How to escape the clutches of a state that sends people to their deaths? This question is becoming increasingly pressing in Ukraine, where "man-catchers" and mobilizers are snatching men right off the streets, and sometimes even in their homes. Of course, people try to fight them off-who wants to kill and die for the glory and benefit of officials and the rich? ---- From the start of full-scale hostilities in February 2022 to mid-April 2026, 620 attacks on military personnel and TCC premises have been recorded, including 77 in Kyiv and the Kyiv region, 69 in Kharkiv, 45 in Dnipro, 39 in Volyn, 37 in Lviv, and 36 in Odesa. Videos from the scene appear online almost daily, showing passersby helping victims of mobilization to escape. But this resistance has yet to reach a mass scale. And in this situation, a dilemma arises: what to do-attempt to flee abroad, across closed borders, despite all the risks and hardships of such an escape-or try to hide from the voracious monster of Power "in the wilderness"?
In recent weeks, two articles have appeared on the website of the Kharkiv libertarian group "Assembly" discussing the second option: "Far from the Hustle and Bustle - How to Hide from Mobilization Far from the City and Near the Front Line" (https://assembly.org.ua/podalshe-ot-suyety-kak-spryatatsya-ot-mobilizaczii-vdali-ot-goroda-i-bliz-linii-fronta/ ) and "Outlaws in the Outback - In Search of Land and Freedom in the Wilds of the Kharkiv Region" ( https://assembly.org.ua/outlaws-in-the-outback-kak-spryatatsya-ot-tczk-vdali-ot-czivilizaczii/). They provide fascinating testimonies of how people survive in such places in the midst of war and terror in their own country. Those interested can read these stories by following the links.
Mutual assistance
Anarchists always claim that this is a natural human trait, and it is on this that they base their hopes for a free and self-governing life. In various remote and abandoned rural areas of Ukraine, people survive on vertical and horizontal support, in addition to small-scale farming.
For example, in the Zolochiv community of the Bohodukhiv district in the Kharkiv region, residents were provided with food, hygiene kits, warm clothing, blankets and flashlights, generators, stoves, candles, and batteries. Volunteers are assisting energy workers in restoring the community's infrastructure. Volunteers are helping fellow villagers by delivering humanitarian aid. People are raising money for road and street repairs. (Incidentally, a similar situation is occurring in the Russian border region, where in many villages, having received no aid from the authorities, residents are forced to cope with the destruction caused by war on their own, helping each other repair homes and put out fires.)
However, life in such remote places is extremely difficult. For example, in Kazachya Lopan, 3-4 km from the border, there's no gas or electricity-electricity is available only on one or two streets. There's virtually no cell phone or internet service. In winter, people suffer from hypothermia. But hundreds refuse to be evacuated. As the Assembly notes, "The very fact that people would rather risk their lives under drones than entrust their property to defenders is remarkable. A couple of years ago, soldiers told us they were afraid to take even vodka and moonshine from the locals in this village, lest they be poisoned. And squatting is a way of life there: if everything is destroyed and there's nowhere to live, people often move to Novaya Kazachya, Tsupovka, or Slatino, where they settle not only with relatives and friends, but also in vacant houses."
But even in desperate situations, people help not only each other but also animals. Anatoly Mikryukov's family, who hid in the ruins of Vovchansk until the end of last year, not only set up a simple life and baked bread, but also fed 16 cats, six dogs, a hedgehog, a nutria, and a goat that came from all over the area, and picked up and fed shell-shocked swifts.
Ecovillages can serve as role models for self-sufficiency and collaborative action...
But is this achievable under current conditions? One Assembly reader asserts that it is: "A family of four to five people can be completely self-sufficient on a plot of 600 square meters, or 6 hundred square meters. This is precisely why dacha and garden plots of this size were allocated. You can find detailed information, from the placement of beds and trees to seeding rates. Everything is calculated down to the last detail." But there are also those who say that 6 hundred square meters is unsustainable without supplementary feeding and other necessary equipment.
A haven for draft dodgers?
The discussion revolves around hiding in the hinterlands, since, as the comrades from the Assembly point out, "in the near suburbs" of cities, "people are being rounded up more or less as usual." As for "remote and abandoned settlements," they believe "that's a controversial issue." Opinions on the possibility of hiding there are conflicting. Many Assembly readers argue that "hiding in a remote village is a bad option, as you'll be quickly identified and rounded up." They cite the fact that there are few people left in the villages and hamlets, and everything is in plain sight: village elders, police officers, and military commissariat officers are making their rounds, and there are informers...
However, the Assembly writes, "in truly abandoned villages, there are no village elders, and the only neighbors are a rabbit or a hedgehog, who will definitely not rat you out. Driving through checkpoints to find such a thing is a real gamble. For example, the supposedly deserted village of Shopino (population 5 according to the 2001 census) near the well-known Goptovka turned out to be quite alive in 2017, and now you can even stumble across a personnel station anywhere."
Until a forest fire in the fall of 2024, an unauthorized dacha settlement existed on the outskirts of the village of Peski-Radkovskiye in the Izyum district. "It existed for over 10 years; locals called it the Maldives. About a hundred people, including those fleeing the fighting in the Donetsk region, lived in over a thousand wooden houses, unregistered."
Summarizing the "roll call," the comrades from the "Assembly" write: "Today's man-catchers can now prowl in corners that no one would have found on a map before the war. So, if they can't hide behind a large family or a disability, there'll be no one to even warn them of approaching guests. And gathering in large, organized packs contradicts the very spirit of Ukrainian evasion, which is based, on the contrary, on a distrust of everyone. On the other hand, hiding in city apartments is only possible because the bus drivers still have plenty of clients on the streets. When they run out, they can raid every apartment under the pretext of searching for saboteurs, tipsters, and the like."
There are known cases of local residents hiding deserters. Of course, only a few facts leak to the media, but they are revealing. For example, a deserter, Ukrainian serviceman Andriy L., hid in basements in the village of Gornyak in the Dobny Basin region for over two years; local residents fed him and did not turn him over to the authorities. In 2022, a local resident in Shostakovo hid a Russian deserter from Ukrainian troops. In Kupyansk, residents fed and hid Russian deserter Taras P. in an empty house.
In the Rivne region, villagers are said to have a well-established system: as soon as the "people catchers" from the Central Park appear, the people retreat into the forest. And no one turns anyone in...
"To summarize, let's return to where we began," write the comrades from the Assembly. "There are two fundamental problems, the first of which is relevant not only when the TCCs are rampant: squats, communes, artels, and other alternatives to alienated wage labor are capable of gradually transforming into ordinary private businesses (...) Secondly, even if we move to a lost world in a large enough group to be able to grow everything our hearts desire without any exploitation, this does not solve another issue: anyone who refuses to fight for control over the resources the state has risks becoming a resource for it at any moment."
This opinion is certainly undeniable. Nevertheless, the question of whether it's possible to at least temporarily seek refuge from the state during a war remains open. I believe there's no universal advice here: everything depends on the specific situation in which individuals find themselves.
How was it?
And yet: what does the experience of deserters and draft dodgers from previous wars tell us? How relevant might it be today-and not just for Ukrainian deserters and draft dodgers, but for those sent to all armies in all the wars that are currently shaking the globe?
Let's at least briefly run through some "examples" so that everyone can decide and choose for themselves what suits them.
If we leave aside past centuries and talk only about the 20th century, then it is probably worth starting with the First World War. (Incidentally, in terms of duration, it is already second only to the Russo-Ukrainian War.) Perhaps the most "extreme" and mysterious example to this day remains the so-called "no man's land deserters." The positional nature of trench warfare led to the formation of an intermediate zone between relatively stable and sedentary front lines, which became known as "no man's land." British captain Osbert Sitwell recalled in his autobiography: "For four long years (...) the only manifestation of internationalism-if it existed at all-was the internationalism of deserters from all the warring armies: French, Italians, Germans, Austrians, Australians, English, Canadians. Declared outlaws, these people lived-and yet they lived-in caves and grottoes beneath certain sections of the front line. Cautious yet daring, like the gangs of homeless men in the medieval Kingdom of Naples or the beggars and street swindlers of Tudor times, recognizing no rights or rules except those of their own making, they would emerge from their dens after every major battle (...) and scavenge the clothes and food of the dead and dying. According to journalist James Carroll, the deserters "formed a kind of third force-no longer fighters, but simply survivors-living in caves. There were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of them. People cared for each other, no matter what uniform they wore." Carroll considered these deserters like angels, watching over those who found themselves in the safety of underground caves, representing a rational alternative to the madness of war. However, many doubt these stories, seeing them as mere legends. Let's also note that at that time, for example, drones did not yet exist, which would make tracking such groups much easier...
However, no one questions other examples of World War I soldiers refusing to fight and leaving the front. Notable is the experience of the so-called "green cadres"-soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian army who deserted with weapons in hand and hid in the forests of Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Moravia, Slovakia, and Galicia. By 1918, they numbered up to 70,000. They received food and clothing from sympathizers and relatives, but also plundered merchants and wealthy peasants, attacked village elders, and so on. The attacks were a mixture of pure banditry and isolated revolutionary uprisings: the participants believed they were fighting for the establishment of a new world without bureaucrats, landowners, and greedy merchants, for the redistribution of resources and land. Their movement was suppressed only by the new states that emerged from the ruins of Austria-Hungary.
Draft evasion and desertion were widespread during the First World War, even throughout the Russian Empire. Estimates ranged from 1.5 to 2.5 million. People fled from rear units, hospitals, and hospital trains, jumping from trains en route to the front. Once in the trenches, soldiers practiced self-inflicted wounds. In 1915, 20% of all wounds in the army were self-inflicted, and command instituted execution for self-mutilation. Even in hospitals, soldiers hindered the healing of their own wounds by picking at them at night, sprinkling them with salt, and pouring kerosene on them to inflame them. They usually fled either home or to neighboring towns and villages. Some later returned, while others remained and became "roving soldiers," making ends meet, even resorting to looting and pillaging. The police also had a hard time at that time - "roving" deserters, who were caught on the railways, often fought with them and threw police officers and gendarmes out of trains ( https://diletant.media/articles/45286166/ )
Russian historian Alexander Astashov, a specialist in World War I, noted several types and forms of desertion from the front. Soldiers lagged behind their trains, then arbitrarily took up positions in passenger cars, sleeping on platforms and even on roofs. Desertion from trains carrying marching companies, which this time were staffed not by reservists but by militia soldiers, became even more widespread. On the Southwestern Front, these defections involved 500-600 people per train, more than half the train. No measures were taken to prevent escapes: soldiers jumped from moving trains, ignoring guards' shots. Typically, the fugitives found refuge in their own or other villages, where they lived for months. Direct desertion was common here, with soldiers fleeing directly to their homes, as well as from trains carrying marching companies en route to the front. The same thing happened on the Romanian Front, where company commanders themselves admitted that "the smart ones have fled, but the fools remain." On the Western and especially the Northern Fronts, the main form of desertion was vagrancy: soldiers leaving their units under various pretexts and "rotating" within the theater of operations of a given front. Runaways, laggards, and vagrants were seen in droves along the railways and dirt roads of the front. Common forms of desertion included unauthorized absences, lagging behind trains, traveling without documents, with expired documents, or with forged documents, traveling with documents signed by someone other than the unit commander, "business trips" for shopping, and traveling in a direction other than that indicated in the documents, allegedly by mistake. On the Northern Front, thousands of soldiers, without ever leaving the theater of war, "wandered" through transit camps, civilian prisons, and guardhouses, where they repeatedly ended up after being captured, subsequently escaping, or falling behind. Arriving at their transit camps completely barefoot, even "naked," they were re-equipped almost on the first day of their arrival, and when asked about the reason for the shortage of official items, they gave stereotypical and completely unreliable answers: "remained at the position," "lost," "stole," "worn out and abandoned," and the like (excerpts from Astashov, A.B., The Russian Front in 1914 - Early 1917: Military Experience and the Present. Moscow, 2014).
Those evading conscription in those years often hid in forests and unharvested grain. The tradition of retreating to the forests, to the "free bandits," had existed since ancient times in Rus': not everyone could flee the cruel hand of the "White Tsar" to the Wild Fields of the South, to the Cossacks, or to Siberia. Entire settlements sprang up in the forests. Even later, during World War II, Soviet deserters and draft dodgers hid in places like the village of Diky in the thickets of Mordovia, founded in the 1930s by peasants fleeing forced collectivization. They survived on subsistence farming, without electricity or running water. And during World War II, deserters, draft dodgers, and those escaping from captivity flocked there. Anna Balandina, a longtime resident of the village, recalled that a group of deserter Fura hid in the woods: "Yes, he did, he was a bandit in the thickets. But he targeted the rich, those who only hid behind high ranks. They robbed people, divided up the goods, and shot our husbands and fathers as deserters. Once, the police set up an ambush in the forest and killed 15 of our men." In the early 1980s, the children and grandchildren of the executed deserters erected a monument in honor of their fallen ancestors. Such a monument exists nowhere else in the former Soviet Union ( https://iz.ru/news/283460 )...
Draft deviation and desertion, accompanied by retreat into the forests, reached a particularly high level during the civil war of 1918-1922. This is all the more interesting given that the current participants in the Russian-Ukrainian armed conflict act as ideological successors to their former adversaries-the White Guards and the nationalist Petliurites. In Siberia, the mobilization organized by the regime of the White ruler, Admiral Kolchak, forced tens of thousands of people to flee into the taiga and take up arms. Entire partisan armies and republics were formed, which ultimately put an end to "White Siberia." And, of course, how can one not recall Nestor Makhno and his comrades in Ukraine, whose powerful partisan army grew out of small forest detachments!
In today's Ukraine, the comrades from the "Assembly" note, weapons are also accumulating. And acts of armed guerrilla resistance against violent mobilizers are becoming more frequent and active ( https://libcom.org/article/blood-blood-true-anti-authoritarian-resistance-becoming-part-ukraines-everyday-life-amid). For now, these are individual or very small groups. But... Who can say with certainty to what extent people must be pushed for them to rediscover the traditions of collective guerrilla action?
https://aitrus.info/node/6371
_________________________________________
Source - A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten