. 212). The collage of Pskov employed a similar mélange of old and new, as the images of that surround its anchor photograph of the monument commemorating the 1242 “Battle of the Ice” (also known as the Battle of Lake Peipus) feature one of the towers in its medieval city, the Holy Trinity Cathedral, the “Pushkin and Peasant Woman” monument, and the Liberation Memorial, which showcases a T-34 tank.

All of the photographs used in collages like these were taken at great distance; often they are aerial views. This camera angle evokes a sense of power and control over the landscape or urban setting, similar to what scholar Mary Louise Pratt describes as “monarch-of-all-I-survey” scenes, in other words, key moments in travel literature when explorers stand on a promontory and survey everything in front of them (Pratt 1992, p. 201). The same camera angle also means that the pictures are largely devoid of people, which depending on the location being photographed, allowed for ethnic differences (and possibly tensions) to be ignored. Instead, the images enabled viewers to believe in “the unitary notion of the ‘Soviet people’ and in “a cohesive spatial imaginary of the ‘Soviet land’” (Sarkisova and Shevchenko 2023, p. 301). While not as exotic as destinations in say the Baltic republics, which many people in the period of late socialism viewed as an “inner abroad” because they were so different from other parts of the USSR, even being stationed in Moscow or a large provincial city could seem exotic and exciting for teenage conscripts who came from more distant regions of the country or from small villages (Gorsuch 2011, p. 3). Not surprisingly then they wanted to include something in their demobilization albums to show where they had been. But there is no evidence that the young soldiers thought deeply enough about these materials to quibble with the contents of the views on the postcards. Viktor Skorokhodov, for example, was much more concerned with the precision of his cuts. In his case, the aesthetic presentation of geometry outweighed any ideological statement.

Conscripts stationed in Eastern Europe gravitated towards the same collage technique and the same overall aesthetic when they too wanted to address geographic space in their demobilization albums. The collage shown in Figure 6 was created by a young soldier who was stationed in East Germany from 1980 to 1982. Not only does the composition feature the standard mix of sites in and around Dresden, including the Zwinger Palace and the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, but it takes the “monarch-of-all-I-survey” to an even higher level for in this instance the conscript has integrated a studio portrait of himself in uniform into the collage.

The sepia tones of the photograph draw the eye immediately, as they differ so significantly from the vibrant colors of the picture postcards. Differences in perspective are also readily apparent, for while the landmarks and historic buildings are, as usual, mostly shown from a distance, the image of the soldier is a close-up. Such a choice makes it impossible to think of him as just another soldier, blending into a sea of Soviet conscripts stationed abroad. Instead, viewers not only take note of such things as his haircut, the pronounced arches of his eyebrows and the mole on his chin, in other words the unique features that define his appearance, but also the prominent role that he has assigned himself as narrator for this collage (and the album in general) as well as the power dynamic that is conveyed by having a Soviet soldier claim ownership over German landmarks. Often “rhetoric about transnational friendship served to sugarcoat imperialist aims”; here, the inclusion of the photograph lays them bare for all to see, ensuring that we only have the perspective of the colonizer in this collage and blurring the line between friendly conscript/tourist and military occupier (Applebaum 2013, p. 225).

4. Time Served—Commemorating 730 Days Spent in Uniform

A Soviet conscript’s time was never his own. Instead, every minute, hour, day, week and month of his mandatory service was accounted for, with each assigned task or activity serving to recalibrate his existing sense of time and, as we shall see, ensure that the period in uniform as a whole came to be perceived as a distinct phase of his life (Saunders 2009, p. 49). Demobilization albums offered a perfect way to express what these changes felt like and preserve a sense of military life for posterity. That is because scrapbooks do “not need to rely solely upon chronological time”; instead, they can “capture, amplify, even eliminate certain moments altogether” (Helfand 2008, p. 9). In other words, they offer both mediations on a specific period and episodic explorations of it at the same time.

One of the best ways to understand how various conceptions of time were represented in the albums is by focusing on some of the paintings and cartoons that were frequently included within their pages. These often offered fanciful representations of time, since both kinds of artwork allowed for exaggeration, satire and laughter. That is not to say that we do not also find staged photographs commenting in humorous ways about aspects of military life and the passage of time, but there is something more anonymizing and more universalizing about the creations that derive from the artistic labor of the soldiers.10 So that is where our attention will settle for the next few pages.

It was quite common for dembel’ albums to start their narratives by commemorating the moment when a young man received his summons. This could take the form of a comedic drawing showing the future soldier being jolted out of a more pleasurable activity and environment. Or a more abstract commentary could be rendered, like the painting seen in Figure 7, which speaks to the power of the state to control the trajectory of individual lives via the documents that it issues. This painting, another striking work from the Skorokhodov album, playfully uses archaization of both text and visual elements to mark Viktor’s entry into the armed forces. The wax candle, inkwell and quill, to say nothing of the overt references to an ancient military rank (voevoda) and the Russian historical past in the document on display, imply that Viktor is being swept up into a process that has been happening for centuries.11

However, the temporal limits of his actual experience are conveyed by a second painting found later in the album [Figure 8]. There an oil lamp is burning down, marking Viktor’s approaching demobilization—the obvious end point of his time in the military—which is further signaled by the inclusion of the acronym “DMB” (a shorthand for demobilization) in the composition. Those letters, incorporated into any number of drawings and paintings, feature in album after album in our collection; obviously they serve as an accepted acronym when soldiers wanted to reference their release from service.

Once they had formally sworn their oath and been inducted into the military, conscripts broke their service down into a number of other milestone moments. These could be structured by year, as in the case below where a conscript has painted four scenes in watercolor evoking the process of adapting to military life during his first year of service [Figure 9]. These satirical cartoons emphasize the awkwardness of the young recruits, who are unable to march correctly and who are all clad in ill-fitting uniforms. The images as a whole underscore how unfamiliar and strange this new environment had to have been for them. Other albums contained references to branch-specific events such as the annual “Day of the Navy,” which was held on 26 July or the 28 May “Day of the Border Guard” holiday which was celebrated by troops in border security units, as well as rituals such as the “Line-Crossing” ceremony (presided over by someone dressed as King Neptune) which commemorated the first time a group of sailors crossed the Equator. Artwork also consistently referenced the point at which conscripts reached their final 100 days of service, as we can see in Figure 10. Often such drawings included a slow-moving turtle since it was assumed that the days felt like they were dragging. In this illustration, the young men who are anxious to see their freedom restored are trying to get the turtle (a anthropomorphized representation of the gruelingly slow pace at which they were completing the final days of their military service) to move faster by enticing it with a sausage. However, the artist has not drawn any “action lines” to indicate that their efforts are working; while the turtle may be salivating at the sight of the proffered food, there is no indication that it is actually increasing its pace and therein lies the humor.

More dynamic images tied to demobilization were the ones that reference trains. These tap into longstanding visual metaphors from Soviet propaganda where renderings of locomotives were used to indicate that the USSR was moving towards modernity and a bright future. Such images were supposed to evoke time in a strictly linear sense and made progress appear inevitable but, in post-World War II demobilization albums, the meanings assigned to familiar elements from Soviet propaganda are more complicated (Johnson 2025, p. 105). In instances like the painting in Figure 11, progress has nothing to do with economic or social development; instead, as the caption running along the bottom of the composition—“Vozvrashchenie” or “Return” in Russian—indicates, it means returning to civilian life. Time spent in the army is likened to a disruption as when a train passes through a darkened tunnel. The painting gives the impression that while their military service may have felt like an unwanted, self-contained interruption to the conscripts, now they were finally heading into the next phase of their lives. In other words, as the visual elements convey, with demobilization comes a return to the light, signaled here by the rising sun whose bright red rays dominate a sizeable portion of the work’s skyline.

Demobilization could also be conceptualized as a rupture, as it is in Figure 12. Done by someone serving near Brest in a KGB unit from 1988 to 1990, the drawing’s caption “Obratnogo puti net!” tells viewers that there is no way back, that demobilization marks the definitive end of a conscript’s time in the army and this phase of his life. We have seen dozens of variations of this image since we began working with dembel’ albums. In some instances, mythological creatures or demons are drawn (or painted) obstructing the railway track which serves as a symbol of a young man’s trajectory. Here, a more senior officer steps in to do likewise, thereby making a mockery of how people usually conceptualize rail travel as “the most fixed and linear transportation, since it follows determined routes along tracks from which it cannot deviate” (Johnson 2025, p. 113). The cartoon, instead, emphasizes the unpredictability of life and the non-linear nature of time; it does so via the railway tracks which no longer lie flat and point towards the future. Now the destination is unknown.

5. The Commemorative Power of Photographs

In October 2025, we acquired the most intriguing dembel’ album—intriguing because in its current form, it is completely devoid of personal photographs. Made by a sailor who, from 1987 to 1990, served on the Pacific Fleet’s SSV-33 Ural, a communications ship involved in electronic intelligence and missile tracking, the album did not start out its life this way.12 We can say that because its now empty pages still have their corner holders, the ones that once affixed photographs to them, in place. Only the photographs are gone. This is not the only one of our demobilization albums that has damage or shows signs of editing, but it is one of the most extreme examples. Seeing something so altered, where the album’s lovely cartoons which, in this case tell the story of conscript life in a form reminiscent of a graphic novel, and where its collages of Leningrad and Vladivostok also remain intact, forced us to think about what aspects of demobilization albums were the most important to former conscripts or their descendants.

It is difficult to know what to make of albums that have been deconstructed in some way. Given the legacy of the Stalinist past, it is tempting to see the removal, or sometimes the obliteration of only part of a photograph, as an act of self-preservation or as a sign that friendships and family relationships have collapsed (Skopin 2002, pp. 78–79). But the potential repercussions of photographing one’s friends and loved ones and then keeping their likeness close by in albums were not nearly as severe in the era of late socialism. Indeed, unless an album was made by a soldier serving in a particularly sensitive branch of the armed forces or geographic hotspot, there was nothing to fear from the contents of dembel’ albums. Moreover, the Soviet government under Khrushchev (and continuing through the Brezhnev and Gorbachev eras) actively encouraged young people to take up photography as a hobby (Werneke 2019).

Nor did another point raised by a recent study of Chinese family albums fully fit our scenario either. The authors, who like us work with “orphaned” albums that have long become separated from their original owners, noted that people sometimes repurposed parts of family photographs because it was expensive and difficult to get the pictures needed for government identification and forms (Wexler et al. 2023, pp. 271, 279). In the end, we felt two other reasons were more likely at play here. The majority of the more than three dozen albums that (so far) make up our collection have been acquired from people selling militaria online and unfortunately it is sometimes more lucrative for them to sell photographs individually rather than keep an album intact. While we recognize that economic reality, and we cannot say for certain that this not what happened in this case, we prefer to think that the pictures were removed by the original creator and that they were taken out because it was the photographs that mattered most of all. If someone was being forced by circumstances to part with their dembel’ album, it only made sense to us that they excised favorite photographs of themselves or images of loved ones. The same holds true if an album has been inherited by relatives who are not particularly interested in military culture or history. They too might be tempted to pull out photographs connected to the family before getting rid of the album’s remains in some fashion. Hence, what may seem like the erasure of friendships, might actually be simply a different way of preserving their memory, but that is a topic that requires further study.

The power of the photographs in demobilization albums is unquestionable. Generally produced by amateur photographers, most of the images document the immediate experiences and emotions of the conscripts and in an intimate and narrowly specific way, so much so, in fact, that it appears as if the photographers were actively trying to avoid referencing larger historical events and real, as opposed to playfully staged, violence. In other words, they were engaged in “abstraction”—a process whereby the subject and place are divorced from what is going on at the state or international level (Ashkenazi et al. 2025, p. 15). Perhaps that is why so often the pictures in demobilization albums make no reference to the ongoing Cold War or to the war in Afghanistan. The conscripts prefer instead to “act out normality,” or as we often put it in our discussions, like youthful idiots when bored (Ashkenazi et al. 2025, p. 2). Only a small sample is needed to show what we mean.

Our first example, Figure 13, comes from an album commemorating service at a distant naval base in Petropavlosk-na-Kamchatka, a port city on the coast of Avacha Bay, next to the Pacific Ocean. The photograph shows two men sitting on, and surrounded by, landmines. Their lack of concern is breathtaking, given that more than two dozen TM-57 anti-tank mines—each one loaded with roughly 7 kg of explosives—are visible in the photograph. A smile adorns the face of the man looking at the camera while he sits on a stack of four mines. Demobilization albums, in fact, regularly contain photographs of conscripts handling their weapons in ways that contravened regulations or in over-the-top staged incidents of mock violence against one another, as if challenging the viewer with the sheer audacity of the behavior on display.

Other images speak to less dangerous pursuits that similarly capture moments of humor and friendship. Figure 14 and Figure 15 come from the same album—one we refer to as the “Kiev album” after the place name embossed on its cover. It was made by a conscript named Viktor Doyarenko, whose family apparently lived in Kyiv, but who did his military service from 1975 to 1978 at one of the naval bases near Riga that fell within the Baltic Military District.

It appears that Doyarenko and some of his fellow conscripts have slipped away, onto a rooftop where they are free to clown around for the camera. The ensuing pictures are full of laughter. They must have created visual inside jokes as well as lasting memories of that day. While formal signs of rank appear on their uniforms, hierarchies have obviously been jettisoned. Had they been sporting civilian clothing, the conscripts would simply have passed for a trio or pair of teenagers anywhere in the Soviet Union, enjoying an afternoon together. Both photographs freeze moments in motion and reflect a conscious decision to document a memory. The subjects in Figure 14 do not look at the camera and for them to be so relaxed the photographer had to be one of them, one of the “in group” so to speak. While he may have stepped out to take the picture, likely, at some point, he put down his camera and joined in the shenanigans with his friends. Both this image and the next offer an overt rejection of the compositional conventions of the group photographs that were so often produced in the post-war period. The subjects are not arranged in a symmetrical fashion nor near any recognizable geographic landmark. And unlike standard group portraits, which often included people who did not have strong emotional ties to one another, here the intimacy of the conscripts is surely the first thing that a viewer notices (Sarkisova and Shevchenko 2023, pp. 304–5).

We can say a bit more about Figure 16 which was taken in June 1988, when instead of being on base, Viktor Skorokhodov and his colleagues spent several weeks on a training exercise in the general Moscow military district. Taken by a fellow conscript, the picture commemorates the moment when the young men reached their final 100 days of the military service. As we mentioned earlier, references to that milestone were a common feature in demobilization albums no matter where their creators happened to be stationed.

As was the case with the photographs discussed in the previous pages, the informality of the moment is immediately visible. The soldiers sit at a table covered with snacks as well as a thermos and canteen. Their belts have been used to form the number 100 and this, along with other military infractions such as having their collars undone and hair growing out, speaks to the privileges that soldiers had in their final months of service, when they were able to slack off in many ways while some of their superiors turned a blind eye. In a certain sense, the situation is analogous to the final months of high school when students, now confident that they are guaranteed to graduate, do not bother with homework or even to attend class every day and their teachers acquiesce to what is happening.13 With that said, the fact that a photograph was taken at all indicates a strong degree of trust between the men, since it was one thing to do things that explicitly violated regulations and quite another to document them and possibly render the violations visible to one’s superiors. The image also serves as a commemoration of their group for, despite the fact that their uniforms show that the soldiers had achieved different ranks, here they sit as equals, as members of a cohort who have all reached the final stretch of their time in the Soviet Army.

None of the pictures reproduced here are photographic masterpieces; nor were they ever meant to be. Instead, they are prime examples of amateur photography, where “the so-called flaws and imperfections of the amateur image are its most exciting traits because they give it its claim to truth” (Guerin 2012, p. 166). They do reaffirm the individuality of the conscripts—all of whom are shown violating any number of military regulations—while underscoring the relationships that they have developed over time with their comrades-in-arms. Lacking captions, the pictures force viewers, particularly now that so many demobilization albums are no longer in the possession of their original creators, to narrativize what they see, to complete the stories so to speak (Guerin 2012, p. 164). And the stories that are apparently being told are not ones of young men in distress, but of conscripts who found ways to incorporate companionship and sometimes even fun into their highly regimented lives.

6. Conclusions

This article has only scratched the surface when it comes to what demobilization albums reveal about the years millions of young men spent doing mandatory military service in the USSR and what they chose to commemorate about their experiences. For decades, scholars have focused—and not without justification—on the prevalence of extreme hazing (dedovshchina) and the damage it did both to conscripts as individuals and to the Soviet army as a whole (Elkner 2004; Gross 1990; Maklak 2015; Spivak and Pridemore 2004). As their works have shown, hazing encompassed a whole range of behaviors; it potentially included such things as the assignment of extra chores, the theft of food, packages and equipment, and even extreme physical violence. However, such studies do not tell the entire picture for it was possible to combine camaraderie and hazing and for some conscripts to have neutral or even positive memories of the years that they spent in uniform (Watson 2004).14 We see both of these things reflected in the dembel’ albums in our collection and hence our work suggests that more nuance is needed when studying this male dominated environment.

Stunning works of art, demobilization albums used an array of art forms to tell their stories. For some soldiers, this meant literally encasing their albums in clothing that they had once worn, or attaching decorations they had proudly earned to the covers, effectively turning the albums into representations of themselves and the military identities that they had developed. In other cases, collages created with varying degrees of skill spoke of the distant places where the conscripts were sent to work or came to visit—places that undoubtedly affected how the young men viewed the world and their place in it. Part mediations on modernity, part celebrations of other historical eras, the contents of the collages demonstrate that the line between soldier and adventurous tourist was often a fluid one.

As we have seen, many albums also featured striking paintings and cartoons. The creation of these kinds of artwork was highly dependent upon the skills of those in a conscript’s immediate circle or from whom he could ask a favor, thereby rendering the finished album a more collective endeavor, although one that was still curated, in the end, by one soldier or sailor. The elements that we have here—archaization, reproductions of trains or locomotives, references to “DMB”—speak not only to the distinct cultural world of the Soviet military’s youngest members, but also to the ways in which it intersected with Russian history and the iconography of Soviet propaganda. The paintings and cartoons offer important mediations on how the conscripts experienced time during the years that they spent in uniform.

Finally, we ended by discussing how photographs commemorated the friendships that sprang up between soldiers or sailors. Only amateur in a technical sense, the pictures are powerful expressions of shared experiences and human interactions; unsurprisingly, they resonate with viewers even decades after they were taken. The photographs also tell unique stories—in fact ones that likely could not have been captured by professional photographers who would not have had the requisite degree of trust and intimacy with the subjects, things that could only have been established over 730 days of shared service. As with the other forms of art that found their way into dembel’ albums, the pictures contributed to the ways in which these sources serve as personally curated mementos of a rite of passage undergone by millions of young Soviet men.