‘Our focus is weakening the Russian army’: For four years, Grigory Sverdlin’s aid group has helped Russians evade the draft and desert

In September 2022, immediately after Putin announced “partial” mobilization, Grigory Sverdlin, the former director of Nochlezhka, a foundation that helps the homeless, launched Idite Lesom (“Get Lost”). For four years now, the project has been helping Russians avoid taking part in the war — evading mobilization or deserting. To date, the organization has helped more than 82,000 people. In his book “Punkt Obogreva” (“Warming Station”), which was published by Meduza’s publishing house, Sverdlin describes the launch of Idite Lesom in detail. We are publishing an excerpt from the book about the project’s creation and its earliest days, translated into English.

On September 22, I notice something strange on the streets: long lines of young men forming outside every cell phone store. “Mobilization,” I hear from a television mounted on the wall of a shoe store.

It takes me a couple of minutes to understand what’s happening: the streets of Tbilisi are witnessing a new wave of emigration from Russia. I’ve lost count of how many waves there have been in my lifetime alone. Some friends and relatives left in the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the borders opened. Others began leaving between 2012 and 2014, as hopes for a democratic transfer of power faded and finally died with Russia’s seizure of Crimea. I lmyself left when the full-scale invasion began. Now here’s another exodus.

In the first weeks of the mobilization, estimates suggest that between 600,000 and 1 million people left the country.

“Giant lines of cars at the borders with Kazakhstan and Mongolia: Russians are fleeing the country. The line at the border with Georgia has stretched to 30 kilometers [19 miles].”

It felt like a punch to the gut. As if it weren’t enough that these bastards had attacked Ukraine and unleashed a criminal war — now they wanted to force people to fight in it? Force my friends who’d stayed behind in Russia to shoot at Ukrainians?

For several days I’m in a kind of stupor, until my friend Ilya Krasilshchik calls me out of the blue. We start talking about the mobilization, and then he asks: “Don’t you want to start a project that would help people avoid ending up in the army and leave the country?” I pull over to the side of the road.

So there it is — exactly the outlet for my energy I’ve been looking for these past months. I can help people avoid taking part in the war. My sister is already doing exactly that, constantly advising her followers on the easiest and cheapest way to get from Russia to Georgia. I have no idea yet how to help someone dodge the draft or desert, but I know this fear and this excitement well — every big new undertaking begins with them. All that’s left is to close my eyes and jump.

Many people advise me to keep the project anonymous, but I understand that an anonymous project will have a much harder time winning the audience’s trust. Clients and volunteers, donors and journalists — all of them will trust a cause fronted by blurred-out faces far less.

I post on social media that I’m starting a new project and need volunteers and staff. In 20 years of charity work, I’ve never seen a response like this — hundreds of people write to me. We end up with a team of volunteer programmers and designers, and psychologists and lawyers reach out too. With their help, we write our first guides: how to behave during a raid, what to do if you receive a draft summons, and so on. We use these guides to quickly train “first-line” volunteers, the people who will advise those seeking help over messaging apps. None of them live in Russia: that’s a mandatory condition for the safety of both clients and volunteers. Almost all of them are recent émigrés.

I agonize over what to call the new project and even ask my social media followers for help. More than 300 comments come in: “Demobilization,” “Suitcase,” “Backup Airfield,” “Refusal,” “Parachute,” “Off the Rails,” “Don’t Shoot.”

A good name needs two things: it has to be memorable, and it has to convey what the project actually does. “Off the Rails,” for instance, is vivid and catchy and easy to remember, but it doesn’t really convey the substance — we’re not going to be sabotaging railroads. “Don’t Shoot” comes closer on that front, but it seems to lack energy, and it opens with a “don’t.” I rack my brain for half the night. Branding is one of my professions; I know a name matters.

The night before, the name Idite Lesom [literally “go by way of the woods,” figuratively “get lost”] comes up in a casual conversation among friends. Maybe that’s it? I love the pun: “Hide and take to the woods,” we’ll tell our future clients, while at the same time telling the Russian authorities where to go. But isn’t it too provocative and flippant — won’t a name like that alienate part of the audience? Ah, to hell with it. Trying to please everyone is a sure path to failure, and someone has to joke around even in times this terrible. Later I remember that Ernst Jünger’s essay on freedom in an age of tyranny, which I love, is called The Forest Passage. It’s decided: Idite Lesom.

A designer friend draws up a logo for us overnight: a minimalist fir tree lying on its side. It ends up looking like an arrow pointing “right” — here’s the way out, we’re signaling. For New Year’s, my colleagues and I hang a decorated fir tree horizontally.

A friend lends me $15,000. Another, after reading about the new project, donates the same amount. Both are Russians now living abroad, and neither is exactly wealthy. Now I have money to hire our first staff — and the situation is unique, since huge numbers of highly skilled professionals among the new emigrants are out of work.

Who should head our aid, consulting, and evacuation projects? It’s a tough job: the most difficult cases will all flow to this person, who will have to confront human suffering every day, while staff — and volunteers even more so — will be anxious and quick to pass that anxiety on to those around them.

I call my sister, a businesswoman, precise and level-headed — exactly the person I need. I warn her that if she’s in, she’ll have to forget about ever returning to Russia. “They can go fuck themselves,” Dasha says curtly. I invite a woman I’ve known since my Petersburg days to be our fundraiser. Instead of an interview, we go for coffee, and she calmly tells me how she’d just smuggled her brother across the Russian border in the trunk of a car.

Friends recommend a programmer. We meet, and — bingo — he already has a ready-made solution for organizing online consultations. We launch a platform where all requests will come in: volunteers will answer questions there, supervisors will assign cases, and we’ll pull statistics and reports for social media from it.

I try to assemble a great team and then stay out of its way as much as possible — to be more of a producer than a controlling manager. In a guerrilla war, everyone is a leader.

We’re constantly discussing how to keep our clients safe.

We develop a system for vetting potential volunteers, since it’s obvious Russian security officials might try to infiltrate our team. In case they do get in anyway, we make all requests anonymous: even our own volunteers won’t know the real phone numbers or usernames of the people they’re advising.

Just five days later, we’re ready to start. We have a “Knowledge Base,” a website collecting various legal guides: how to get a deferment, how to prove you’re medically unfit, what to do during a raid or after receiving a summons. We have more than 70 volunteer consultants, out of more than 800 applications. In effect, we’ve built a new organization in five days. I never would have believed that was possible.

I decide right away to rely on volunteer help. We’re clearly not going to have much money, and we probably won’t be able to keep hiring consultants as the number of requests grows. But right now there are huge numbers of people who want to help in any way they can — we’ll train them, and they’ll train the next ones.

“Thank you, guys,” one volunteer says on our first call. “Before you showed up, I wanted to bang my head against a wall. Now at least I understand how I can actually do something.” Buddy, we’re all like that here — thank you.

We spell out that our focus is to weaken the Russian army. We won’t help deserters we’ve relocated find jobs in their new country. We won’t be evacuating political activists from Russia. We have only two goals:

— that as few people as possible end up in the army,

— that as many of those who did end up there as possible get out.

We decide that the most difficult cases — desertion, illegal border crossings, surrendering as a prisoner of war — will be handled only by staff. Alongside the “Volunteers” team on the online platform, a “Foresters” team appears, and the most dangerous cases flow to them. For the first “forester” position, I call a friend from Petersburg, Anton Gorbatsevich; we used to run into each other at protests, dodging riot police batons together. He’s one of the most level-headed people I know. Anton agrees right away.

We provide consultations 12 hours a day, with volunteers working two-hour shifts. In the first two days alone, more than 300 people reach out to us for help. Most of these are relatively simple: A summons arrived — what do I do? How do I avoid the draft office? Will I be allowed to leave the country if I have third-level access to state secrets? How do I make it through the last month and a half before discharge without ending up at war? One employer asks for advice on how to protect employees from mobilization.

None of us knows the answers to all these questions. We’re constantly consulting each other:

— Ask Dasha, she just had a case like this.

— A lawyer I know sent over recommendations on “What to Do During a Raid,” I’m posting it in the group chat. — Great, we’ve got a volunteer medic now, you can ask him questions about medical deferments.

We’re scared, anxious, focused, and — oddly enough — quite effective. To exchange information faster and support each other, we come up with the idea of working with our cameras on at all times. Two volunteers from Moscow, scattered by the war, suddenly recognize each other:

— Oh, where are you calling in from? Where are you now?

— Hi, this is Berlin! And you?

— Yerevan. One of our most valuable volunteers is a mother of five. We watch her ladle out soup for someone and help with homework, all while advising kids caught up in raids and their families.

— My husband was mobilized, they took him within a day, and now he’s already at a training camp. Is there anything I can do to get him back? Moscow, 33 years old, did his military service, only child, his mother is disabled, but they wouldn’t even look at the certificate for that.

— What disability group is his mother in? And is she married? If she needs constant care, we might be able to try to get a deferment on that basis. Ah, no, group two won’t work, especially since she’s married.

— Was he given a medical examination during mobilization? There are often violations there — we can try to challenge the results.

— If nothing else works, we’re ready to help him desert. But it’s better to do that while he’s in Russia — escaping from occupied territories would be much harder. And if your husband decides to do that, we recommend leaving the country.

The hardest thing turns out to be getting across a few seemingly simple rules: don’t go to the draft office, don’t accept a summons, don’t open the door. How many times have we heard: “They told him to show up at work, so he went.” Not everyone was capable of doing something contrary to instructions — of disobeying the state.

I break every rule of responsible charity work I preached for years. Don’t collect money on staff members’ personal bank cards? Where else are we supposed to collect it if we don’t even have a bank account yet? Pay all our taxes? We’d love to, but we don’t even have a legal entity yet and won’t for several more months. The commandments of the pre-war era clearly don’t apply anymore. We accept donations in crypto, and I pay the first salaries in crypto too. The Russian state is a criminal, and we’re not going to follow laws issued by a criminal. We’ll do whatever it takes to make sure as few people as possible pull the trigger.

Charity — yes, of course this is charity, we want to help people — but it’s also civil resistance. We, citizens of Russia, are going to resist the people who seized power in our country. It’s funny: in my pre-war life, I was more law-abiding than most. Somewhere in the back of my mind there was always the thought that I might put Nochlezhka at risk, so I scrupulously complied even with directives from my own state that I found deeply repugnant, like the requirement to disclose dual citizenship.

I decide right away that we’ll help everyone. It doesn’t matter what your political views are, whether you support Putin or not — the only thing that matters is whether you want to shoot at Ukrainians. If not, even if you have a Z tattooed on your forehead, we’ll help you get out. Let Putin have one less soldier. Let this particular Vasya or Petya stay alive. Let him not shoot anyone.

If we can help even one person avoid going to war, if thanks to our efforts even one bullet doesn’t fly at Ukrainians, then it’s all worth it.

On social media, we regularly catch flak for “excessive humanism”: why help these mobiks, they went to the draft offices themselves, they’re all rapists and murderers, let them come back in body bags. It’s mostly Ukrainians who write this, and I understand them very well — how could I not? I’m honestly not sure that if, say, China were shelling Vasilyevsky Island, I’d have enough humanism left not to lump all Chinese people together. When your loved ones are being killed, there’s not much room for nuance. The brain is a lazy beast, and even in peacetime it tends toward oversimplification — let alone during a war.

But no, there is no such thing as “all of them.” Talk of “they’re all criminals” is oddly similar to the propaganda line “they’re all heroes.” There are individual people, on both sides of the front line. I have great sympathy for Ukrainians and wish them a swift victory, but I can’t help feeling sympathy for Russians too — at least for those who haven’t stained themselves with war crimes, meaning crimes against civilians.

I should say that even Ukrainians sometimes write us things that make me want to just stop and burst into tears: “Thank you from Kyiv for your noble work. I can hardly believe there are still sane people left in Russia.”

One of the first donations, 300 rubles, arrives with a note: “I’m very afraid of becoming a foreign agent over this donation, but I can’t stay on the sidelines.” Another: “Sent 500 rubles, I’ll send more if I can… I’m a pensioner, maybe my son-in-law will need it, but he doesn’t want to leave. Idiot, he’s got two kids.”

I get responses I never expected.

“I live in … the border with Kazakhstan is right nearby. I have a jeep, and I know how to drive through the steppe around the checkpoint. I’m ready to drive a few people across every month. Save my contact info, but delete this message.” Under current Russian law, this message alone counts as treason. The prison term ranges from 12 to 20 years.

Soon, this person really did help us get two deserters out — young guys who’d been caught up in the mobilization. I felt like I’d landed in some spy movie. Except this time it was all real: the people we were calling could end up in prison for many years.

We tried to verify the person who’d written to us somehow: we asked questions prepared specifically for cases like this. Everything seemed to check out. But the real test turned out to be a call — I understood that in the end, I’d still have to rely on intuition. Was he really who he claimed to be? We agreed to have a video call, and within a minute of talking, I was sure everything was legitimate.

“Have them wait at 11 o’clock at the gas station” — he named the place. “There’ll be quite a few cars there at that time, we won’t stand out. Have each of them carry a green bag and wear a black cap. I’ll drive up, take a look. If something’s off, I’m leaving.”

For the next seven or eight hours, I think I checked my phone every 30 seconds. And finally, a short message: “All good!”

Of course, people willing to take such drastic action were few and far between, but many wanted to fight in some way: “Make flyers with your contact information. I’ll put them up / drop them in mailboxes around my area.” We don’t really know how to react. It’s terrifying to put people at risk, but on the other hand, they could make an announcement themselves anyway. We warn about the risks, but we still make downloadable flyers.

Inside me, it’s as if a block of ice that’s been stuck there since the first days of the war is slowly starting to melt. I think I’m beginning to love my home country again.