Greetings! Today is Sunday, June 12 - by the way, the so-called "Russia Day" - and we're continuing our podcast, Trends of Order and Chaos. This is episode 58. Here are the top stories on last week's agenda.
St. Petersburg. Russia. On May 30, the St. Petersburg District Court extended the pre-trial detention of Aleksandra Skochilenko until July 1. The defense submitted a character description of her and documents on her health and ability to serve house arrest, which the judge added to the file but did not consider.
Hi! Today is Sunday, 5 of June and we continue our podcast “Trends of order and chaos”. This is the episode 57. Here are the main stories on the agenda for the past week.
One hundred days of War
This week marked 100 days from Kremlin’s attack on Ukraine. No good news here. Russian army obviously doesn’t have enough power to crush Ukrainians, yet. As victories, they present the occupations of small localities on Donbass.
30 year old Denis Serdyuk, suspected of an arson attack against amilitary call-up center in Volgograd, is being held in remand prison #1 of his town. He is being charged with ”destruction of property” and ”hooliganism”, and may be sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Vladimir Sergeev and Anton Zhuchkov were arrested in an anti-war action on the 6th of March 2022. Before his arrest Vladimir worked in a factory. Vladimir did not go to demonstrations before the war began. After the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian army on February 24, 2022, Vladimir's attitude toward the Russian state became even worse.
These prisoners have been jailed due to anti-war protests or opinions. They have a wide variety of positions, but all of them are against the Russian attack against Ukraine. There are more prisoners than whom we know the addresses. This list was compiled by Ivan Astashin.
Please translate your letters to Russian for example with Google translate, as currently letters in other languages except Russian are very seldom accepted in Russian prisons.
Possibilities to protest in Russia were already significantly limited before the pandemic, and during the last two years, from March 2020 to Russian attack to Ukraine, street demonstrations have been banned with the pretext of the Covid Pandemic. People were demonstrating persecutions against opposition leader Alexey Navalnyi, and in few other cases, but these ended in massive arrests.
“Autonomous Action” (Avtonom) has always been a group that spreads anarchism in the Russian-speaking world. We don’t care about national borders. But no matter which states our activists are based, social change in Russia is very important to us.
Translation from Crimethinc., as part of a collection of anti-war texts from Russia.
Hi, it's Sunday and you are listening to our podcast «Trends of order and chaos». This is episode 44. Here are the main events of the past week: the week of the war.
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War in Ukraine has already increased the level of repressions in Russia, but there are not yet any new criminal proceedings against anarchist or anti-fascist activists. In this new exceptional situation, we are channeling some of our resources to humanitarian needs which go beyond our usual narrow focus of supporting repressed anarchists and anti-fascists.
In picture: action of Left Bloc activists against FSB.
As the full scale military operation began this morning, it is important to show that the Russian people don’t need this shameful war. There were dozens of antiwar protests all over the country in the past days mostly in the form of single-person pickets, which according to Russian laws don’t need any notifications. But the majority of protestors were detained nevertheless.
Hello, it is Saturday, and we are continuing our podcast "Trends of order and chaos". This is episode 43. Of course, you know perfectly well what is the main topic of the last week.
Yesterday, on February 21, an extraordinary meeting of the Russian Security Council was held. As part of this theatrical act, Putin forced his closest servants to publicly “ask” him to recognize the independence of the so-called “people’s republics” of the Luhansk People’s Republic [LPR] and Donetsk People’s Republic [DPR] in eastern Ukraine.
On Thursday, February 10, a Russian court handed down sentences for terrorism to three teenagers from the Siberian town of Kansk. The boys were arrested in the summer of 2020 for posting leaflets with political slogans on the local FSB building. After searching their phones and uncovering a “plot” to blow up a virtual rendering of an FSB building in the video game Minecraft, investigators charged the teens with making explosives and training to participate in terrorist activities.
The sentence in the case of the Kansk teenagers will be given on Thursday, the 10th of February 2022 at 3PM in Krasnoyarsk time (11 AM Moscow time, 8 AM GMT). Three anarchists from the Krasnoyarsk region are accused of “studying terrorism” and storing explosives. Nikita Uvarov, Denis Mikhayuulenko and Bogdan Andreev were arrested in the summer of 2020 for spreading leaflets that criticised the state, and for supporting political prisoners. At that time they were 14 years old.
This time around there's both good news and bad news, so lets start with the good ones.
Maxim ”Hadad” Smolnikov released from remand in custody
The family of Maksim Smolnikov needs financial support to cover lawyer costs and the transfer to a pre-trial detention center. If you want to help, please transfer money to the ABC Moscow PayPal (abc-msk@riseup.net) or if you are in Russia directly to the family account: 4274320068140352.
Ilya Romanov needs support for rehabilitation
Ilya Romanov has been an activist in the anarchist movement since 1987. He was sentenced to prison twice, for 10 years in Ukraine in 00’s and 7 years in Russia in the last decade. In 2019 he almost died as a result of a cerebral hemorrhage. Due to the delay in the medical intervention, he lost the capacity to move the right side of his body.
We got in touch with several anarchist comrades to talk about the recent protests on the streets of different cities in Russia: looked into political events of 2020 and how they brought people to the situation with protests.
With the comrades we managed to clarify if Navalny is a nazi and the whole protest should be ignored by the anarchists or leftists. And of course we talked about anarchists and their participation in protest movement.
Listen to our radio stream:
June 11th is the International Day of Solidarity with Marius Mason & All Long-Term Anarchist Prisoners. This action day has a long history, it was organized first time 20 years ago in 2004. In the first year, we managed to paint a graffiti to wall of one of the most guarded objects of Moscow,...
Anarchist group ANA Regensburg hosted my online-presentation on 16th of May 2024, in which I discussed tactics of anti-war activism in Russia, and reasons why the anti-war movement has not been able to make an impact to change the course of events yet. Cases of anarchists repressed for anti-war...