According to official data published by the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office and the Ministry of Defense, about 235 thousand so-called draft deviators were recorded in our country in 2012. In this case, draft evaders are understood as young people between the ages of 18 and 27 who use various means and methods to avoid conscript military service, and this kind of evasion has nothing to do with official deferrals from military service or alternative civilian service. Taking into account the fact that the number of the Russian army announced by the authorities should be 1 million servicemen, the number of draft deviators looks really impressive. This is a full-fledged problem, which at one, far from perfect, moment can develop into a problem of national security. After all, if you think about it, it turns out that the number of draft deviators may well exceed the number of those who are ready to fulfill their constitutional duty to defend the Fatherland. This by itself leads to the stratification of society, to the growth of internal tension, to bitterness in the civilian environment. Even among those young people who are ready to become servicemen of the Russian army for 12 months, there may be fair claims to the conscription system and law enforcement activities of the state, who often act quite selectively in terms of implementing the doctrine on staffing military units with conscripts.
The controversy of the situation is that some have obligations to the state, while others have the ability to ignore their obligations. What is the reason for this differentiation? You can talk as much as you like about the inexpressive moral character of today's youth, about its unprincipledness, but nevertheless, the main reason for inequality before the law is corruption, which has set the teeth on edge. It is bribery, starting with the district medical draft commissions and military commissariats, and ending with the more highly circulating spheres, that is the reason that the horde of draft evaders is growing despite the announced actions to improve the image of the army and increase the prestige of military service.
The Russian legislative system is full of proposals that would make it possible to attract young people of conscription age to military service - to fulfill those duties that are enshrined in the basic law of the Russian Federation. There are a lot of proposals, but so far the legislative machine is not particularly agile in this regard, which makes it possible for the voiced 235 thousand dodgers to use loopholes in order to evade military service.
Based on this, it would be interesting to consider one of the proposals, which has recently been quite often expressed by representatives of the public, as well as by domestic legislators. This sentence can be described in a military way: "If you do not want to serve, pay!"
"What do you mean" pay "?!" - the democratized strata of the population will shout too much. "By what right ?!" - will be echoed by numerous representatives of foundations, commissions, legal groups, which openly feed on the so-called "legal aid" to deviators of all stripes. Help to those people who do not want to tear their soft places away from their warm and familiar places, terrified by the literally "inhuman" conditions of service, oppression by the commanders, and almost daily torture in the barracks.
But the idea of a legal possibility not to join the army only at first glance looks somewhat unjustified. After all, if a young man declares that he does not want to go to the service, because he is afraid of losing a prestigious job or his professional (acting, musical, mathematical and other) skills and talents, then - for God's sake! - It is quite possible to finance those who are going to go through this same military service. In other words, the official ransom from the army (no matter how slippery this term may sound) on the part of some could quite actively stimulate other young people in terms of fulfilling their constitutional duty. Indeed, in this case, the army treasury could also be replenished with the help of those very "yesterday" deviators. This option for resolving the issue must be linked to an increase in the material well-being of those who are going to serve on a contract basis. This would give the necessary impetus to solving the problem of understaffing of professional servicemen in Russian military units.
Someone will call the official ransom from the army a new version of medieval indulgences, when for a certain amount the Christian church forgave everyone sins. Of course, you can compare as much as you like, but only the army is not a Christian church, and its funding is based on the payment of taxes by Russian citizens, and not on donations. Therefore, it would be possible to talk about morality in this regard if we had built an absolutely transparent system in which all young people of military age (except those suffering from certain diseases) would give their military duty to the state in which they live. But so far, unfortunately, there is no such system. And if so, then it is completely incomprehensible on what basis a certain stratum of people constantly claims their rights, but for some reason, without a twinge of conscience, keeps silent about their duties. If such people are accustomed to measuring relations with others only with money, then let the official payment for the opportunity to stay at home and not go to the recruiting station and become a kind of military indulgence. And let this paper stating that the “sitting on the stove” be paid for is kept in a conspicuous place, it is better - in a frame on the wall so that everyone can see the joy for those who are now studying the charter instead of this citizen, are engaged in drill and spend day and night planned shooting.
Someone will say: but excuse me, isn't the introduction of the official possibility of buying off the army service - this is not a reason to talk about a new round of corruption. They say, if you make the draft deviators pay a substantial sum for their unwillingness to fulfill their constitutional duty, then the same military commissariats can quickly adapt in terms of corruption and to these figures. They decide to collect half a million or a million at a time, which means that the bribe-takers will have a chance to demand half or three times less amount in envelopes. The average deviationist, like the family of the average statistical deviator, clearly will not want to part with an impressive amount, if it is possible to "put it where it is necessary" (to the medical board, for example) a smaller amount …
This is really a problem. Can you solve it? Can! To do this, of course, you will have to sweat: go along the path of attracting outside experts to the same medical draft commissions, and not only the doctors of district polyclinics, so that the diagnosis, which gives the right to avoid military service, was confirmed by several specialists. At the same time, district military commissariats need to establish closer cooperation with educational institutions in order to identify the presence of students who use their status for the endless game of "cat and mouse". After all, it is no secret that it is often Russian universities, the number of which is innumerable, that fill their lists with "dead souls" who have not appeared in class for years, but receive a reprieve from service as students of higher educational institutions. In conditions of tough per capita funding at educational institutions of various levels, each rector (director) tries, among other things, to artificially inflate the number of his students. Obviously, for deviators of all stripes, this is a loophole to bypass the law. It often just comes to the ridiculous: a young man of military age enters a new university literally every six months, being expelled from the previous one in order to "stretch" until the age of 27 and be left out of the draft on completely legal grounds. Military enlistment offices often simply do not have time to track the movements of such, if I may say so, students who have become proficient in “catch me if you can”.
So, in order not to chase in hopeless attempts, it is necessary to set such a task, including for the heads of educational institutions, whose official duties imply responsibility for their "pets". After all, if such an approach is worked out in detail and the head of the educational institution is declared personal responsibility for each deviator, who is listed only in the payroll of the educational institution, then things will move.
However, let us return again to the possibility of official payment of unwillingness to go to compulsory military service. In this regard, legislators are making a proposal to impose a lifetime additional 13% tax on such persons instead of a one-time payment. An option that is undoubtedly worthy of attention. The only difficulty here lies in the fact that if earlier the military registration and enlistment office was looking for a dodger, now this person can be retrained as a tax evader. Whether the tax service will chase him is a big question. And the additional tax itself can reduce the labor activity of a citizen evading service to an opaque one, i.e. to conceal the level of his real income. It turns out that the 13% + 13% tax rate option is unlikely to work for dodgers today, but a one-time cash repayment of their unwillingness to serve the Fatherland is quite a suitable option.
Moreover, Russia will not be the first in this regard. There are a sufficient number of states in the world where such a practice as an official buy-out from the army takes place. In particular, in Turkey, whose army is one of the most powerful in the region, on an official basis, you can refuse to serve in the army, in fact, hiring another person instead of yourself for the amount contributed. A young man can join the Turkish army from the age of 20. The service life is 15 months. At the same time, a fee can be charged for a complete refusal of service (about 10 thousand dollars), and for a reduction in service life (about $ 5000). This practice has been in effect for several years, and in Turkey, where, by the way, the level of corruption is no less than in Russia, there is no talk of any drop in the combat effectiveness of the Armed Forces. The very idea that it is possible to exempt young people from military service came to the mind of Turkish legislators due to the fact that tens of thousands of people of military age from this country began to leave for Europe to work. In order not to stop this flow, which brought and brings a substantial income to the Turkish treasury, the Turkish authorities decided to introduce a legalized taxation from the service.
The practice of legalized buy-out from the army for persons stubbornly unwilling to serve exists in other states as well. For example, in Greece you can stay “in civilian life” by paying about 8-8.5 thousand euros, in Mongolia - $ 700. There is an opportunity to refuse service on a financial basis in a number of CIS countries, in Georgia.
Of course, the very initiative to introduce a payoff for unwillingness to serve in the army is not a panacea. It is incapable of completely solving the problems of the prestige of military service. But at a certain stage, this idea may well have a kind of educational impact on young people who say that, they say, if everything was okay in the state, they would rush to pay off their constitutional debt. Well, if, in the opinion of the draft deviators, everything is not going well in the army, then help it with at least a ruble.
