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BASTA! Special Issue: RASH, “We Have to Take People to the Next Level”

hecksinductionhour — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 12:53:06 +0000

This is the fifth 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.

* * * * *

At first I was in one of the communist parties. There, it was all “Jawohl, mein Fuehrer!” They did everything they did because that’s what Lenin wrote. It was round then that I first read Kropotkin’s and Bakunin’s books about anarchy. That is why I left the party and became an anarchist.

The RASH movement [Red and Anarchist Skinheads] emerged here in 2003-2004. I was the first RASH. Nearly all of us were anarcho-punks who became anarcho-skinheads. We take part in demos. We publish pamphlets, broadsides, and a newspaper [Frontline, available for download at www.redskins.ru]. I am also involved in the skinhead and punk subcultures, so I organize concerts and do propaganda work within these groups. If folks react, we work with them. We try and develop them physically; we conduct training classes in martial arts and self-defense. When you go to an antifa concert there’s a risk you’ll be attacked by Nazis. If you’re not prepared to defend yourself, the attack will probably end badly for you.

I’ve been in the hospital once with stab wounds. There’s this [weekly] anti-war protest. First it was attacked, but the protesters fought off [the Nazis]. We figured there would be another attack the following week so we put a group together and went to defend the protest. It wasn’t attacked, but after it was over we split up. There were seven guys with me, and something like twenty-five or thirty [skinheads] jumped us.

I’ve never been attacked at a concert, especially because I became more careful after this incident. At concerts, it is mainly the folks who let their guard down who get attacked—they go out to get beers by themselves or they walk from the metro to the concert alone. You absolutely shouldn’t do this.

Xenophobia has always been very well developed in Russia. In the early part of the twentieth century there was the Union of the Russian People. It was essentially a Nazi party and it carried out pogroms against Jews. There was something like half a million people in this organization. Xenophobia didn’t just emerge in the nineties, and it isn’t a western import. When parents scream, “The wogs have flooded the streets!” or “It’s all the fault of the Jews!” their children listen to this. Then those same kids see upper-form students who are “boneheads.” For some reason they decide these guys are cool and they join them. Most of them, though, get tired of it quickly or they run into trouble—with the police, for example. And now we’re on the beat, and they might run into us.

For me, anti-fascism is one aspect of the anarchist struggle. On the whole, there are good prospects for the development of Nazism in Russia. Right now the Nazis are moving to a new level; they’re giving up Hitlerism. They’re basing themselves on their “historic” roots: national patriotism, the Black Hundreds movement. This is the direction they’re moving in, and they’re members of organizations like DPNI (The Movement Against Illegal Immigration) or the Slavic Union. A lot of folks get worked up over these ideas: God, Tsar, great power status, empire. The Hitlerists don’t have a leg to stand on here in Russia: the majority associates National Socialism with evil. But national patriotism, orthodox patriotism bordering on Nazism, could really take root.

Nowadays there are quite a lot of immigrants, and the standard of living is fairly low. Why did the Nazi skinhead movement in England get a head of steam [in the seventies]? Because there were problems and there was someone to blame the problems on: foreigners. It’s the same way now: [Russia has] social problems that can be blamed on others. And the authorities are playing both sides of the court: they come out publicly against Nazism, but on the other hand they promote it in all sorts of clandestine ways as a safety valve for the working class. So that the people don’t blame the government, but blame the foreigners instead.

It is really stupid people who carry out the attacks. Either they’re commissioned to do them or the idiots do them on their own initiative. In Moscow, the veteran boneheads say that these Petersburg midgets who butcher Tajiks have to be whacked because they don’t achieve anything this way. The Tajiks will still keep coming—the country is going to the dogs. But because the skinheads butcher Tajiks, they get a reputation as extremists and murderers. The police give them a real hard time; they don’t let them hold concerts. They lose money and they lose the folks they could have recruited at these shows.

People are so indifferent about racist attacks because they believe that the police should deal with them. Most policemen, however, are xenophobes themselves. I’ve been beaten up at the police station just for being antifa. Several times it’s happened that the policeman rolls up his sleeves and there’s a swastika on his arm. An ex-Nazi (or a current Nazi) and he’s employed by the police!

*****

I worked actively to form a housing co-op in the building where I live. In theory, a co-op is a tiny libertarian cell. But everyone said, “What are you talking about? We can’t run our own building. Let’s leave everything to the state housing authority. The state won’t rob us.”

I also participate in the workers movement. It’s also quite hard to explaining some things to them. Let’s organize a union, you tell them. “We have a union already.” Yeah, a shitty union, a state-run union that engages in appeasement.

All the guys at work are Gastarbeiters. If you say anything to them about unions, about fighting for your rights, they say, “What are you on?! All we worry about is that they don’t depart us back to Tajikistan tomorrow.” What needs to happen is that local workers start supporting each other first, and then start supporting the migrant workers.

But there are positive examples: the union at the Ford plant, grassroots groups like Living City and Save Yuntolovo. We try and interact with them—to help them grow and to use them as examples in our conversations with people: “People up and saved their local park. You can do this, too.” Right now I hope we’ll be able to get a movement on its feet in the neighborhood of the Politekhnicheskaya metro station, where the authorities are planning to demolish the Khrushchev-era housing blocks and relocate the residents God knows where. We plan to organize residents committees. But we don’t to be an avant-garde—just a wind that will give them a little nudge so that they do everything themselves.

Because otherwise people don’t want to live their own lives. That is why my work aims to help people at least think with their heads and take action in their daily lives. People are uneducated and unprepared. We have to take them to the next level. When they get the experience of this form of struggle under their belts, then we’ll be able to do this.

BASTA! Special Issue: Foma, “Who Makes the Nazis?”

hecksinductionhour — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 12:34:03 +0000

This is the second 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.

* * * * *

In the centerfold of this newspaper you will find a map of catastrophe and terror. Buildings razed or made to collapse in the name of progress; parks and squares surrendered to “developers”; human beings maimed or destroyed in the attempt to purify one of the capitals of “Russian civilization.”

Who makes today’s Nazis, fascists, and nationalists? The British sociologist Paul Gilroy argues that while we can never simply explain racism away as a mere byproduct of the class struggle, it always arises in particular conditions of economic and social injustice, imperial domination, nationalist resurgence, systemic collapse or “post-imperial melancholy.” Hence, he writes, we should speak of “racisms” in the plural. In the US, for example, racism persists, after the hard-fought struggles of the sixties, in the criminalization and massive incarceration of the poor non-white classes; in Britain, it has found new life (after the routing, in the seventies, of the fascist National Front by a broad, combative coalition of minorities and leftists) in the all-too-respectable fear of “homegrown” terrorists and “Islamofascists.” In the latter case, this fear is connected to the history of the empire and its loss; in the former, on the contrary, to a regime in which “civil” and “world” peace are achieved (at great financial and political profit to those pursuing it) by turning the space of politics into the realm of the police.

Whatever the case, it always specific histories, discourses, sociopolitical regimes, local class struggles, and armed or unarmed conflicts (domestic and foreign) that coalesce to produce particular racisms and fascisms. One could write more than a few books about what coalesced in which way to generate both the street violence in Petersburg and other Russian cities, and the broad “moral” support for the “ideas” (if not the methods) of these cowardly murderers among representatives of the establishment and the society at large. Here, the perpetually anxious cult of strength (that is, of political and financial capital acquired through deceit and selective violence) and autocratic decision making filter down to the streets as a reflexive hatred of non-Russians and their handful of defenders.

Retroactively, the projects of Russian imperial internal colonialism and Soviet internationalism are shown to have to been founded on a racist core that, in the post-imperial period, propels pro-Kremlin youth activists to besiege the Estonian embassy and greet the returning murderer Kaloev as a conquering hero, while their less well-connected peers stab Timur Kacharava and Khursheda Sultonova to death in dark courtyards or in broad daylight. The “civilizing” missions of the Russian imperial and Soviet states thus return as bloody farce—as furious, spectacular impotence and near-invisible (or invisibilized) terror. This destruction of solidarity and justice, however, is re-presented on TV screens and hence in minds as the stability that brings with it the ability to consume as if there were no tomorrow, and the geopolitical power that comes with something much more valuable than a dubious civilizing mission—oil and gas. All of this is almost so obvious as to require no comment. This obviousness apparently explains the near-silence on, and almost total inaction against, violent and verbal racism in Petersburg and elsewhere. In reality, however, none of this is obvious, even to the right-thinking “liberal intelligentsia” that, we are meant to imagine, shudders in horror when such crimes are reported, but does little else. “Liberalism,” too, has a racist aspect, which reveals itself in the words and deeds of its local advocates.

Thus, in a recent lecture at Smolny College, dissident hero and would-be presidential candidate Vladimir Bukovsky denounced the corrupting influence of “political correctness” on life in Britain, where “negro lesbian single-mother one-legged” women are hired to read the news and Pakistani doctors are given medical licenses only to avoid lawsuits and maintain a falsified civil peace. His screed (you can listen to it here) was met with silence by his audience of westernizing professors and students. When I retold this story at a public discussion of racism in the offices of Memorial, one participant replied, “Well, of course. Bukovsky grew up under the Soviet system, where the unfair policy of advancing natsmeny in political and academic spheres made most people unhappy.” (Remarkably, this same man had been involved in repelling the skinhead attack on anti-war activists—on the very same street—that later led to the city’s most famous anarchist being forced into exile in Ukraine.)

Likewise, what are we to make of a panel discussion (after a screening that was part of a film festival meant to encourage ethnic toleration) in which a Jewish school director passionately catalogued the discriminations visited on ethnic Russians in the post-Soviet period, and prominent sociologists hotly defended the rights of Nazis to free speech and enjoined the audience to be more sympathetic to the hard lives of young skinheads?

The examples of such “liberal” thinking I have encountered in the past few years are so many that they do constitute a pattern for me. To put it crudely, authoritarian or fascist racism requires or generates its “progressive” counterpart, thus ensuring a continued escalation of the terror. Here, the catchword tolerance—whether promoted by flimsy government public education programs or uttered by pseudo-liberals—implies that the dominant group has to force itself to tolerate subalterns. This tolerance quickly reveals its true content when those subalterns refuse or otherwise fail to conform to this narrow-minded regime.

Who makes the Nazis, then? You do.

Who unmakes the Nazis? The four people whose stories you will read on these pages. Two stories involve direct action or intervention: the first, in the best traditions of the international movement for civil rights and social equality; the second, drawing on the equally proud history of grassroots leftist and communal resistance to fascists. The other two partake in what Gilroy calls the multiculture of conviviality. By this he means that people really do live or want to live in ways that unmake and erode the absolutely artificial restrictions imposed on them by the dominant racialist and culturalist ideologies. Whatever the strategic or tactical value of these approaches, theirs is the only way to be democracy, not just “manage” it.