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Russia: Stop attacks on auto workers union

Alexei Etmanov (pictured), the leader of the Ford-Vsevelozhsk trade union and co-chairman of Interregional Trade Union of Autoworkers (ITUA) has been the target of two brutal attacks on November 8 and 13. An anonymous caller following the first assault contacted the union and warned Etmanov to stop his union activities or “we will take away your life,” the caller said. No one has been charged for the crimes and an investigation has been suspended. Other members of ITUA have been assaulted, including the leaders of the local trade union organisation of Taganrog automobile plant, Alexei Gramm and Sergei Brizgalov. Those incidents were not investigated either. 

The International Metalworkers Federation is carrying out a campaign to protect the leaders of ITUA, demanding that the Russian authorities conduct a complete investigation of all cases of the assaults and to punish the guilty ones – both those that took part and those who ordered the crimes to be committed.

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Please follow the link at the top of this message to sign the petition in support of Russian auto industry unionists.

NO TO THE PERSECUTION OF SOCIAL AND LABOR ACTIVISTS!

NO TO THE REPRESSION OF TRADE UNIONS!

NO TO THE WHITE TERROR AGAINST THE LEFTIST MOVEMENT!
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FREE CONCERT

December 1, 2008, 9:00 p.m. Proekt OGI, Moscow (Potapovsky per. 8/12, bldg. 2; Metro: Chistie Prudy)

Chronicle of a Single Day (November 13, 2008): 

The second attack on Alexei Etmanov, leader of the labor union at Ford-Vsevolozhsk; the third attack on Carine Clément, director of the Institute of Collective Action; the brutal beating of Mikhail Beketov, leader of the movement to defend the Khimki Forest.

The beatings and murders of labor and social activist is the quiet civil war of our time, a corporate White Terror, a strike by the wealthy and the powers-that-be against the leaders of social movements that in one way or another raise questions related to property and ownership. Our task is to call this process by its real name and publicize what is happening. Each of us will in the end be forced to take sides and it is better if we do this right now. We are on the side of the oppressed.

Slaughter 2017, Lesorubi [Woodcutters], Zombiderevenshchina [Rural Zombie], Vladimir Aigistov and others will perform sets of political new hardcore, punk rock, country metal, and protest songs.

The concert is organized by the >Vpered>> (Forward) Socialist Movement. Entry is free.

We here at Chtodelat News are pleased to announce the launch of an important new online resource for social activists in Russia and those of you who read Russian and are interested in keeping abreast of how the fight for civil, labor, environmental, housing and human rights is going in the world’s largest country. Dvizhenie—“(The) Movement”—is the brainchild of three friends and allies: Artem Marchenkov, Vlad Tupikin, and Alexander Bikbov. In recognition of their timely hard work, we are pleased to publish a translation of an essay by Alexander Bikbov that was just posted on Dvizhenie. Bikbov reflects on the recent series of attacks on labor and social activists in Russia and asks the question that should be on everyone’s mind: who stands to gain from these cowardly crimes?

Alexander Bikbov, sociologist

Crimes against Justice: Who Stands to Gain?

The events of the last several days—a series of attacks on [Russian] activists—are acutely alarming. It is not political hierarchs who have been attacked or rival businessmen or professional militants from one or another side of the barricades. No, these attacks have been directed against people who have expressed their sense of fairness and justice publicly: in print and at demonstrations, by defending their own rights and the rights of others, by taking honest, consistent stances at their workplaces. The perpetrators are unidentifiable; their masters are anonymous. These are blows from the dark.

Here is the list of these attacks:

• repeated attacks on Alexei Etmanov, chair of the trade union committee at the Ford-Vsevolozhsk plant;
• repeated attacks on Carine Clément, sociologist and director of the Institute for Collective Action;
• the attack on Oleg Demin, the military prosecutor of the Vladivostok Garrison, who has actively fought against abuses by officers in the Pacific Fleet;
• the attack on Mikhail Beketov, editor-in-chief of the newspaper Khimkinskaya Pravda;
• the attack on Sergei Fedotov, the leader of the movement of disenfranchised small landowners in the Moscow Region;
• the arson of a car owned by Alexander Nazarov, chair of Assistance to Social Politics, a civic organization in the Volgograd Region.

On the streets of Russia’s cities similar blows are struck against people with the “wrong” skin color, eye shape, and speech patterns. Although the perpetrators of these crimes cannot always be identified personally, we know the type. We know their motivations, and in recent times investigations of these crimes take these motives into account. We owe a correct understanding of hate crimes in large part to those who draw our attention to real problems rather than to imaginary “external threats”—that is, to those people who have now become the targets of assaults themselves. What has been happening over the past several days and evenings in Moscow and other cities is particularly alarming. Violence has become a response not to an individual’s outward appearance; there is not the tiniest bit of aggressive rage or unhappy circumstance in these acts. The occasion for the attacks is crystal clear and precise: a pursuit of justice that hinders someone’s appetite for power or money; the freedom of speech that these activists defend. These are not ethnic hate crimes or even crimes directed against a particular set of beliefs. These are crimes against justice. The time and place of these attacks were planned in advance, the actions of the perpetrators were coordinated, and unsuccessful attacks were repeated. There has been no reaction to these crimes on the part of the authorities.

It is no secret that the state’s simple, time-tested recipe for “working on the opposition” is to recode the civic and political initiatives of activists as abnormal and criminal. It is more convenient to affirm that citizens “open their yaps” not because they want to improve something, but because they are mentally deranged, their actions are criminal or someone paid them off. It is more convenient to squelch their initiatives, and Russian history is rich with examples of this practice. Michel Foucault, author of Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, remarked that the Soviet state’s only countermeasure against dissidence was to condemn it as madness or a criminal act. Foucault’s generalization is a slightly exaggeration, but only a slight one. In the late Soviet period, several dissidents were charged with “political” crimes. It is true, however, that the majority were treated as ordinary criminals or wound up in the psychiatric meat grinder insofar as even the act of doubting Soviet power was qualified as madness. The most important difference between the current political conjuncture and Soviet times is that, nowadays, official criminalization and psychiatrization encompass only the most radical members of the opposition. Civic dissidence is not officially punishable as a thought crime.

This, however, does not spare activists from those same suspicions of criminality and mental illness—suspicions that are unofficially common within official ranks. A good portion of state security and police officers view demonstrators, members of civic organizations, people who attend activist concerts, political oppositionists, and subculture aficionados not as political extremists but as petty criminals—hooligans, embezzlers, and junkies. I have not made up these examples: they are the real opinions of certain public servants, including the rank-and-file policemen who stand watch at public events. Hence the administrative aggression and arbitrary police treatment directed toward everything that is “strange” and dissimilar. This reaction is unsanctioned, but for all that its consequences are no less harsh and painful. This is a semi-official morality armed with a truncheon.

The series of assaults against activists have followed a different logic. These recent events are not the result of someone’s abuse of office or an attempt to criminalize activists in order to “tame” them. Here, on the contrary, the criminal motive has been turned totally upside down. When it is unfeasible to persecute civic initiatives via the courts, when it is impossible to turn an active, thinking individual into a criminal, the final argument comes into play: an “unknown perpetrator” attacks a well-known civic activist. This blow from the dark seemingly leads us away from official institutions, the abuse of power, and the semi-official fear of all unofficial “others.” This blow is struck so as to look like a random incident whose traces lead nowhere. But the paradox of crimes against justice has to do with the fact that the first things that come to mind are precisely the institutes of power (radiant in their lack of complicity), the management of major corporations, and the secret chancellery of the “security forces.”

During the past year, several members of small independent trade unions have been assaulted all over Russia. This, however, is the first time that aggression against civic activists has been so obviously coordinated. An apparently random series of crimes against justice has occurred on the threshold of a new phase in the economic crisis—when the economic struggle between the major players is heating up, when workers are being laid off and markets are shrinking, when massive grassroots activism has become a little more likely. Justice becomes a dangerous circumstance in an economic struggle with high stakes and the ever more real possibility of bankruptcy. Who is in such a hurry to make short work of justice? The criminal investigators are supposed to answer this question. But can we count on them after all other such cases—from the murder of Dmitry Kholodov to the murder of Anna Politkovskaya—have ended in nothing? In the absence of the justice system’s official truth it is the official justice system itself that comes under suspicion.

In a particular crime there are almost always elements that reveal the motives behind the crime. When a series of such crimes takes place, the number of these elements is significantly greater. As of now, one of the perpetrators of the last attack on Alexei Etmanov has been detained by the union leader’s colleagues and police officers. If the Russian justice system is unable to tell us who ordered the attacks or confines itself to affirming the random nature of these events, then it will tacitly recognize guilt. Whose guilt? Not only its own guilt—the guilt of weakness and administrative dependence, such a customary albeit not always hopeless form of guilt.

Here, the answer will be the same as the answer to a question as old as the struggle of justice against injustice: who stands to gain? Who stands to gain should these activists cease to “open their yaps”? Who stands to gain if the rights of  workers at the Ford plant are not honored, people who purchase land and houses in the Moscow Region keep getting ripped off, the Khimki Forest is cut down, the officers of the Pacific Fleet go unpunished, and the information blockade against grassroots initiatives continues? Who stands to gain should the economic crisis, which will soon hit everyone like a ton of bricks, reduce the quality of life “quietly,” “without unnecessary excesses”? The management of certain companies (Ford, Vinci, and others touched by these crimes) and the governments of Moscow, Moscow Region, and the Russian Federation now have a greater stake than anyone else in getting clear, publicly declared answers to these questions. That is why any false or ambivalent answer about this series of attacks will point towards them.

End the Terror Against Social Activists in Russia!

Public Statement on the Attacks against Social Activists

Recently, criminal attacks against the leaders of trade union and social movements have clearly increased. Among the latest such incidents, we should note the attacks against Carine Clément, a member of the working group and a leader of the Union of Coordinating Councils; Alexei Etmanov, leader of the labor union at Ford-Vsevolozhsk; Mikhail Beketov, leader of the movement to defend the Khimki Forest; and Sergei Fedotov, leader of the deceived land shareholders of the Moscow Region. In addition, a great many activists fighting the infill construction that is happening in all our cities have been attacked. There have been murders, in particular, of antifascist activists.

This is not a random phenomenon, but a clear trend: active citizens who try to restore justice and defend their legal rights are more and more often subjected to brute force. With no other arguments at its disposal, the opposite resorts to criminal methods. While it is clear that in each situation it is a different group of people who commissions these crimes, the overall tendency demonstrates that excellent conditions for the further escalation of this brutal method of “social dialogue” have been created in Russia today. These conditions include lawlessness, the lack of criminal liability for violations of the law by state officials or members of the ruling elite, universal corruption, and the hypercentralization of authority in the absence of any form of control from below. Many cases of “political” attacks on activists have still not been investigated, and the guilty parties not be found, which gives the assailants a sense of impunity and thus provokes further crimes.

We say, Enough!

We demand a maximally thorough and swift investigation of all assaults against all social activists, the transfer of these cases into a separate category, and the creation of a special investigative group within the Ministry of the Interior. We also demand that the public be kept informed about the course of these investigations.

We demand that the assailants be punished according to law whatever high-ranking patrons might support them.

We declare that we will not be intimidated by the method of violence and terror. We will continue our struggle for the social rights of our country’s citizens.

We appeal to the state authorities, who position themselves as the guarantee of “public order,” to make sure that “public order” is not violated by government officials. As it is, all we observe now is the arrests of old women and young activists at various assemblies, demonstrations or strikes, while we hear very little about arrests of corrupt state officials or unscrupulous employers. Down with this politics of double standards!

We declare that, given the situation, we consider it our right to use methods of self-defense and that we will use all possible means to assist and protect our comrades.

14 November 2008

Union of Coordinating Councils of Russia (SKS): Izhevsk, Perm, Tiumen, Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Krasnoobsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Omsk, Astrakhan, Kurgan, Moscow Region, Surgut, Kaliningrad, Saratov, Samara, Penza, etc. (There are twenty-seven regional coordinating councils in all.)

This statement has been supported (as of November 17) by the following organizations:

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We ask all networks, movements, and initiative groups to support our appeal. You may send your collective or individual signature to: info@ikd.ru

Another Assault on Alexei Etmanov

Last night (November 13) another assault was made on Alexei Etmanov, the leader of the trade union at the Ford-Vsevolozhsk plant outside of Petersburg. An unidentified man was waiting for Etmanov with a metal club in the entryway of his building. Alexei and his wife miraculously escaped harm.

Alexei Etmanov is known for his work as the leader and chair of the of the union at the Ford plant in Vsevolozhsk, Leningrad Oblast, which has won fame for its successful strikes. Etmanov is also the co-chair of the Russian Interregional Trade Union of Autoworkers (ITUA), which represents workers at auto plants and related production facilities in Moscow, Kaluga, Taganrog, Yaroslavl, Leningrad Oblast, and other regions.

Alexei is an active member of the Petersburg-based Committee for Solidarity Actions (KSD), which unites trade union and leftist political activists and is the organizer of the support campaign for the workers union at the TaGAZ plant, which is affiliated with the ITUA. The attacks on Etmanov could be linked to his work on this campaign. The ITUA has demanded recognition of the trade union at TaGAZ, the reinstatement of union committee chair Sergei Pinchukov and other members of the organization who were illegally dismissed, and the investigation of the three attacks, this past summer, on activists Alexei Gramm and Sergei Bryzgalov, who were likewise ambushed by persons unknown after they got off work.

We should remind our readers that this was not the first attack on Etmanov: on the night of November 8, three unidentified men attacked him as he made his way from a parking lot to his home. Although the bandits were armed with brass knuckles, during the struggle Alexei managed to pull out his stun pistol: the shot he fired frightened his attackers, and they ran away. The following day, Etmanov’s deputy chair, Vladimir Lesik, received an anonymous phone call. “You got a mild scolding. If you keep making trouble for us, you’ll pay with your life,” said the caller. We have just learned that other members of the KSD got similar calls.

The unions will press for a swift and complete investigation of these incidents.

Russian union leaders attacked

IMF calls for an immediate and transparent investigation into the recent assaults and threats against ITUA leaders and activists.

RUSSIA: Alarming news was received from the Russian Interregional Trade Union of Autoworkers (ITUA), an affiliate of the International Metalworkers Federation regarding a recent attack against Alexey Etmanov, ITUA co-chairman and chairman of the ITUA primary organization at Ford enterprise in Vsevolozhsk.

 

Etmanov was assaulted on the evening of November 8 when he returned home from the second shift at the Ford plant. He parked his car and was walking in the direction of his home. On the street, three assailants armed with brass knuckles ran towards Etmanov and without a word assaulted him.

During the scuffle Etmanov managed to remove his rubber bullet gun and made a shot. The assailants escaped. Originally, Etmanov believed these were ordinary robbers. However the next day the deputy chairman of Etmanov, Vladimir Lesik, received a call on his mobile phone and was alerted that the night incident had no relation to a robbery or a plunder. “You were softly scolded. But if you continue to create obstacles for us, we will take away your life”, threatened the anonymous caller.

Earlier, on June 24 and July 26, Alexei Gramm and Sergei Bryzgalov, activists of the ITUA primary organization at Taganrog enterprise OAO  “TagAZ” producing Hyundai cars, also became victims of  assault after their participation in a picket at the entrance of the enterprise. Gramm and Bryzgalov were trying to get  information about wages and compensations as well as demanding  management to recognize their union.

In a statement regarding the assaults, IMF General Secretary Marcello Malentacchi warned of IMF’s grave concern over “the authorities’ indifference to violations of fundamental human and labour rights and the failure to act promptly and effectively to ensure these rights are fully upheld and protected” and demanded “an immediate, unbiased and transparent investigation into the facts of attacks against trade union leaders Alexei Etmanov, Alexei Gramm and Sergei Bryzgalov, as well as the death threats made to Vladimir Lesik.”

Click here to read the full text of the statement.

IMF is urging affiliates to send letters calling for an immediate and transparent investigation into these attacks to:

Mr. Yuriy Chaika 
General Public Prosecutor of Russian Federation
125993, Moscow, GSP-3, 15a B. Dimitrovka str. RUSSIA
Fax: +7 (495) 692-96-00  

Mr. Sergey Romanyuk 
Public Prosecutor of Leningrad region 
194044, Saint Petersburg, 
av. Lesnoi, str. 20, kor. 12
RUSSIA
Fax: +7 812 542 00 15

Mr. Valeriy Kuznetsov
Public Prosecutor of Rostov region
344082, Rostov region
Rostov-na-Donu, per. Bratskiy, 11
RUSSIA
Fax: +7 863 262-45-25

Ms. Tatiana A. Golikova
Minister of Health Care and Social Development
127994, GSP-4, Moscow, per. Rahmanovskiy, 3
RUSSIA
Fax: +7 495 628 09 48  

To send solidarity support letters to the ITUA, email: profkom@ford-profsoyuz.ru

Knuckledusters as an Instrument of “Social Dialogue” in Contemporary Russia

Who Is Bothered by Alexei Etmanov? 

Reprisals against union leaders have, unfortunately, ceased to be merely a part of the ancient history of the trade union movement. They have more and more often become a reality of labor relations in today’s Russia.

On the night of November 8, when Alexei Etmanov, chair of the union committee at Ford-Vsevolozhsk and co-chair of the Russian Interregional Trade Union of Autoworkers (ITUA), returned home after his shift, he was attacked by three armed bandits. It is clear that the people who sent them wanted to ensure numerical superiority. Here, however, their calculations ran afoul: Alexei managed to force his attackers, who were armed with knuckledusters, to retreat in shame.

However, in order to dispel any doubts as to the motives for the attack, the “organizers” of this piece of brigandage telephoned another union leader at Ford, Vladimir Lesnik, and threatened reprisals if the Ford unionists “didn’t stop getting in [their] way.”

Over the past two years such attacks have happened more than once: labor activists have been savagely beaten in Kaliningrad, Togliatti, and Taganrog. Each time the targets were union activists who challenged the complete sway of their employers and thus all employers who recognize no one’s rights other than their own sovereign right to dictate the work conditions and the lives of “their” workers.

Each time the reprisals followed a heightening of conflict at the respective factories. Despite the fact that police investigators have still not managed to solve any of these crimes, there can hardly be any doubt as to the names of the people who really commissioned them since it is much too obvious whose interests were threatened.

In this case everything is more complicated. The attack on Alexei Etmanov, leader of the Ford workers and an iconic figure for the reborn labor movement and independent trade unions in Russia, happened a year after the last, widely publicized strike at the plant, at a time when passions had cooled and the union was preparing for what has become an ordinary affair—negotiations over the next collective bargaining agreement. But, lo and behold, it turns out that the Ford union has interfered with someone’s plans to such an extent that the enemies of the workers are prepared to commit crimes. They openly announce that they won’t stop at anything in order to “remove the question” of the free labor and trade union movement from the agenda.

The attack on Etmanov is, without a doubt, a challenge. It is a challenge to all the healthy forces that have dared to raise their voices in defense of the interests of workers in today’s Russia. This challenged has been thrown down by those find inimical the very idea that hired workers have a right to self-organization, a say in their own working lives, a right to negotiations and equal dialogue with their employers. Their name is legion. It is not important who, in this case, gave the ignoble orders or the number of the telephone in Vsevolozhsk, Taganrog, Togliatti, Petersburg or Moscow from which the scum got the call. We know whom the free trade unions bother. And we can answer their challenge by closing our ranks and demonstrating general solidarity. For today the bell tolls not only for Etmanov and Ford, but for us all.

Let us prepare ourselves for the battle!

—A. Lyapin, Union Activist

The Fight Is Effective When the Fighters Know How to Defend Themselves

 

On the night of November 8, Alexei Etmanov, the chair of the trade union committee at the Ford-Vsevolozhsk plant, returned home from the second shift. He parked his car in a lot and headed for his house. On Heroes Street three men jumped in his path and without uttering a word attacked Alexei. They were armed with knuckledusters.

During the tussle, Alexei managed to pull a stun weapon from his pocket and get off a shot. The cloak-and-dagger types beat a hot retreat.

Etmanov told a police investigator that in his opinion the assailants were ordinary “yobs.” However, he turned out to be wrong.

The following day, Etmanov’s deputy, Vladimir Lesik got a call on his mobile phone. The caller warned him that the nighttime incident had nothing to do with robbery or mugging.

“You got a mild chewing-out. But if you keep getting in our way, you’ll part with your life,” the anonymous caller declared.

The combative trade union at Ford-Vsevolozhsk gets in a lot of people’s way—both employers and dealers. And, by establishing the Russian Interregional Trade Union of Autoworkers (ITUA), the young workers of Vsevolozhsk have also gotten in the way of employers in Taganrog and Togliatti, as well as those trade union organizations that the authorities use like an “engine whistle” to let off the steam of popular rage.

It is a matter for the police to find out which of these forces attacked a labor leader with knuckledusters.

For our part, we would like to remind our sons of Lenin’s statement that a revolution is worth its salt only when it knows how to defend itself.

Trade union activists are in the process of preparing an appeal to the police to open a criminal investigation.

From the editors:

This is not the first time that labor activists have been attacked in Russia. We have written many times that the bosses are trying to intimidate workers and crush the seedlings of the evolving class struggle. Threats and violence against labor movement activists have become an ordinary affair in our country. In this situation, all communist and labor organizations should band together and oppose the terror of discrete members of the bourgeoisie with class solidarity. All incidents of such pressure on workers should be as widely reported as possible, and the protest campaign against the current practice of conflict resolution should be as noisy as possible.

Along with the Saint Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast Committee for Solidarity Actions (KSD), as well as socialist and trade union organizations, the Marxist Group Workers Action (MGRD) has begun a campaign of protest against the actions of the administration of the Taganrog Auto Plant (TagAZ), whose [unrecognized union] is affiliated with the ITUA that Alexei Etmanov co-chairs. (It cannot be ruled out that the attack on Etmanov and the attacks on and threats made to union leaders at TagAZ are links in the same chain.) We call on all socialist and labor activists to join in our campaign—to distribute information about the illegal actions of employers, participate in pickets planned both for Petersburg and other cities, to send protest letters to the e-mail addresses of the bosses, and so forth. You can find updates on our campaign on our website. If you are able to help us in any way, please write to us at: red@marksizm.info

 

This is the seventh in a series of translations of the articles in BASTA!, a special Russian-only issue of Chto Delat that addresses such pressing issues as the fight against racism and facism, the new Russian labor movement, the resistance to runaway “development” in Petersburg, the prospects for student self-governance and revolt, the potential for critical practice amongst sociologists and contemporary artists, the attack on The European University in St. Petersburg, and Alain Badiou’s aborted visit to Moscow.

The entire issue may be downloaded as a .pdf file here. Selected texts may be accessed here.

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—François Sabado, “Components of Revolutionary Strategy”