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

http://chtodelat.wordpress.com/2012/11/18/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.

1871: The Paris Commune

http://libcom.org/history/1871-the-paris-commune

A brief history of the world's first socialist working class uprising. The workers of Paris, joined by mutinous National Guardsmen, seized the city and set about re-organising society in their own interests based on workers' councils. They could not hold out, however, when more troops retook the city and massacred 30,000 workers in bloody revenge.

The Paris Commune is often said to be the first example of working people taking power. For this reason it is a highly significant event, even though it is ignored in the French history curriculum. On March 18 1871, after France was defeated by Prussia in the Franco-Prussian war, the French government sent troops into Paris to try and take back the Parisian National Guard’s cannon before the people got hold of it. Much to the dismay of the French government, the citizens of Paris had got hold of them, and wouldn't give them up. The soldiers refused to fire on their own people and instead turned their weapons on their officers.

The PNG held free elections and the citizens of Paris elected a council made up mostly of Jacobins and Republicans (though there were a few anarchists and socialists as well). The council declared that Paris was an independent commune and that France should be a confederation of communes. Inside the Commune, all elected council members were instantly recallable, paid an average wage and had equal status to other commune members.

Contemporary anarchists were excited by these developments. The fact that the majority of Paris had organised itself without support from the state and was urging the rest of the world to do the same was pretty exciting. The Paris Commune led by example in showing that a new society, organised from the bottom up, was possible. The reforms initiated by the Commune, like turning workplaces into co-operatives, put anarchist theory into practice. By the end of May, 43 workplaces had become co-operatives and the Louvre Museum was a munitions factory run by a workers’ council.

The Mechanics Union and the Association of Metal Workers stated “our economic emancipation . . . can only be obtained through the formation of workers' associations, which alone can transform our position from that of wage earners to that of associates." They also advised the Commune’s Commission on Labour Organisation to support the following objectives: “The abolition of the exploitation of man by man... The organisation of labour in mutual associations and inalienable capital.” 

Through this, it was hoped that within the Commune, equality would not be an “empty word”. In the words of the most famous anarchist of the time, Mikhail Bakunin, the Paris Commune was a “clearly formulated negation of the state”.

However, anarchists argue that the Commune did not go far enough. Those within the Commune didn’t break with the ideas of representative government. As another famous anarchist, Peter Kropotkin said:

“if no central government was needed to rule the independent Communes... then a central municipal government becomes equally useless... the same federative principal would do within the Commune”

As the Commune kept some of the old ideas of representative democracy, they stopped the people within the Commune from acting for themselves, instead trusting the governors to sort things out for them.

Anarchists argued for federations of directly democratic mass assemblies, like the people of Paris had done just over a hundred years previously (must be something in the water!).

The council became increasingly isolated from those who’d elected it. The more isolated it got, the more authoritarian it got. The council set up a “Committee of Public Safety” to “defend [by terror]” the “revolution”. This Committee was opposed by the anarchist minority on the council and was ignored by the people who, unsurprisingly, were more concerned with defending Paris from invasion by the French army. In doing so, they proved right the old revolutionary cliché of ‘no government is revolutionary’!

On May 21st, the government troops entered the city and were met with seven days of solid street fighting. The last stand of the Communards took place at the cemetary of Montmartre, and after the defeat troops and armed members of the capitalist class roamed the city, killing and maiming at will. 

30,000 Communards were killed in the battles, many after they had surrendered, and their bodies dumped in mass graves.

The legacy of the Commune lived on, however, and "Vive la commune!" ("Long live the Commune!" was painted over on the walls of Paris during the 1968 uprising, and not for the last time we can be sure...

not thinking instead of acting, but both thinking and acting

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/27.htm

V. I. Lenin

Eleventh Congress Of The R.C.P.(B.)[1]

March 27-April 2, 1922

---

Written: 16 March, 1922
First Published: 1925; Published according to the manuscript
Source: Lenin’s Collected Works, 2nd English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 33, pages 237-242
Translated: David Skvirsky and George Hanna
Transcription\HTML Markup: David Walters & R. Cymbala
Copyleft: V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marx.org) 2002. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

---

1
Speech In Opening The Congress March 27

[…]

Indeed, the sermons which...the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries preach express their true nature: 'The revolution has gone too far. What you are saying now we have been saying all the time, permit us to say it again.' But we say in reply: 'Permit us to put you before a firing squad for saying that. Either you refrain from expressing your views, or, if you insist on expressing your political views publicly in the present circumstances, when our position is far more difficult than it was when the white guards were directly attacking us, then you will have only yourselves to blame if we treat you as the worst and most pernicious white guard elements.'

Žižek, “Repeating Lenin”

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek1.htm

My personal experience is that practically all of the “radical” academics silently count on the long-term stability of the American capitalist model, with the secure tenured position as their ultimate professional goal (a surprising number of them even play on the stock market). If there is a thing they are genuinely horrified of, it is a radical shattering of the (relatively) safe life environment of the “symbolic classes” in the developed Western societies. Their excessive Politically Correct zeal when dealing with sexism, racism, Third World sweatshops, etc., is thus ultimately a defense against their own innermost identification, a kind of compulsive ritual whose hidden logic is: “Let’s talk as much as possible about the necessity of a radical change to make it sure that nothing will really change!”

[…]

Here are some details of the daily life of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1917 and the following years, which, in their very triviality, render palpable the gap from the Stalinist nomenklatura. When, in the evening of 24 October 1917, Lenin left his flat for the Smolny Institute to coordinate the revolutionary takeover, he took a tram and asked the conductress if there was any fighting going on in the center that day. In the years after the October Revolution, Lenin was mostly driving around in a car only with his faithful driver and bodyguard Gil; a couple of times they were shot at, stopped by the police and arrested (the policemen did not recognize Lenin), once, after visiting a school in suburbs, even robbed of the car and their guns by bandits posing as police, and then compelled to walk to the nearest police station. When, on 30 August 1918, Lenin was shot, this occurred while he got in a conversation with a couple of complaining women in front of a factory he just visited; the bleeding Lenin was driven by Gil to Kremlin, were there were no doctors, so his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya suggested someone should run out to the nearest grocer’s shop for a lemon... The standard meal in the Kremlin kantina in 1918 was buckwheat porridge and thin vegetable soup. So much about the privileges of nomenklatura!

[…]

the kernel of the Leninist “utopia” arises out of the ashes of the catastrophe of 1914, in his settling of the accounts with the Second International orthodoxy: the radical imperative to smash the bourgeois state, which means the state AS SUCH, and to invent a new communal social form without a standing army, police or bureaucracy, in which all could take part in the administration of the social matters. This was for Lenin no theoretical project for some distant future — in October 1917, Lenin claimed that “we can at once set in motion a state apparatus constituting of ten if not twenty million people."32 This urge of the moment is the true utopia. One cannot overestimate the explosive potential of The State and Revolution — in this book, “the vocabulary and grammar of the Western tradition of politics was abruptly dispensed with.”33 What then followed can be called, borrowing the title of Althusser’s text on Machiavelli, la solitude de Lenine: the time when he basically stood alone, struggling against the current in his own party. When, in his “April Theses” from 1917, Lenin discerned the Augenblick, the unique chance for a revolution, his proposals were first met with stupor or contempt by a large majority of his party colleagues. Within the Bolshevik party, no prominent leader supported his call to revolution, and Pravda took the extraordinary step of dissociating the party, and the editorial board as a whole, from Lenin’s “April Theses” — far from being an opportunist flattering and exploiting the prevailing mood of the populace, Lenin’s views were highly idiosyncratic. Bogdanov characterized “April Theses” as “the delirium of a madman,"34 and Nadezhda Krupskaya herself concluded that “I am afraid it looks as if Lenin has gone crazy."35

[…]

Today, Lenin appears as a figure from a different time-zone: it’s not that his notions of the centralized Party, etc., seem to pose a “totalitarian threat” — it’s rather that they seem to belong to a different epoch to which we can no longer properly relate. However, instead of reading this fact as the proof that Lenin is outdated, one should, perhaps, risk the opposite conjecture: what if this impenetrability of Lenin is a sign that there is something wrong with OUR epoch? What if the fact that we experience Lenin as irrelevant, “out of sync” with our postmodern times, impart the much more unsettling message that our time itself is “out of sync,” that a certain historical dimension is disappearing from it?69

[…]

The greatness of Lenin is that he WASN’T AFRAID TO SUCCEED — in contrast to the negative pathos discernible from Rosa Luxembourg to Adorno, where the only authentic act is the true failure, the failure which brings to light the antagonism of the constellation (what, apropos of Beethoven, Adorno says about the two modes of the artistic failure — the unauthentic, due simply to the authors subjective deficiency, and the authentic, which brings to light the limitation of the very objective social constellation — bears also on his own politics71). In 1917, instead of waiting for the right moment of maturity, Lenin organized a preemptive strike; in 1920, finding himself in a position of the leader of the party of the working class with no working class (most of it being killed in the civil war), he went on organizing a state, i.e. he fully accepted the paradox of the party organizing-creating its base, its working class.

Nowhere is this greatness more palpable than in Lenin’s writings of 1917, which cover the span from his initial grasp of the unique revolutionary chance (first elaborated in the “Letters From Afar”) to the “Letter to Central Committee Members,” which finally convinced the Bolshevik majority that the moment to seize power has arrived. Everything is here, from “Lenin the ingenious revolutionary strategist” to “Lenin of the enacted utopia” (of the immediate abolishing of the state apparatuses). To refer to Kierkegaard, what we are allowed to perceive in these writings is Lenin-in-becoming: not yet “Lenin the Soviet institution,” but Lenin thrown into an OPEN situation. Are we, within our late capitalist closure of the “end of history,” still able to experience the shattering impact of such an authentic historical openness?

[…]

http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2009/11/381-382-interview-obama-theory

“I am a Leninist. Lenin wasn’t afraid to dirty his hands. If you can get power, grab it”

Millions Without Power Following Election

http://www.theonion.com/articles/millions-without-power-following-election,30247/

WASHINGTON—According to widespread reports, roughly 314 million Americans across the country have been left without any power following Tuesday’s devastating presidential election.

As many struggle to cope amidst the continued outage, experts have predicted that due to the severity of the presidential contest, which cut a wide swath of carnage throughout the entire United States, it’s very possible that power won’t be fully restored to the general public for at least another four years, if ever.

“By our estimates, power is out in roughly 150 million homes throughout the country, and many residents—especially the poor, the middle class, and ethnic minorities—will have no power for a long, long time,” said Cornell University political scientist Dr. Paul Kucharski, adding that the power infrastructure, which was originally put in place in 1789, has become increasingly problematic and unreliable over the past 200 years.

“Given that we have an outdated system that is so prone to failure, an outage of this magnitude was inevitable.”

“At this point,” he continued, “with the number of citizens whose lives have been completely devastated by this election, I think it’s fairly clear that the whole system needs a complete overhaul.”

[…]

Gatsheni and the bleeding lessons from Marikana

by Dinizulu Mbikokayise Macaphulana

http://www.newzimbabwe.com/opinion-9543-The+bleeding+lessons+from+Marikana/opinion.aspx

A PART of the good reason why Slavoj Zizek has been titled “the most dangerous philosopher in the West,” is his courage and obscene honesty.

Speaking and writing from the West, in his light and entertaining manner, the Slovanian failed actor and successful philosopher has pronounced that, in spite of the anger, the denialism, the depression and occasional acceptance, Eurocentric capitalism is tittering towards a cataclysmic collapse.

Drowning in the global financial and social crisis, the self-confessed political prefects of the world and patrons of Western modernity have no clue as to the way forward, hence the new scramble for Africa disguised in the grammar of human rights, democracy, peace and other gifts from the Greeks that have seen Africa being the new focus of attention as dramatised in Libya and the murder of Muammar Gaddaffi recently.

It takes a good sense of danger and that of humour to tell bad news to the owners of power. There is a price for telling bad news, however true. From Zizek to Julius Malema and from Frantz Fanon to Patrrice Lummumba, the penalty is either a label of idiocy, an accusation of insanity or a clear dismissal as a noise maker of no categorical consequence, if not death.

Yet, what has kept Zizek above the wave and off the sink, to the point of being an intellectual celebrity, is the undeniable truths he tells about a society that he belongs to, and which he still intelligently defends.

Undeniable and ordinarily pricey truths is what impressed the crowd, most of whom travelled far to listen to Professor Sabelo Gatsheni Ndlovu's “Decolonising Development Studies” lecture that he gave on October 16, in acceptance of his full professorship at the University of South Africa and which coincided with his assumption of the leadership of the Archie Mafeje Institute of Research.

Used to the usual inaugural lecture, most of us expected a romantic narrative of how the toddler Professor Gatsheni hunted squirrels in the woods and chased rabbits in bare foot before he thought about school, or some other intellectual rags to riches rendition involving favourite primary school teachers, witches and wizards, blessings and curses or such other usualities that accompany the rituals of inaugural lectures as we have become used to them.

Away from the usual mundanities, Gatsheni delivered an hour of what Professor Peter Stuart, the discussant and the head of the school of Development Studies said “has left development studies and development theory in tatters.” And what fundamentally did Gatsheni say or do that left an entire academic discipline like Development Studies and a total province of thought like development theory “in tatters”?  The answer is the subject of this short article.

What has been called “the African condition” by African scholars like Ali Mazrui, and the “African curse” by others in the Afropessimist school or the “African predicament,” by some historians is the troubling paradox where Africa is rich in natural resources and industrial raw materials, richer than most continents, but the people of Africa constitute the definition and name of poverty, disease and misfortune under the sun.

Not only that but as Eric Williams says, “every brick that built Western civilisation is cemented with Negro blood” and sweat. In slavery, mercantilism, colonialism and neo-colonialism Africa built the West, the West that Zizek has warned of collapse. And the West that is the hegemonic power in the globe as we experience it now.

Contributing to a growing family of ideas generated by combative African intellectuals in the shape of the late Arhibald Mafeje, the departed Dani Wadada Nabudere and the insightful Paul Tiyambe Zeleza and Adebayo Olukoshi to name but a few, Gatsheni asked and answered such questions as to why “Western modernity  has created” for the world “modern problems for which it has no modern solutions,” and why the West has promised to Africa and the rest of the global South, civilisation, development, economic prosperity, peace, human rights and heaven, but in place of all these grand “sugar-candy” promises it has delivered illusions and no realities.

In raising the question of illusions that currently occupy the space of realities within the African political and economic condition, Gatsheni tore into the curtain that continues to hide the true challenge that confronts Africa but has eluded scholars including the grand fathers of African liberation like Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere. The African experience continues to be the experience of coloniality in its racial, ethnic, gender and social manifestations.

Nkrumah’s “seek yeh first the political kingdom and all other things will be added unto you” dictum was one of the most poetic mistakes of the African decolonisation project that sold to Africans one of the most stubborn illusions to date. Africans sought the political kingdom, they earned the right to vote, replaced white leaders with black ones, designed beautiful flags and sang new melodious national anthems but for money or for love, nothing has been added unto them.

The 44 dead bodies of poor black miners in Marikana, gunned down by a squad of equally black and equally poor police officers on the orders of those who control platinum in South Africa, using their black mouthpieces in the government, should jolt all serious Africans to hard thinking about the continuing reality of apartheid that is disguised behind the illusions of “a rainbow nation” and a “South Africa that belongs to all who live in it.”

The political theatre in Zimbabwe is even more illusory than the one in South Africa. Robert Mugabe and Zanu PF are bearing the brunt of the stick from the West in form of sanctions and threats of prosecution for crimes against humanity. On the other hand, Morgan Tsvangirai and MDC-T are eating the carrot of rich sponsorship and funding to fight the tyranny of Mugabe and Zanu PF. Through their stick and their carrot, the Euro-American alliance are still the owners of the game in Zimbabwe, except for many slogans and wishes to the contrary by a ruling party and an opposition political party that are entangled and imbricated in a web of Western puppetry and coloniality.

In their fight, Zanu PF and MDC-T have provoked such a dust and arrested so much media attention and kept SADC and AU without sleep. There is nothing to be gained by ordinary bread eaters in Zimbabwe. As this happens, the knowledge is in the public domain that the Chinese are harvesting the bounty of diamonds in Zimbabwe and in the global diamond black market America and her allies still buy Zimbabwean diamonds in prices far cheaper than they would be in the formal market, never mind that “Zimbabwe will never be a colony again!”

In addressing his lecture to the presence of illusions instead of realities of independence and development in Africa and the entire global South, Gatsheni was inviting serious thinking about such paradoxes that are symptomatic of the African condition like the Marikana massacre and the illusory political and economic stalemate in Zimbabwe.

So much African intelligence and energy is expended in pursuit of illusions while realities lie unattended to. Using decolonial thought as his spectacles with which to scrutinise the world, Gatsheni was deploying a combative liberatory school of thought  whose geneology is traceable to world systems philosopher Immanuel Wallerstein and Latin American liberation philosopher Anibal Quijano and their students, among them activist scholars Ramon Grosfoguel and Nelson Maldonado-Torres.

Decolonial thought as a way of looking at the world and life, is a school of thought that refuses to swallow impressions and illusions but is only satisfied with the smell behind the perfume. Together with the African Decolonial Research Network (ADERN), a group of young scholars in development studies, political science and political communication, Gatsheni is geared to contribute to a wealth of insights on where African liberation movements went wrong in the decolonisation of Africa and how Africa can be recovered from coloniality and navigated back to realities of economic and political independence.

His forthcoming book, 'Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity'will be a must read. The path of Gatsheni and ADERN, like the paths of other Afrocentric scholars before him is going to be a thorny one. There is no consesus in African scholarship on where Africa should go. The fierce debates over issues concerning the African destiny that clashed Ali Mazrui with Archie Mafeje, Wole Soyinka and Ali Mazrui have not gone away.

There are still some professors in the African academia who are megaphones of Western stereotypes of Africa who regard combative Afrocentric scholarship as a pursuit of “the power of the false” as Achille Mbembe has offensively argued. The ground is fertile for fierce intellectual tussles, but away from university seminar rooms and comfortable hotels, the painful lessons about the true African condition of coloniality and enduring subjection are the blood of Marikana and the politics of illusions and myths that occupies many in Zimbabwe and the rest of Africa where ruling parties and their rivals in the opposition still remain tools of the same Empire.

International Days of Solidarity against Political Repression in Russia

http://chtodelat.wordpress.com/2012/11/13/international-days-of-solidarity-against-political-repression-in-russia/

A Call for International Days of Solidarity against Political Repression in Russia, November 29—December 2, 2012

An appeal from Russian leftists to their comrades in the struggle

Today we, members of Russian leftist organizations, appeal to our comrades all over the world for solidarity. This appeal and your response to it are vital to us. We are now facing not just another instance of innocent people sentenced by the punitive Russian “justice” system or another human life wrecked by the state. The authorities have launched a crackdown without precedent in Russia’s recent history, a campaign whose goal is to extinguish the left as an organized political force. The recent arrests, threats, beatings, aggressive media attacks and moves towards declaring leftist groups illegal all point to a new general strategy on the part of the authorities, a strategy much crueler and much less predictable than what we have seen in recent years.

The massive protest movement that began in December 2011 radically changed the atmosphere of political and social passivity established during the Putin years. Tens of thousands of young and middle-aged people, office workers and state employees, took to the streets and demanded change. On December 10 and 24, 2011, and, later, on February 4, 2012, Moscow, Petersburg and other major Russian cities were the sites of massive rallies, demonstrating that a significant part of society had undergone a new level of politicization. The “managed democracy” model crafted by the ruling elite over many years went bankrupt in a matter of days. Political trickery stopped working when confronted by real grassroots politics. The movement, whose demands were initially limited to “honest elections,” quickly grew into a protest against the entire political system.

After the elections of March 4, 2012, during which Vladimir Putin, using a combination of massive administrative pressure on voters, massive vote rigging and mendacious populist rhetoric, secured another term for himself, many thought that the potential for protest mobilization had been exhausted. The naïve hopes of the thousands of opposition volunteers who served as election observers in order to put an end to voter fraud, were crushed.

The next demonstration, in whose success few believed, was scheduled for downtown Moscow on May 6, 2012, the day before Putin’s inauguration. On this day, however, despite the skeptical predictions, more than 60,000 people showed up for an opposition march and rally. When the march approached the square where the rally was to take place, the police organized a massive provocation, blocking the marchers’ path to the square. All those who attempted to circumvent the police cordon were subjected to beatings and arrests. The unprecedented police violence produced resistance on the part of some protesters, who resisted arrests and refused to leave the square until everyone had been freed. The confrontation on May 6 lasted several hours. In the end, around 650 people were arrested, some of them spending the night in jail.

The next day, Putin’s motorcade traveled to his inauguration through an empty Moscow. Along with the protesters, the police had cleared the city center of all pedestrians. The new protest movement had demonstrated its power and a new degree of radicalization. The events of May 6 gave rise to the Russian Occupy movement, which brought thousands of young people to the center of Moscow and held its ground until the end of May. Leftist groups, who until then had been peripheral to the protest movement’s established liberal spokespeople, were progressively playing a larger role.

Those events were a signal to the authorities: the movement had gone beyond the permissible, the elections were over, and it was time to show their teeth. Almost immediately, a criminal investigation was launched into the “riot,” and on May 27, the first arrest took place. 18-year-old anarchist Alexandra Dukhanina was accused of involvement in rioting and engaging in violence against police officers. The arrests continued over the next few days. The accused included both seasoned political activists (mainly leftists) and ordinary people for whom the May 6 demonstrations were their first experience of street politics.

Nineteen people have so far been accused of involvement in those “disturbances.” Twelve of them are now being held in pre-trial detention facilities. Here are some of their stories:

⁃ Vladimir Akimenkov, 25, communist and Left Front activist. Arrested on June 10, 2012, he will be in pre-trial detention until March 6, 2013. Akimenkov was born with poor eyesight, which has deteriorated even further while he has been in jail. His most recent examination showed he has 10% vision in one eye, and 20% in the other. This, however, was not a sufficient grounds for the court to substitute house arrest for detention. At Akimenkov’s last court hearing, the judge cynically commented that only total blindness would make him reconsider his decision.

⁃ Mikhail Kosenko, 36, no political affiliation, arrested on June 8. Kosenko, who suffers from psychological disorders, also asked that he be placed under house arrest rather in pre-trial detention. However, the court has declared him a “danger to society” and plans to force him to undergo psychiatric treatment.

⁃ Stepan Zimin, 20, anarchist and anti-fascist, arrested on June 8 and placed in pre-trial detention until March 6, 2013, after which date his arrest can be extended. Zimin supports his single mother, yet once again the court did not consider this sufficient grounds to release him on his own recognizance.

⁃ Nikolai Kavkazsky, 26, socialist, human rights activist and LGBT activist. Detained on July 25.

Investigators have no clear evidence proving the guilt of any of these detainees. Nevertheless, they remain in jail and new suspects steadily join their ranks. Thus, the latest suspect in the May 6 case, 51-year-old liberal activist and scholar Sergei Krivov, was arrested quite recently, on October 18. There is every indication he will not be the last.

If the arrests of almost twenty ordinary protesters were intended to inspire fear in the protest movement, then the hunt for the “organizers of mass disturbances” is meant to strike at its acknowledged leaders. According to the investigation, the so-called riot was the result of a conspiracy, and all the arrestees had been given special assignments. This shows that we are dealing not only with a series of arrests, but with preparations for a large-scale political trial against the opposition.

On October 5, NTV, one of Russia’s major television channels, aired an “investigative documentary” that leveled fantastical charges against the opposition and in particular, against the most famous member of the left, Sergei Udaltsov. This Goebbelsian propaganda mash-up informed viewers of Udaltsov’s alleged ties with foreign intelligence, and the activities of the Left Front that he heads were declared a plot by foreign enemies of the state. By way of decisive proof, the broadcast included a recording of an alleged meeting involving Sergei Udaltsov, Left Front activist Leonid Razvozzhayev, Russian Socialist Movement member Konstantin Lebedev, and Givi Targamadze, one of the closest advisors to the president of Georgia,. In particular, the conversation includes talk of money delivered by the Georgians for “destabilizing” Russia.

Despite the fact that the faces in the recording are practically indiscernible and the sound has clearly been edited and added separately to the video, within a mere two days the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation Prosecutor General’s Office (the state law enforcement agency playing the lead role in organizing the current crackdown) used it to launch a criminal case. On October 17, Konstantin Lebedev was arrested and Sergei Udaltsov released after interrogation, having signed a pledge not to travel beyond the Moscow city limits. On October 19, a third suspect in the new case, Left Front activist Leonid Razvozzhayev, attempted to apply for refugee status in the Kyiv offices of the UNHCR. As soon as he stepped outside the building, persons unknown violently forced him into a vehicle and illegally transported him across the Ukrainian border onto Russian territory. At an undisclosed location in Russia he was subjected to torture and threats (including regarding the safety of his family) and forced to sign a “voluntary confession.” In this statement, Razvozzhayev confessed to ties with foreign intelligence and to preparations for an armed insurgency, in which Konstantin Lebedev and Sergei Udaltsov were also involved. Razvozzhayev was then taken to Moscow and jailed as as an accused suspect. Razvozzhayev has subsequently asserted in meetings with human rights activists that he disavows this testimony, which was obtained under duress.

However, police investigators have every intention of using it. We know of the existence of “Razvozzhayev’s list,” a list beaten out of him by torture: it contains the names of people who will soon also become targets of persecution.

The scope of the crackdown is steadily growing. The Investigative Committee recently announced an inquiry into Sergei Udaltsov’s organization, the Left Front, which may well result in its being banned as an “extremist” organization.Pressure against the anti-fascist movement is likewise building. Well-known anti-fascist activists Alexey Sutuga, Alexey Olesinov, Igor Kharchenko, Irina Lipskaya and Alen Volikov have been detained on fabricated charges and are being held in police custody in Moscow. Socialist and anti-fascist Filipp Dolbunov has been interrogated and threatened on several occasions.

It is hardly accidental that most victims of this unprecedented wave of repression are involved in the leftist movement. On the eve of the introduction of austerity measures, curtailment of labor rights and pension reforms in Russia, the Putin-Medvedev administration is most afraid of an alliance between the existing democratic movement and possible social protest. Today’s wave of repressions is the most important test for Russia’s new protest movement: either we hold strong or a new period of mass apathy and fear awaits us. It is precisely for this reason, faced with unprecedented political pressure, that the solidarity of our comrades in Europe and the entire world is so crucial.

We appeal to you to organize Days of Solidarity against Political Repression from November 29 to December 2 outside the Russian Federation embassy or any other Russian government misson in your countries, demanding the immediate release of those who have been illegally arrested and termination of the shameful criminal cases and preparations for new “Moscow trials” based on torture and fabrications. We also ask that you use the specific names and details we have provided in this appeal in your own protests and demands. This is crucial for every person now behind bars.

Please send your reports on solidarity actions and any other information or questions to the following email address: solidarityaction2012@gmail.com

Solidarity is our only weapon! United, we will never be defeated!

Russian Socialist Movement, Autonomous Action, Left Front