Расцинковка ~ Word of the Month

This is our new monthly language column that has taken the reins over from our long-running Survival Russian column in the magazine. Each month we focus on a word or phrase trending in Russian culture and society.

In early April, the writer Masha Rupasova told the publication Republic that she was studying online chat groups where female relatives of Russian servicemen communicate. Rupasova, who lives in Canada, is known in Russia primarily for her unconventional children’s poems. Her book “Grannies Fell From the Sky” was named 2015’s “Book of the Year” and has become a symbol of a new generation of children’s poetry – light-hearted and contemporary, free of stereotypes.

Yet, as stated in the preface to her Republic interview, Rupasova has not been writing for children since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Instead, she said, she “reads the chats of widows whose husbands have died in Ukraine… the prayers and curses of mothers whose children fled to war and died.” She reads and weeps, she said, “watching as people refuse to believe their own eyes and continue to believe the propaganda.”

Rupasova has said she intends to write a book based on the content of her chats – a book about women’s experiences of the war, about the problems faced by wives, mothers and sisters, and how they talk about what is happening. It is clear that this is a very grim world, in which there is not only the collection of aid or mourning for the dead, but also dirty squabbling over payments. 

An important part of this reality is the search and identification of human remains. The bodies of soldiers killed by the fighting are sorted at a facility in Rostov-on-Don, from whence zinc coffins are sent by plane and train across Russia. To verify that the deceased is indeed one’s relative, family members need to take part in a “расцинковка” (de-zincing) – the opening of the zinc coffin. 

According to Rupasova, some families are unaware that this option exists. Others deliberately choose not to take part, either because they do not want to see the remains or, perhaps, out of fear that they will lose death compensation benefits if the deceased turns out not to be their relative. Others are deeply outraged by this latter response, because they are actively searching for their own relatives, who, as a result of bureaucratic and military chaos, may have ended up in unopened coffins. There have even reports of clods of earth found in place of a body inside the zinc coffins.

A zinc coffin is opened using an angle grinder (having been soldered shut at the point of departure); if the remains cannot be identified, DNA testing is required. For Rupasova, расцинковка became a metaphor for confronting a horrifying reality, the ultimate truth about war that cannot be unseen, cannot be forgotten. Some are ready to face this truth, while others are not.

“And I thought that my project is also a process of de-zincing,” Rupasova wrote on her Facebook page, “the opening up of isolated digital spaces, isolated women’s communities, which fellow citizens avoid in disgust and from which even their own neighbors turn away.”