[ In just five days after Putins speech calling up 300,000
reservists, the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, citing government
sources, reported that 261,000 Russian men had fled the country.]
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1-2-3-4; WE DON’T WANT YOUR F—ING WAR!  
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Harold Meyerson
September 27, 2022
The American Prospect
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_ In just five days after Putin's speech calling up 300,000
reservists, the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, citing government
sources, reported that 261,000 Russian men had fled the country. _

Russian men carry their luggage after crossing the border at Verkhny
Lars between Georgia and Russia, September 27, 2022, in Georgia.,
Zurab Tsertsvadze/AP Photo // The American Prospect

 

It’s been less than a week since Vladimir Putin announced he was
calling up 300,000 fellow Russians to fight his war in Ukraine, but on
Monday, just five days after his speech, the independent
newspaper _Novaya Gazeta_, citing government sources, reported that
261,000 Russian men had fled the country. Today’s _New York
Times_ reports
[[link removed]] that
the line of cars at Russia’s border with Georgia stretches 12.5
miles.

Credit where credit is due: Putin has accomplished in less than a week
what it took years for Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to
do—drive young men across the border (in that case, Canadian) rather
than fight an immoral and failing war.

It’s too early to pronounce Ukraine to be Russia’s Vietnam, not
least because Afghanistan was already, at least in part, Russia’s
(well, the Soviet Union’s) Vietnam. But far more than Brezhnev’s
Afghan Adventure, Putin’s Ukrainian war has outraged public opinion
across the planet and, apparently, now that he’s instituted
conscription, within Russia’s borders as well. (The fact that
Ukraine is virtually European and its residents overwhelmingly
white—as Afghanistan and Afghans were not—factors into that.)
Neither is it yet clear that Russia will eventually be forced to
withdraw from Ukraine, as the U.S. was from Vietnam.

Nonetheless, Russia is now going through something that Americans of a
certain age—most particularly, those who were draft-age men in the
years 1965 to 1972—should remember well. I was one of them, and I
certainly do.

In some particulars, Russia’s turn to conscription echoes ours.
Putin has made clear that he’s not calling up the young male techies
and professionals whom he clearly doesn’t wish to estrange (or lose
to cross-border flight)—much as the U.S., during the Vietnam years,
extended 2-S draft deferments to college students. That only tends to
increase the anger, then as now, of the young men and their families
excluded from the elite’s immunity to war (in our nation, a
phenomenon dating back to the Civil War, when a $300 payment to the
government bought you out of having to serve).

Putin’s draft also echoes instances in Russia’s
not-all-that-distant czarist past—most especially, using the draft
to afflict the groups viewed as the regime’s current or potential
enemies, and the groups with the least power to resist. Today’s
Russian conscription has landed most heavily on the nation’s
non-urban, non-Russian minorities, as well as on men arrested for
protesting the war. Such was also the case in Czar Nicholas’s
1904-1905 war against Japan, in which the draft was particularly aimed
at the nation’s least politically powerful population: the Jews,
whose rate of border-crossing (in most cases, all the way to Ellis
Island) accelerated correspondingly. In 1905, the combination of the
draft, the high death rate, and the defeat at Japan’s hands
contributed to that year’s revolution—something that Putin assumes
his control of state media and his neo-Cossack security forces will
render impossible.

In the Vietnam-era U.S., relatively few war opponents or reluctants
actually had to cross over to Canada. The 2-S was just one of a raft
of deferment possibilities, and an entire cottage industry of draft
counselors, attorneys, and the occasional physician arose to keep
young men far from Vietnam. We were, as Russia emphatically is not, a
liberal society, deliberately pocked with loopholes that gave legal
outs to those who could afford them. That made conscription largely
economic—and it became much more economic when the massive
opposition to the war convinced policymakers (Nixon in particular) to
shift the armed forces to an all-volunteer basis.
Just _how _economic our de facto but not de jure conscription
currently has become was made clear in a congressional hearing
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week, when the Army noted that it’s falling far short of its
enlistment quotas due to a record number of private-sector job
openings and the wage increases that the labor shortage has compelled
employers to adopt.

For those of us who both opposed and sought to evade fighting in the
Vietnam War, the current flight and anti-war stance of young Russian
men inevitably brings back memories. At the turn of the millennium,
when I worked for the _L.A. Weekly_, I used the occasion of that
supposedly landmark new year’s passage to write about the one New
Year’s Eve (1971-1972) when my college roommate and I managed to get
out of the draft, which loomed over us more than it did most. Here’s
a link [[link removed]] to that
piece, which I include along with my hope that my newfound Russian
counterparts—if need be, in the millions—make it across the
border.

_[HAROLD MEYERSON is editor at large of The American Prospect
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_Read the original article at Prospect.org
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_Used with the permission. © The American Prospect
[[link removed]], Prospect.org, 2022 [[link removed]].
All rights reserved.  _

_Support the American Prospect [[link removed]]._

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* Russia
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* Ukraine
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* Ukraine war
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* Vladimir Putin
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* draft
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* draft resisters
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* Military
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* Vietnam
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* Vietnam War
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* Anti-Vietnam War movement
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* peace movement
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