Russian Anti-Fascist Alexei Gaskarov Arrested

avtonom.org

Well-Known Russian Anti-Fascist Alexei Gaskarov Arrested

On Sunday, April 28, 2013, the well-known Russian anti-fascist Alexei Gaskarov was arrested in Moscow. He is an elected member of the Russian opposition’s Coordinating Council. The Russian Investigative Committee has accused him of involvement in riots and violence against officials on May 6, 2012, when OMON (Russian riot police) attacked a peaceful, authorized demonstration in Moscow.

May 6 was the day before Putin’s inauguration, and a mass demonstration had been called by the opposition. The winter and spring of 2011-2012 saw the biggest wave of political demonstrations in Russia in almost twenty years, as tens of thousands of people took to the streets to protest election fraud. May 6 was also the first time authorities had moved to crush these protests. According to the opposition, more than 600 people were arrested that day, and 28 people have subsequently been charged in connection with these events, remanded to police custody, placed under house arrest or forced to emigrate.

On May 6, 2012, OMON officers beat Alexei Gaskarov with batons and boots. He filed a complaint against the officers who beat him up, but no one was charged. Now, a year later, and just a few days before the anniversary of the May 6 demonstration, as Gaskarov was preparing to lead a left-wing and anti-fascist column at May Day demonstrations, he has had a set of absurd charges brought against him and been arrested.

Alexei Gaskarov was born on June 18, 1985, and has been politically active since his school days.

Gaskarov gained fame in summer 2010, when, during the protest campaign against the destruction of the Khimki Forest, he was  arrested along with Maxim Solopov and accused of orchestrating an attack by 300 to 400 young anti-fascists, who supported the environmentalists, on the Khimki city administration building. In autumn 2010,  Gaskarov and Solopov were released from prison, thanks to a massive international campaign on behalf of the “Khimki Hostages.” In summer 2011, Gaskarov was acquitted of all charges.

Gaskarov has been actively involved in the mass demonstrations against electoral fraud in Russia since they began in December 2011. He was one of the speakers at the largest of the demonstrations, on December 24, 2011, on Sakharov Boulevard in Moscow. He was in charge of the security for that rally, where he had to stop neo-Nazi provocations.

Gaskarov is being held in the police jail at Petrovka, 38, awaiting a court hearing, scheduled for 11 am, April 29, 2013 at the Basmanny district courthouse in Moscow. Pending the court’s decision, Gaskarov will be remanded or released.

Additional information:
gaskarov.info@gmail.com
https://twitter.com/gaskarov_info
Svetlana Sidorkina (Gaskarov’s lawyer): +7 (926) 557-9016

Editor’s Note. We have slightly edited the original article to make it more readable.

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Opposition activist gives investigators video of being beaten by police

August 1, 2012

MOSCOW, August 1 – RAPSI. Opposition activist Alexei Gaskarov has filed an application with the investigative authorities, claiming that he was beaten up by riot police officers during the March of Millions, the Agora human rights organization told the Russian Legal Information Agency on Wednesday.

Gaskarov has also provided a video of the beating to the investigators.

Agora reported that Gaskarov went to the Interior Ministry’s Internal Security Department to speak with investigators about the Bolotnaya Square riots. During the questioning, he gave the investigators a four minute video demonstrating how he was beaten by police officers.

According to Gaskarov, the investigators said they would look into his statement within a month.

Gaskarov sent a statement about his beating to Moscow Investigative Department head Vadim Yakovenko.

Clashes with the police flared up on May 6 during an opposition march across Moscow, which had been granted official permission. Tens of protesters and police officers were injured. The police detained over 400 rally participants.

After May 6, the opposition continued its protests in the form of “people’s promenades.”

“You’re All Illegal”

Video of the day:

If You Want to Commemorate the Murder of a Anti-Fascist in Petersburg, Police Will Treat You Like Scum

The Term, Episode 1121: Anniversary of a Death

Saint Petersburg anti-fascists marked the seventh anniversary of the death of their comrade Timur Kacharava. After the sanctioned action was over, police demanded that the friends of the deceased man remove all the flowers laid at the site of Timur’s death.

The friends refused, so the police got a homeless man to do it.

Just a little taste of a life in a city where, once upon a time, over a million people perished during a Nazi siege.

Timur Kacharava was stabbed to death by neo-Nazis in broad daylight in downtown Petersburg on November 13, 2005. The murder took place just a stone’s throw away from an obelisk erected to mark the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two.

Shut Down Greek Nazis in NYC!

www.thenorthstar.info

Shut Down Greek Nazis in NYC

Golden Dawn, G.D. (in Greek, Chrysi Avgi), the neo-Nazi, ultra-nationalistic party, which was recently elected to the Greek Parliament under the pretext of concern over unemployment, austerity and the economy, and while engaging in virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric and anti-democratic, nationalistic activities, has now established a chapter in New York City. Several groups and organizations have already publicly expressed their outrage and have called for immediate action.

For over 30 years, G.D. has operated from the margins of the far right political spectrum using the symbols, practices and methods of a racist, anti-democratic and intolerant neo-Nazi ideology. The recent economic crisis, however, has brought them to the forefront of political developments. They recently drew the attention of the international media when one of their Parliament members physically attacked two women from Left wing parties on live television. Before that incident and since, G.D. thugs have organized murderous attacks against immigrants, left wingers, gays as well as anyone who will stand in their way.

Greek Golden Dawn MP Attacks Another MP Live: Kasidiaris Slaps Kanelli

G.D. harbors common criminals. In the 70s, the “Fuhrer,” as they honorably call their leader, was imprisoned for setting off bombs in cinemas that showed films of Soviet production. Around the same period, members of the organization were also prosecuted for committing acts of terrorism against left wing newspapers and organizations. Today, they exhibit particular disdain against Muslims while they also openly deny the Holocaust.

In New York City, G.D. masquerades as a philanthropic organization conducting food and clothing drives. The goal of such activities is to popularize G.D.’s neo-Nazi ideology and enlist public sympathy. G.D.’s ‘philanthropic’ activity is a cynical ploy and has to be condemned as such.

Alternatively, Doctors of the World, AHEPA, and a number of other international or community-based NGOs rely on our help to support the Greek people. We urge all who wish to do so to support legitimate charities and Greek solidarity groups, and reject Golden Dawn’s advances.

History teaches us that economic crises can breed hatred, racism and ultimately fascism. Capitalism divides us along social, cultural and political lines so as to dominate us more effectively. Few cities in the world other than New York know this better. We therefore invite immigrant organizations, unions, teachers’ associations and cultural organizations to an open meeting where we can freely discuss and decide how we can effectively act against racism, violence and fascism.

Say NO to fascism!

Say NO to racism!

Please Join Us on October 9, 2012 • 7–10 p.m.

@ Church of the Redeemer

30-14 Crescent Street (Corner of 30th Road), Astoria, NY 11102-3249

Event co-sponsored by: Left Movement NY (Aristeri Kinisi NY) • Occupy Astoria – LIC • Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination • Strike Debt

Solidarity with Alexey Sutuga!

Anarchist Alexey Sutuga has been arrested and remanded in Moscow — your help is needed!

Alexey Sutuga, anarchist, anti-fascist and member of Autonomous Action, was arrested on Tuesday evening, April 17, in Moscow. The arrest took place during a fundraising effort in support of anti-fascist prisoners. It was learned almost after a day after the arrest that Alexey is now in Remand Prison No. 2, also known as Butyrka Prison.

The police accuse him of the same crime as anti-fascist Alexey Olesinov, who has already been in custody for a month — complicity in the incident at the Moscow club Vozdukh, on December 17, 2011, when neo-Nazis working security attacked concert goers and then blamed anti-fascists for this assault.

Voluntary donations for the support of anti-fascists in detention, particularly Alexey Olesinov and Igor Kharchenko, were collected in downtown Moscow on April 17. The event was organized by activists of the anti-racist human rights initiative Direct Help. About fifteen people, including Alexey Sutuga, showed up for the event. Two police officers approached the group at 8:30 p.m., according to witnesses. They identified themselves and asked why there were so much garbage around the bench where everyone was gathered.

The police then asked everyone present to show their documents. When people refused to show them, two plain clothes officers appeared instantly out of nowhere, followed shortly by five or six of their colleagues.

One of them presented his ID, muttered something to the effect of “Criminal Investigation Department, guys,” and said, “Get him!” Police officers obeyed him, grabbing Alexey and leading him off towards the highway.

The plain clothes officers immediately followed them, no longer paying any attention to the rest of the crowd, although they had promised to arrest all those who had no documents and take them to a police station. Among those who arrested Alexey was the well-known Moscow FSB agent Yevgeny Platov, better known as “Zhenya the FSB Guy.” (You can read more about him and his persecution of Moscow anarchists here, in Russian: http://avtonom.org/news/feisy-vs-anarkhisty-kak-boitsy-nevidimogo-foront…)

It’s worth noting that a group of anarchists, including Alexey, had been detained a week earlier by the same plain clothes officers, but were released without charges.

Sutuga’s family and friends did not know of his whereabouts for almost twenty-four hours: he didn’t answer his phone. Information about his whereabouts was only released on the evening of April 18. It was reported that he is in Butyrka Prison and, apparently, Basmanny District Court quickly sanctioned his pretrial detention.

He has been charged with “hooliganism” (Article 213, Part 2 of the Russian Federation Criminal Code). The press service of the Moscow police reported that Alexey Sutuga has been charged in connection with the same case as Alexey Olesinov.

Recently, it became known that police are attempting to fabricate a second criminal case against Olesinov. On April 17, police confronted him with a young man who claims to have been attacked by Alexey on December 4, 2011, although on this day Olesinov was posting articles on the Internet. (For more details, in Russian, see: http://ru.indymedia.org/newswire/display/26512/index.php.)

As a member of Autonomous Action has explained, “The case against the well-known anti-fascist Alexey Olesinov, now remanded, has been investigated for several months and is now collapsing. It seems that the human rights campaign in support of Olesinov has begun to irritate the police. If they had something on Sutuga, they would have followed the legal procedures for this case. And it turns out that they have just arrested a person and held him incommunicado for almost a whole day. It looks as if the police have wild imaginations.”

For more information about the incident at the Vozdukh club, see:
https://avtonom.org/en/people/aleksei-olesinov

For information about persecution of other anarchists and anti-fascists in Moscow, see:
https://avtonom.org/en/people/antti-rautiainen
http://anarcho-news.info/news-534 (in Russian)

Funds are urgently needed to defray Sutuga’s legal expenses. You may donate through Anarchist Black Cross of Moscow. Instructions are available here:
http://wiki.avtonom.org/en/index.php/Donate

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Editor’s note. This appeal was originally published, in English, on the Autonomous Action web site. It has been slightly edited to make it more readable.

January 19: Anti-Fascist Marches in Moscow and Petersburg

19jan.ru/english/an-appeal-from-the-january-19-committee-2012

An Appeal from the January 19 Committee

Three years ago, on January 19, 2009, we lost our friends Stanislav (Stas) Markelov and Anastasia (Nastya) Baburova, who were gunned down in broad daylight in downtown Moscow. After many protest actions, marches, rallies, and speeches by activists and ordinary citizens shocked by this violence, Nikita Tikhonov and Yevgenia Khasis, themselves the unfortunate victims of the neo-Nazi narcotic, have been convicted of the murders and sentenced to life and eighteen years in prison, respectively. Events have come full circle and the criminals have been punished, but we continue to remember how sincere lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova were in their anti-fascist convictions. We are aware of their absence on a daily basis, when hundreds of activists, people from various movements and of different ideological hues, require an uncompromising lawyer to defend them and an engaged journalist to cover their cases and their campaigns. So for the third year in a row, on the day when they were murdered, the coldest day of the year, we will take to the streets in an anti-fascist march to remind our fellow citizens and ourselves of the need for each of us to continue our daily struggle with fascism. We must be extremely vigilant in order to recognize fascism in ordinary things: fascism mimics and constantly changes its guises without altering its essence.

There are changes, however, that only a blind man would not notice. Three years ago, the neo-Nazis switched from the indiscriminate slaughter of immigrants to targeted, more “effective” political assassinations: this is how we lost Fyodor Filatov, Ivan Khutorskoi, Stas, and Nastya. After Tikhonov and Khasis were sent to prison, ultra-rightists were on the verge of tucking their tails between their legs, but a year ago, in response to the unlimited callousness and corruption of the courts and the police, we were treated to the monstrous, senseless riot on Manezh Square in Moscow. A year later, in December 2011, during the mass protests against the rigged parliamentary elections, we once again saw extreme right-wingers trying to appear more respectable at meetings of protest organizing committees and on the podium at protest rallies.

They scream that it is time we stopped “feeding” the North Caucasus, although it is not the most federally subsidized region of our country: the problem is caused by the local authorities there, who embezzle all available resources and suppress dissenters. The neo-Nazis stuff immature minds with demagoguery about immigrants, but if their fellow “national-democrats” came to power in Europe and began kicking out ethnically and religiously “inferior” Russia, what would they say? They criticize the regime, but many of them are always willing to serve it for a small fee by breaking up opposition rallies and attacking environmentalist protest camps. It is the neo-Nazis who will support the current regime if it is faced by the real threat of a democratic revolution demanding freedom and equality for all. Along with other opposition forces, they are against anti-extremist laws, but they want to abolish them only in order to insult other ethnic groups with impunity and play them off each other. It is not immigrants and “aliens” who threaten a mythical “indigenous majority,” but rather an ultra-right minority that threatens the majority of people in Russia. The “Russian question” is not the issue, but corruption and an unjust social order that enables some people to suppress, exploit and gag others, regardless of their ethnicity and religion. Nationalism is an obligatory element in this society. The anti-fascist cause is an inherent part of the struggle for genuine democracy, for the right to vote, to speak and be heard for everyone now deprived of this right. Baburova and Markelov proved this with their lives and their deaths.

Please join us on January 19, 2012, at 19:01, on Nikitsky Boulevard, for a rally in memory of Stas and Nastya involving social and civic activists and musicians.

We will never forget, we will not forgive! Russia for everyone willing to work and live honestly!

***

The January 19 Committee is a public anti-fascist initiative involving people from various walks of life – workers and teachers, lawyers and journalists, artists and filmmakers, musicians and sociologists. The January 19 Committee was formed in autumn 2009 in memory of anti-fascist lawyer Stanislav Markelov and anti-fascist journalist Anastasia Baburova, who were murdered in downtown Moscow on January 19, 2009. The January 19 Committee will hold its third annual civic march against neo-Nazi terror on January 19, 2012.

More information:
Telephone: +7 968 836 9877, +7 919 970 0060
Web site: http://19jan.ru
LiveJournal blog: http://january-19th.livejournal.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/groups/393549975496/

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City Refuses to Approve Commemorative Rally
By Sergey Chernov
The St. Petersburg Times
January 18, 2012

The city authorities have refused to authorize an annual anti-fascist march and rally in memory of the slain anti-fascists Stanislav Markelov and Anastasia Baburova due to be held on Thursday, Jan. 19, allowing only a “picket” on the largely deserted Ploshchad Sakharova on Vasilyevsky Island.

Human rights lawyer Markelov and journalist Baburova were shot dead in downtown Moscow on Jan. 19, 2009, and the date has been marked with vigils and rallies across Russia since then. Other anti-fascists, such as Nikolai Girenko, Timur Kacharava, Ivan Khutorskoi and Alexander Ryukhin, who were also killed by neo-Nazis, are commemorated as well.

Stefania Kulayeva, the program director of Memorial Anti-Discrimination Center, said City Hall refused to issue a permit on purely technical grounds, just as it did last year.

According to the law on public assemblies, applications must be submitted to the authorities from 15 to 10 days before the event, but because of New Year and Christmas celebrations, City Hall was closed from Jan. 1 through Jan. 9.

Kulayeva said she applied on Jan. 10, the first working day of 2012, but received a refusal the following morning on the grounds that the application was too late. Last year, she said she applied on Dec. 31, just before the holidays, and a refusal was issued on the grounds that the submission had been made too early.

She pointed out that the Jan. 19 march in Moscow has been authorized. “We didn’t choose this date, they could have issued a permit, especially if they did not need more than one day to give us a refusal,” she said.

Nevertheless, Kulayeva said the protesters are planning to gather at 6 p.m. near Gorkovskaya metro, the closest station to Ploshchad Sakharova, and walk together to the site for security reasons, as threats against participants have appeared on neo-Nazi web sites. The event, which will feature a slide show, will be held at 7 p.m.

Under Russian law, picketing is defined as a form of stationary public assembly that does not use sound amplifying equipment. Only posters and other forms of visual agitation are allowed.

Kulayeva said that she received multiple phone calls from City Hall officials and police officers Tuesday, who warned her against holding an unauthorized march.

“It appears that the commemoration of human right activists and anti-fascists such as Markelov is highly undesirable for the authorities,” she said.

Markelov, 34, and Baburova, 25, were shot and killed by a masked man in downtown Moscow after they left a press conference at the Independent Press Center.

Despite international outcry over the killings, neither Prime Minister Vladimir Putin nor President Dmitry Medvedev reacted or offered their condolences to the families of the slain activists.

Interfax quoted a Foreign Ministry official who said that the murders were “artificially politicized and used, with dishonest intentions, to discredit Russia.”

In November 2009, Nikita Tikhonov and his partner Yevgeniya Khasis, described as extreme nationalists, were arrested in Moscow and charged with the double murder. The investigators said the FN/Browning M1910 semi-automatic pistol that was used in the double murder was found in their apartment during a search.

In May 2011, Tikhonov was sentenced to life imprisonment, while Khasis as an accomplice was sentenced to 18 years in a penal colony.

According to the January 19 Committee in Moscow, commemorative events for Baburova and Markelov will be held in 20 Russian cities, including Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg, Petrozavodsk, Ufa and Omsk, as well as in Ukrainian cities and in Berlin and Paris.

English Defence League Strategists Exposed as Tycoons

Unite Against Fascism

December 11, 2011
EDL: secret strategists ‘Lake’ and ‘Gaia’ exposed as tycoons

Alan Lake, the mastermind behind the racist and fascist English Defence League has been exposed as the rich director of a City investment fund – and his real name is Alan Ayling.

Lake is the strategist who boasted of how he has brought football hooligan firms together to create the EDL’s army of racist street thugs.

He is a vicious anti-Muslim racist and open in his support of fascist organisations such as the Sweden Democrats and Hungary’s Jobbik party, whose uniformed paramilitary organisation terrorises Roma communities.

Lake described the massacre of 69 innocent people in Norway by fascist Anders Behring Breivik as “chickens coming home to roost”.

And on his 4Freedoms website, he has discussed the merits of killing prime minister David Cameron, deputy prime minister Nick Clegg and the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams.

He has admitted funding the EDL, telling Norway’s TV2 channel: “I have given some money to help some EDL things happen.”

City fund

Lake’s real name is Alan Ayling and he was, until January, a director of City fund Pacific Capital Investment Management, the Sunday Times reported. The fund was wound up in August.

Ayling, born in March 1954, lives in a luxury £500,000 flat in London’s Barbican Centre, where the founding meeting of the EDL was held in 2009.

That brought together Stephen Yaxley Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson), now the EDL’s leader, and members of the shadowy “counterjihad” network of vicious anti-Muslim racists of which Lake/Ayling is a key part.

Ayling has now been quizzed by police as part of the investigation into the Breivik massacre.

“Lake” had a falling out with the EDL back in August.

Property tycoon

But his fellow “counterjihadist”, a woman known by the pseudonym “Gaia”, is still closely connected to the EDL – and part of steering it in the direction of its recent alliance with the British Freedom Party, a fascist group that splintered off from the British National Party.

The BFP-EDL tie-up brings together the two elements of a classic fascist organisation – an electoral, suit-wearing BFP wing and the EDL’s army of street thugs – in an open alliance of linked organisations.

“Gaia” – named in the Sunday Times as buy-to-let property tycoon Ann Marchini, who lives in a £1.6m Highgate mansion – is also understood to have been at the 2009 founding meeting. She is reported to also use the alias Dominique Devaux.

BFP tie-up

Gaia was also at the EDL’s 19 November “Way forward” meeting, where the street thug cadre assembled to hear news of the tie-up with the BFP, and reported on the event for both the EDL and BFP websites.

Marchini and the counterjihadist clique, who have substantial international connections, believe that “going political” with the BFP will help bring money into the organisation.

A lawyer for Marchini told the Sunday Times: “Ann Marchini does not operate under the alias of either Dominique Devaux or Gaia. She is a member of British Freedom but joined only to support her personal friend Paul Weston.”

Weston is the former UKIP candidate hurriedly shunted into the position of BFP chair last month, when the fascist group carried out a cosmetic clean-up, moving its most prominent former BNP leaders discreetly off its executive committee.

Ann Marchini’s name and address in London N6 (a Highgate postcode) appear on a list of EDL donors released after the EDL’s website was hacked last year.

Thanks to Comrade Agata for the heads-up.

Timur Kacharava Street

cherno-sliv.livejournal.com

Timur Kacharava  Street

November 13 is the sixth anniversary of Timur Kacharava’s murder by neo-Nazis [in downtown Petersburg]. Timur was a social and humanitarian activist, an antifascist and musician. His murder was a planned, demonstrative act on the part of the neo-Nazis. As often happens in such cases, far from all of the people guilty of Timur’s murder have been brought to justice.

On the eve of this anniversary, Petersburg antifascists carried out an action in memory of their slain comrade. They renamed Kolokolnaya Street — which is not far from the traditional site of the Food Not Bombs actions Timur was involved in — Timur Kacharava Street.

We must preserve the memory of people who have perished in the struggle for freedom and equality.  We didn’t begin to ask the authorities permission to do what we did, because we have no illusions about their stance. For many years now, the state and its propaganda machine have done nothing but incite ethnic hatred and enmity. Law enforcement agencies — the police and the special anti-extremism police (Center “E”) — support, often quite openly, the neo-Nazis and persecute opponents of fascism. The courts deems fascists and nationalists a “social group” and bring criminal charges against antifascists for inciting hatred against them.

Six years have passed since Timur’s death.

We remember.

We continue the struggle.

We will be victorious!

Khimki One Year Later

Khimki One Year Later: July 28, 2010 – July 28, 2011

July 28 marked a year to the day since the famous demonstration in Khimki during which 300-400 young anarchists and antifascists from Moscow and the Moscow Region marched from the train station to the Khimki town hall (to the applause of local residents), where they set off smoke grenades, pelted the building with stones, and spray-painted several slogans on its walls.

It was a protest not only against the blatant clear-cutting of the free Khimki Forest to make way for a Moscow-Petersburg paid highway of dubious worth, but also against the methods the woodcutters employed to shield their actions from public protest. Environmentalists who tried to get in the way of the construction equipment were dispersed not only by police but also by masked soccer hooligans. When their masks slipped off, the protesters recognized several of them as ultra-rightists.

The demonstration was spontaneous: it was held instead of a concert by two Moscow hardcore groups. During the demonstration, Pyotr Silayev, the singer for one of these groups, Proverochnaya Lineika, encouraged the demonstrators with chants shouted into a megaphone. The megaphone is one of Silyaev’s traditional “musical instruments”; you can find old videos on the Web where it is clear that he is shouting his fight songs into a megaphone: “It’s time to take the consequences for your culture! It’s time to take the consequences!”

Pyotr has been taking the consequences ever since: after managing to flee the country the day after the demonstration, he has spent time as a homeless vagrant in Western Europe, a squatter occupying abandoned dwellings, and a prisoner in a Polish camp for illegal immigrants. He is now applying for political asylum in a country neighboring Russia.

Another of the “defendants,” Muscovite Denis Solopov, an antifascist activist, artist (the first exhibitions of his paintings took place recently in Kyiv and Moscow), and a jeweler by training, was held in Lukyanovsky Prison, Kyiv’s notorious pre-trial detention facility, from March 2 to July 13 of this year. During this time he managed to catch pneumonia and spent Victory Day, May 9, in solitary confinement. Denis was meanly arrested outside the offices of the Kyiv Migration Service, which had rejected his asylum request. The fact that at the time he had already been recognized as UN mandate refugee and that this status had been confirmed by the Kyiv office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, did not stop the Ukrainian jailers: they had in hand a request to extradite Denis to the Russian Federation. However, all the protests actions organized by comrades in Kyiv, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod and other cities were not in vain: on July 28, 2011, Denis Solopov left Ukraine and went further into exile, traveling to a third country [the Netherlands] which had agreed to admit him as a political refugee.

Two more participants in the Khimki demonstration heard the Khimki city court’s verdict in late June. Alexei Gaskarov, a correspondent for the web site www.ikd.ru (the Institute for Collective Action has specialized in coverage and analysis of social protests in Russia for nearly seven years, and Alexei has worked for them most of that time), was acquitted, while Maxim Solopov, a student at the Russian State University for the Humanities, was given a two years of probation. It was a surprising decision, considering that one and the same witnesses gave contradictory testimony against both of them, and that the defense had challenged claims that these witnesses had actually been in Khimki during the demonstration.

This largely “vegetarian” sentence was preceded by the stint Alexei and Maxim spent in the Mozhaisk Pre-Trial Detention Facility during the first phase of the preliminary investigation (from late July to mid-October 2010), as well as a vigorous public campaign for their release. Thus, during the first international action days on their behalf (September 17-20, 2010), thirty-six protest actions were held in thirty-two cities in twelve countries in Eastern and Western Europe, as well as in North America. Protests also took place in Russia, Siberia, and Ukraine, of course. The Campaign for the Release of the Khimki Hostages managed in a short time to mobilize not only people in Moscow, Petersburg, and Kyiv in support of the young Russian activists, but also people in Krakow, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Paris, London, and Berlin. In Athens and New York, protests for the release of Alexei and Maxim took place on two occasions in late September.

Political refugees from Moscow who (unlike Denis Solopov and Pyotr Silayev) have not made official asylum requests, continue to take the consequences for the Khimki demonstration, as well as for their protest culture, including the stones, smoke grenades, and spray-paint cans. They have dispersed to various cities and countries. They have not seen friends and relatives for a year now, and they are still afraid to return home. They were forced to flee Moscow a campaign of mass intimidation unprecedented in recent Russian history. The campaign has focused on the youth subculture scene to which many of them belonged – the antifascist punk/hardcore community. Arrests, searches, interrogations, and beatings took place throughout most of August 2010 not only in Moscow and the Moscow Region, but also in other regional capitals, including Nizhny Novgorod and Kostroma. In Zhukovsky, a town in the Moscow Region, seventy people were arrested before a concert, while in Kostroma more than 260 people were arrested in similar circumstances. The police officers who interrogated antifascist Alexander Pakhotin promised to cut off his ear, and it took him several weeks to recover from the beating he suffered at their hands. But they haven’t left him alone even now, a year later. In early July of this year he suddenly got a phone call inviting him to report to Petrovka, 38 [Moscow police HQ], for an informal discussion. Alexander reasonably replied to the caller that he preferred to talk with police investigators only after receiving an official summons. For Moscow police investigators, however, an official summons is, apparently, something incredibly difficult. It’s probably easier for them to hunt down and beat up obstinate witnesses – which is exactly what happened to Alexander Pakhotin.

Further evidence of the secret police’s abiding interest in the people who took part in last year’s Khimki demonstration is the canard that circulated in the Russian media in late June: Pyotr Silayev had allegedly been arrested in Brussels by Interpol at the request of Russian law enforcement authorities. Antifascists quickly refuted this lie: at the time, Pyotr was fishing, and he was not in Brussels. Apparently, the authorities were trying their best to patch up their reputation after losing the casing against Gaskarov and Solopov in the Khimki court.

And all this time the saga of the Khimki Forest per se has continued. There was last year’s big demonstration on Pushkin Square [in Moscow] with headliners music critic Artemy Troitsky, rock musician Yuri Shevchuk, and Maria Lyubicheva, lead singer for the popular group Barto. Then was there the temporary halt to the logging of the forest. This was followed by a vicious musical parody of the activists by a musician [Sergei Shnurov] who had been previously seemed like a member of the “alternative scene,” but now turned out to be singing almost with the voice of the Ministry of Truth. There was wintertime tree-hugging and springtime subbotniks. And finally, there was Russian president’s meeting with public figures and his announcement that the highway would go through the forest after all. Subsequently, we’ve witnessed the Anti-Seliger forum, to which two of every species of oppositional beast came (where were all of them during the constant demos and clashes in Khimki?), and their using the misfortune of the Khimkians to grandstand in the run-up to the 2011-2012 election season. Finally, there is the tent camp set up by the Rainbow Keepers and other eco-anarchists, which opened on July 27, 2011, the eve of the first anniversary of the famous demonstration.

What has this past year shown us? That in our country, any project, even one that is obviously directed against society, will be forced through all the same if big money and the authorities back it. That there is still no control over criminalized local authorities: not only have none of the officials mixed up in dubious affairs been put on trial, but none have even been fired. That the power of social solidarity still counts for something: if it cannot stop harmful projects, it can at least defend activists who have fallen captive to the penal system and get people out of jail. That radical political action (of which last year’s demonstration was an instance) is quite effective at drawing attention to acute problems, but that it must be effectively deployed and backed up with infrastructure, however informal; otherwise, the emotional, political, and physical toll on the movement will be too high and may jeopardize its very existence. This, perhaps, is the most important lesson for the social movement, but it bears repeating. As you know, in our country, even if you have brains and talent, it takes a huge effort to roast your enemy over the fire. For if you relax for just a second, lo and behold, he’s already roasting you over the fire. But there is hope, and the future still hasn’t been written.

 —Vlad Tupikin

July 27-31, 2011

Museum Songspiel: The Netherlands 20XX

Sadly, this seems like an appropriate time to post this video…

Museum Songspiel: The Netherlands 20XX

A film by Chto Delat, 2011

This video film, whose narrative takes place against the background of Dutch politics in the year 20XX, tells the story of a group of illegal immigrants who try to evade deportation by the national authorities and seek refuge in a museum. The work is a co-production of the Van Abbemuseum, SMART Project Space and Chto Delat.

Distribution and inquiries: SMART Project Space, Amsterdam

In memory of Zoya Sitnikova, the mother of Olga Egorova

Produced by:  Tsaplya (Olga Egorova), Dmitry Vilensky, Gluklya (Natalia Pershina) and Nina Gasteva

Directed by: Tsaplya (Olga Egorova)

Screenplay: Tsaplya (Olga Egorova), Dmitry Vilensky

Music: Mikhail Krutik

Choreography: Nina Gasteva

Director of Photography: Artyom Ignatov

Set: Dmitry Vilensky

Concept costumes and props: Gluklya (Natalia Pershina)

With support from Van Abbemuseum, SMART Circle Trust, and SKOR.

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What Are Deportees Doing in a Museum?

 Chto Delat’s Museum Songspiel: The Netherlands 20XX is a scary film, not least because it coldly and blithely illustrates how the current democracies (whether “social,” “liberal” or “sovereign”) disappear the undesirables in their midst, the refugees/asylum seekers, illegal immigrants, and “lawbreakers.” In this sense, the film – despite its flimsy gesture toward a dystopian future as its setting (“20XX,” “European National League,” “euthanasia” experiments carried out by scientists, etc.) – is not science fiction. It is firmly situated in the present: this happens nearly everywhere almost every day, however much we would rather not know about it. (And the scary part, as the film shows, is how conveniently we forget that we do know.) What makes it “science fiction,” however, is not these stock elements from a threadbare genre, but its resort to a wholly fantastical plot premise: the deportees seek to claim asylum, of all places, in a contemporary art museum. What are the deportees doing in a museum?

The answer they give in the film (via the intermediary of the guard) is: because they have heard that “art is on the side of the oppressed.” Although the details, as hinted at by the museum staff, are sketchy, we are led to imagine that the establishment of “national democracy” in Holland and other parts of (what can only be Northern and Western) Europe is so brutal that the escapees have nowhere else to turn but the museum. But what they find there is an identification with the oppressed, with the revolutionary and critical potentials of art, that is literally canned, contained, archived, monitored, and rationed. The museum has an extensive collection of “revolutionary” art, but the chorus acknowledges what this art’s fate has been in our world: as a paragon of “timelessness” (although revolutions are only timely, or they’re not revolutions), and as a source of that most counter-revolutionary of genres – reconstructions of historical avant-garde performances and installations. The characters deliver many of their lines against a backdrop of Black Panther newspapers – neatly framed and lined up on a wall and thus not likely to provoke any nice white person’s “fear of a black planet.” “Street art” is relegated to a panopticon-like space known as The Eye, which now serves as a jail cell-cum-theatrical stage for the ever-silent immigrants. Finally, contemporary art’s “critical” mission (“our job is to wake society up”) is so precious that any soft-pedaling of “criticality” is warranted to avoid closure or budget cuts.

The impromptu performance of Victory over the Sun (refashioned as Towards the Light) is, after all, not meant to save the immigrants, but to save the museum and its staff from the untoward consequences of their intrusion. But it inadvertently shows how contemporary art and its handmaiden “critical theory” often function vis-à-vis the oppressed. These acquire legitimacy as “performers,” as “actors,” as data points in the artist’s “solo show mapping the deportations of immigrants,” as colorful clowns in an avant-garde pantomime. As soon, however, as the powers that be – the media, the “Center for Extremism Prevention” (which, by the way, is the name of a quite real branch of the police in the filmmakers’ homeland) – have tagged (and bagged) them as “criminals,” they disappear entirely from view – and from the minds of the art-loving public. The empty Eye at film’s end is a fitting symbol of the void at the heart of the liberal/social-democratic project and the blind spot in the eyes of its thinking (and leisure) classes. Art is not life, goddamn it!

In the real world, the “immigrants” have names: Derkan, Dorgija, Aurel, Salomee, Daniel, Asya. Since they’re identified in the credits, we’ll hope that everything is alright with them. In that same real world, however, “deportees” (as Woody Guthrie once reminded us) have, as often as not, no names (by definition). Museum Songspiel is thus an almost perfect little piece of art, set in an impeccable (real) museum, that tells us: Life is not art. Life is not just a matter of names, but of the people behind those names, the stories they could tell us, and the things we could do together. Leave the museum.