Against Counting
Does counting people dehumanize them? A look at the stories of plague and war, from King David's Israel to Putin's Russian-Ukraine War.
The midnight drive to Yosemite stretches out like the Russian winter—long and unyielding. My boyfriend and I are listening to The Deserter, Sarah Topol’s gripping story for The New York Times. Over the course of a year and a half, Topol interviewed eighteen Russian military deserters, and now we hear “Ivan” and his chilling account of escaping Russia’s military machine. Driven by survival, he flees a system where soldiers—many recently conscripted civilians—are counted, used, and discarded as cannon fodder in Putin’s war on Ukraine. In the quiet of the road, Ivan’s story reminds me of another grim narrative: Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, a proto-novel of London’s 1665 plague, where lives, too, are tallied, reduced, and discarded.
When Journal was published in the early 18th century, fiction and fact were still unsettled territories in literature. Written fifty-seven years after the actual plague, which took place when Defoe himself was only a child, Journal presents itself as an eyewitness account—a detailed chronicle of survival narrated by “H.F.” Readers often mistake Defoe’s fictional works for historical documents. Defoe’s use of specific dates and locations lends it the feeling of authenticity, of fact.
Defoe’s approach stirred controversy, and even now, critics debate its nature. Is Journal a novel, a documentary, or something in between? In an era fixated on “truth,” Defoe complicates this pursuit by placing a fictional narrator in a real setting, inviting us to trust H.F. as a detached yet reliable witness. And he does seem very reliable—one of Journal’s most famous aspects is its obsession with death tolls. H.F. compiles daily fatalities with bureaucratic precision. Readers, too, are drawn into this fascination with numbers, abstract figures that stand in for real lives, even if Defoe fictionalizes them. This style raises questions: does documentation help us confront suffering, or does it desensitize us? By blurring fact and fiction, Defoe forces us to consider whether any “true” account of suffering is possible—or whether we simply seek order amid chaos, story amid reflection.
In The Deserter, journalist Sarah Topol repeatedly reminds us of the Russian cynicism that enables this same detached survival. There’s a Russian idiom—“и рыбки съесть, и на хуй сесть,” or “to eat fish and sit on the dick”—that parallels the Western saying “you can’t have your cake and eat it, too.” For many civilians in Russia, ignoring the war, regardless of their opinions about it, is an act of survival, a way to carry on with their lives without confronting its brutal realities. This mentality is baked into Russian culture, tracing back to the Soviet era, as journalist Kristaps Andrejsons argues in Foreign Policy. Apathy and survival have long been inseparable strategies for the average Russian, conditioned over decades of political repression and control, reinforced by propaganda, and nurtured by a sense of distance from the world. Suffering often feels individual, rather than whole.
Ivan tells Topol that this cynicism is institutionalized even within the Russian military, where accountability is often a performance rather than a reality. The infamous “photo report,” for example, requires soldiers to submit photographic evidence of daily tasks to stay accountable to their superiors. Yet instead of creating transparency, soldiers simply falsify these photos—either by posing or with editing—forging an efficient yet empty record that commanders accept to complete their own hundreds of pages of paperwork. When Putin initiated the war, these fabricated assurances likely contributed to his perception of a strong, combat-ready military. Instead, he inherited an institution hollowed by years of illusion—now sending Russia’s best Photoshoppers to the front lines.
It’s tempting to look at stories like Ivan’s with incredulity. But the problem goes beyond any single system or nation. In the Old Testament, King David sins by counting his people and takes the first census to gauge his military might.
This counting is a violation. By reducing people to numbers and potential military units, David presumes a control reserved for the divine, and this transgression invites cosmic retribution. The Lord offers David three punishments, and he chooses the three-day plague. Seventy thousand people die. Only after this devastation does David atone by building an altar. Enumeration brings ruin rather than reassurance.
I’ve never been a religious person, and with everything happening in the world, it certainly feels more godless than ever. But we all need sources of inspiration to survive. In The Deserter, Ivan remarks that he joined the Russian military as a young man because it promised honor and purpose—a chance to serve something greater than himself. Instead, he found a system held together by fear rather than unity. Russian soldiers are labeled “200s” upon death. Many of these “200s” are young platoon leaders, thrown into battle unprepared, while careerist officers stay safely in the rear, sending soldiers into combat without intelligence, supplies, or a second thought.
Yet cruelty has always been embedded in the Russian military. In the Soviet Army, a lack of professional noncommissioned officers led to dedovshchina, a brutal hazing system where senior conscripts, or deds (“grandfathers”), tormented first-years. Although service time has since been shortened and this hierarchy officially dismantled, the war has revived the same savagery. Attempts at reform have done little to change the culture of wartime command.
And so the Russian census of death continues, even as the toll rises. As of October 1, over 654,000 Russian personnel have died, while 133,000 new conscripts are called into service. Russia’s conscription policy now targets men ages 18 to 30 for a 12-month service in domestic military units. In contrast, Ukraine has refused to mobilize men aged 18-25, out of caution for its population and the fact that most men in that age range have not had children yet. Ukraine has also withheld its casualty numbers, possibly to protect its people from the dehumanizing impact of tallying their own dead or to deny Russia the means to quantify its losses. In any case, this absence of numbers forces Russia to continue sending civilians-turned-soldiers into battle, bloating body counts without any real reckoning of the toll.
The Russian body politic, like Defoe’s London, is broken by its own cold calculations.
At the end of The Deserter, Topol notes that the true scale of desertion is impossible to know. Mediazona, an independent Russian investigative outlet in exile, reports nearly 7,400 AWOL cases in military courts since mobilization began in 2022, but experts agree this represents only a fraction of those trying to escape. As authorities tighten restrictions, most deserters receive suspended sentences, allowing them to return to base, apologize, and be sent back to the front. The true number is likely far higher, as many officers avoid officially reporting AWOL cases to avoid reprimands for losing track of their men.
I can go no farther here. I should be counted censorious, and perhaps unjust, if I should enter into the unpleasing work of reflecting, whatever cause there was for it, upon the unthankfulness and return of all manner of wickedness among us, which I was so much an eye-witness of myself. I shall conclude the account of this calamitous year therefore with a coarse but sincere stanza of my own, which I placed at the end of my ordinary memorandums the same year they were written:
A dreadful plague in London was
In the year sixty-five,
Which swept an hundred thousand souls
Away; yet I alive!
-Daniel Defoe in “A Journal of the Plague Year”
At the end of Journal, the narrator H.F. also pulls back from his account. But he is reluctant to delve into what he calls the “unpleasing work of reflecting” on the behavior of survivors. He notes that he “should be counted censorious, and perhaps unjust” if he were to dwell on “the unthankfulness and return of all manner of wickedness” he witnessed in the aftermath of the plague—a time when people, spared by the epidemic, seemed to abandon their newfound humility and turn back to vice. For H.F., the tragedy of survival is not only the memory of loss but the disillusionment that comes with seeing people quickly revert to their old ways, forgetting the lessons hardship should have taught them. In his final, haunting stanza, he concludes:
“A dreadful plague in London was
In the year sixty-five,
Which swept an hundred thousand souls
Away; yet I alive!”
Ivan’s story in The Deserter echoes this cycle. Like H.F., he is a survivor, marked by a system that sees him as expendable. His desertion represents an attempt to escape the machine, but he knows he cannot escape a society that treats him as a statistic. His survival, like H.F.’s, comes with a harsh realization: in the eyes of his country, his life holds no intrinsic worth.
As we drive through the wilderness, the trees are impossible to separate from each other in the dark mass of midnight. I wonder: Why do we keep counting? Perhaps Defoe saw the answer—or at least the consequences—in the plague. King David certainly saw it.
Plague, war, and census show what happens when we reduce human life to numbers. We gain order, perhaps, but we also fragment, break down, and collapse. Listening to The Deserter on this quiet road in the Sierras, far from Russia, England, or any war, I realize we keep telling this story because we keep living it. Each generation, it seems, must confront the consequences of counting—and remember that humanity is whole only when shared.