You are likely already aware that recently the Russian authorities decided to issue summonses in electronic form and consider them received by conscripts simply by the fact of their appearance in the database. And if a conscript does not come to the military recruitment office on their own, various sanctions await them: a ban on leaving the country, registering an individual entrepreneurship or housing, driving a car, refusal of loans, and others. What will such measures lead to in practice?
Obviously, they will push people to move from the legal framework into relations that are more illegal from the state’s point of view. There are millions of potential conscripts, and far from every one of them will risk appearing at the military recruitment office of their own free will, regardless of the threatening sanctions. But at the same time, they are unlikely to give up leading a life that is at least somewhat full. Therefore, people will increasingly engage in the conscious violation of a number of state laws. In turn, this will create an overload of law enforcement agencies, as they will lack the time, strength, and resources to effectively deal with all the violations due to their excessive number, and will also contribute to the development of grey and black markets operating beyond the reach of the state and its regulations. The stationary bandit, as we see, is digging his own grave with such measures.
It is also worth noting that the Russian state authorities have so far only announced a number of sanctions against a conscript in case of failure to appear following an electronic summons. However, given that a summons will now be considered delivered after its placement in the database, and repeated failure to appear for delivered summonses is grounds for criminal prosecution, those same millions of potential conscripts could end up as “illegal” people, which would only increase the consequences described in the previous paragraph by orders of magnitude. However, most likely the stationary bandit will not create such a large problem for himself. If serious punishments follow, they will be selective and exemplary, but not mass.
Although, just in case, one should expect anything from the stationary bandit for the sake of one’s own safety. However, the good news is that the stationary bandit will only destroy himself further if he decides to do this. And an alternative to him will always be found, especially if millions of people need it and the stationary bandit proves too overloaded to control and suppress everything. This could lead to the flowering of agorism—a voluntary free market existing outside state interference—and in the case of stronger pressure on millions of “military-obligated” persons, the emergence of so-called “unregistered people,” who simply do not exist legally from the state’s point of view.
