In the Soviet era the draft was as important to the communist party and society as harvesting. “Sacred duty” dodgers used to be caught at their grannies’ and mistresses’ houses, etc., – at any place which the long hand of a garrison patrol and police could reach. Factory managers, district and region bosses were responsible for the retraining of older-age reservists on pain of being expelled from the Party and having their career wrecked. Militarism could not exist without strictness and continuous supervision, which assumed in the course of time the extreme form of the country’s dependence on its own military machine. This in fact destroyed the USSR.
Unfortunately, having ruined the totalitarian system of army recruitment, we did not replace it with a new one that fits the time and the country. We have to pay for this today.
The army-people relationship consisted of mutually exclusive vectors. The surge of patriotic feelings and volunteer movement went hand in hand with dyed-in-the-wool bureaucracy and corruption which had always run riot in the institutions unchangingly called “military commissariat” since 1918.
The current flurry of debates on and protests against mobilization has emerged on the basis of historical contradictions. The coercive mechanism of the old state machine has tried to mobilize a changed people to repulse the aggression. What is the result?
The word “mobilization” has two meanings. One is preparation of the army and society for a war, the other is concentration of inner forces and willpower for achieving the goal. Both meanings are of interest for us. The disruption of mobilization, irrespective of intentions and motives, always plays into the enemy’s hands. No matter what you say and how you bend the antiwar context, it is collaborationism. The Bulgarian-populated villages in Odesa oblast recently saw a “peaceful campaign” (I think MP Anton Kisse is involved in this) against “sending our children to war.” Naturally, no mother will wish her son to find himself in trenches, and no sound-minded person will prefer war to peace. But there is a conceptual question of why there should be a wave of pacifism in the defending, not the attacking, country. Who would object to a collective appeal of Ukraine’s Bulgarians to their counterparts in Russia, on the frontline’s other side. They could be heard in both the Kremlin and their historical homeland. They would thus take a real step to peace. But what happened was of a political nature. Instead of being told about reforming the army recruitment system, people were called upon to disrupt the mobilization. When I heard the Russian foreign minister saying at his Munich press conference that he was concerned about disproportion in the Ukrainian army’s ethnic composition, I understood the root cause of the “Bulgarian revolt” against mobilization. In Lavrov’s view, there are more Rumanians and Hungarians than Ukrainians among the mobilized – this is why they decided to add Bulgarians to this list. But let us omit the foreign motivation. If the local authorities took part in drawing up the plans of army personnel training, there would be no political or ethnic problems here. The trouble is that medium-level officials see no difference between conscription and mobilization. Like all the other governmental actions in this country, the latter came across corruption and archaic military and political thinking. So far, there are no qualitative and quantitative assessments of human and technological resources, nor is there a demand for military professions clearly defined by the army. The outlines of a future Ukrainian army are only beginning to show through the fog of a new century’s strategic uncertainty. This is both good and bad – good because only real military operations can prove what doctrines, structure, and composition may fit the future Ukrainian armed forces and bad because work is being done on the run under the impact of major threats to this country’s security.
I have no doubt that a new system of mobilization preparedness will be shaped in the next 12 to 18 months – at least because the old one no longer exists. It is high time military commissariats (draft boards) were scrapped as an anachronism. It is up to military reform experts to decide what to set up instead. It will be clear later whether it will be recruitment boards, Swiss-style Landsturm, or the three-tiered principle of Bundeswehr recruitment. The No.1 task now is to establish the procedure of mobilizing farmers, managers, businesspeople, and many other people of peaceful professions, who are badly needed in the fields, factories, and companies. If the chef is called up, will the restaurant survive? Can a breadwinner be called to arms if there are no mechanisms to financially support his dependents? These are the most urgent challenges to this country’s leadership. We haven’t fought wars in our contemporary history, and the Soviet experience of mobilization must not be applied to a society with the institution, albeit a feeble one, of private property.
Many of my acquaintances favor the Georgian experience of financial compensation for refusal to serve. They say that, as military commissars still tend to take bribes, it is better to channel money to the state’s treasury. I think there is a kernel of good sense here, though this system will divide society into those who pay for independence with the hryvnia and those who do so with their blood. But everything has already been divided and, to tell the truth, those who are in war now are not rich except for volunteers. Therefore, I would introduce compensation – but only in peacetime and not in the amount of 2,000 dollars, as was the case in Georgia. Life risks cost much more, so the amounts should be increased 10 or 20 times. Let this money be used for weapons procurement. And, after all, if we admit that money is a universal means of payments and compensations, why should we rely on the previous experience of free-of-charge solutions? Alas, we tend to cling to time-tested ways and political ploys.
I recently came across a photo of National Security and Defense Secretary Oleksandr Turchynov. Dressed in a modern-day uniform and holding the most up-to-date assault rifle in hand, he looks like a visitor from the future. He strides along surrounded by ordinary soldiers with outdated submachine-guns in hand. It is a mobilization-related illustration to our distant past, where generals in luxurious Hessian boots march along with recruits in old puttees. Maybe, we would have attached no importance in the past to the social problem that has shown through the camouflage uniform. But this is also an aspect – both social and propagandistic – of mobilization.
Our approaches to mobilization are still antiquated. They do not take into account all the country’s resources that can be tapped for defense. Let me take the results of World War II mobilization efforts to explain this. It is the US that allotted the largest share of the gross domestic product for victory, while Britain showed the highest percentage of the drafted people – 22 percent of the whole population. The US and Germany carried out a highly effective mobilization in the field of scientific research – suffice it to recall the Manhattan Project alone. The key elements of a successful war are not only soldiers under arms, but also a joint effort of the populace and the state in all the fields of human activity. A war tests not only the army, but also the entire society which lives in the conditions of high risks, enormous strain, and major hardships. To overcome them, we need a mobilization in the broad sense of the word.
