A-Infos (en) Russia, AIT: "The smart ones ticked" (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

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
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