Paul Sas

Why wasn't he drafted despite the previous 7 rejected applications? The system is fascinating: If your views prevent you from serving in the army, the russian constitution grants you the right to alternative civilian service (random basic jobs that might depend on your education/skills but generally involve something like cleaning in a hospital or teaching kids in a school). Sadly, the russian constitution is pretty fake. Russia tries to appear legalistic, but in reality, doesn't particularly care about the law. You can still use the law and get out of military service. Twice a year, there's a drafting period. 6 months before the start of the drafting period, you can send an application for alternative civilian service to your local drafting body. It will most likely be rejected for ridiculous reasons; the drafting bodies dislike having their stats ruined by you, and don't particularly care about the law. During the drafting period, once the drafting commission decides to reject your application, they can draft you. However, if you appeal that decision in court, it is paused until the court's decision is in force. And if you lose in the local court, you can appeal that decision in a higher court of appeals (think the highest court of a US state), and then everything is paused until the case is decided there. (There's also a court of cassation and higher courts, but that one does not pause anything). (Courts in Russia are a separate fascinating subject; courts and judges dislike having *their* stats ruined by making a decision where a government body loses, as those potentially impacts their careers. Did you know that to be appointed a judge in Russia, among other things, you'll be given a criminal case and asked to write two well-argued verdicts: guilty and not guilty? If you judge in criminal cases, you have a budget of 1-2 acquittals per year.) All of this takes many months. It normally lasts for much longer than the drafting period; often, it takes two (which is why, I assume, Kirill only had to submit 8 applications throughout 6 years, rather than 12). And at the end of a drafting period, the decisions of the drafting commission concerning it are automatically voided; if you submit a new application for the next drafting period, the cycle repeats from scratch! (If courts work unusually fast and the local drafting body wants to draft you, you can repeat the same thing with the medical fitness commission: it will declare that you're fit to serve, and you can appeal *that* in court. This works only once, though, unlike alternative civilian service applications.) Unfortunately, most people don't know that you can simply use this trick forever (until you're old enough) or they aren't agentic enough to use it. Even if you simply refuse to serve, without knowing anything about the laws, they'll use all kinds of tactics to pressure you, but for most people, the worst that can happen is a criminal case that results in like a $5k fine. But in absolute numbers, there are still many stories like that, especially among sufficiently agentic people, which correlates with having read HPMOR.