The concept of the enemy is usually formed during the military conflict and mediated by mass communication, such concepts are at the same time the swiftest yet most stereotypical information passed. The Russo-Japanese war (1904-1905) was the first major military conflict between Orient and Occident where the construction of the enemy concept involved modern means of warring between two neighbouring countries but also the clash between the so-called Western and the Eastern cultures.

The war that has been called as the Zero World War of the 20th century took the benefit of communication techniques of telegraph and telephone but also developed a new journalistic genre in Estonian newspapers – soldiers’ letters that conveyed the first hand information from the battlefield. Estonia that belonged to the Czarist Russia at the time, had to send about 10.000 men to the distant war theatre in the Far East. The most convenient way to keep contact with home was via letters that the soldiers wrote to their families as well as newspaper editors to pass the news of the war.

The Estonian soldiers’ letters give a unique perspective of the enemy concept construction of ordinary men sent to war. The aim of the current paper is to analyse by the qualitative content analysis method the depiction of the enemy in soldiers’ letters (n=42) that were published in major Estonian newspapers: firstly, how was the enemy characterized and secondly, how was the concept of the enemy formed in the everyday messages written from the battlefield.