It is an effort with clear implications for the veterans of Russia’s more recent secret deployments, to Ukraine and Syria under various guises — as so-called green men in uniforms without insignia, “vacationers” in eastern Ukraine or humanitarian aid workers in Syria.

Mr. Anisimov is lobbying for a bill granting the status of combat veterans to the covert soldiers, about 800 of whom are alive today, according to a draft of the law. Parliament on Dec. 4 delayed a planned first reading of the bill, which would entitle them to additional pension payments for combat service. “It is important that the government recognize our service to the motherland,” Mr. Anisimov said in an interview. The Defense Ministry never declassified the “comrade tourist” deployment, so the veterans never received the extra benefits.

“Our documents are all secret,” Mr. Anisimov said. “They are so secret nobody can find them.”

In the war in eastern Ukraine, thousands of Russian soldiers served on the pro-Russian rebel side, but their status is disputed. Western governments say they were on active duty; Russia says they were volunteers.

A leader of the pro-Russian separatists, Aleksandr V. Zakharchenko, said in 2014, at the height of the war, that between 3,000 to 4,000 Russian soldiers were fighting on the rebel side, but all the while on their vacations. “There are active soldiers fighting among us who preferred to spend their vacation not on the beach but among their brothers, who are fighting for freedom,” he said.

Such unacknowledged deployments form one element of the broad doctrine of maskirovka, or masking, which encompasses a range of ideas about misdirection and misinformation that military analysts say is integral to Russian operations and has been for some time. “The Russian approach demonstrates remarkable historical continuity,” wrote Dmitry Adamsky, a professor at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy in Herzliya, Israel, in a research paper about Russian psychological warfare published last month.