Bureaucratic Routes and Documentary Temporalities of a Conscript Questionnaire in a Human Rights Organization

Abstract

This article concerns the working of a nonprofit human rights organization that helps Russian conscripts and their relatives on issues related to military registration. Following the aesthetic approach in research into bureaucracy described by Matthew Hull, the author focuses on the functional elements of the template used in the NGO — the conscript questionnaire. At the same time, an important place in the article is occupied by the issue of documentary time and its organization within the conscription bureaucracy. By analyzing the internal structure and practices of using the questionnaire as a “formal tool”, the text reveals the mechanisms of bureaucratic retemporalization of the health and biography of a young man in the process of setting up his file-self. Drawing a link between the questionnaire and other documentary forms used in the human rights organization, the author demonstrates how these forms embody the logic of the institution of conscription, and how NGO clients use knowledge of the military medical taxonomy of disease in the process of “translating” individual diagnoses and the overall picture of health from the “civilian” to the “military” medical system. The analysis of the structure of the questionnaire and related papers allows the author to ask how the temporality built into the text of the document ensures the credibility of its content on the part of both the citizen and the state.