An Interview With An Anarchist Protester in Russia

Robert sits down with a Russian anarchist, currently protesting the Putin regime's invasion of Ukraine.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Robert Evans here and Welcome to It Could Happen Here,
a podcast about how things are falling apart and how
to maybe put them back together. Obviously, the biggest story
probably in the world right now is the ongoing invasion
of Ukraine. In a major corollarrea of that story is
how dramatically things in Russia have taken a turn for
the totalitarian um. The country has become increasingly isolated from

(00:28):
most of the global community. This is due to a
mix of sanctions, to a lot of businesses pulling out
just because of the social consequences of not doing so UH,
and of policies that have been put down by Putin's
government in order to crack down on dissent and further
remove Russia from any kind of contact with the West. UM.

(00:49):
As a result, it's kind of difficult to get in
touch with people who are resisting Putin's government from within Russia. UM.
Anarchist activists in particular UM are not see people to reach. However,
we did recently sit down with one of these individuals
and talk to them, so this episode will both be
an interview with that person and a bit of history

(01:09):
about the anarchist movements within Russia. Russia has actually a
very long history of anarchist organizing. Two of them in
generally considered foundational thinkers and anarchists political theory. Mikhail Bakunin
and Peter Kropotkin were both born in Russia. Both lived
and agitated under the Tsars. Bakunan was an advocate and
a major theorist of political terrorism. He fled the country,

(01:33):
was returned, and ultimately spent like ten years in prison there.
Kropotkin was the author of a seminal anarcho communist text
titled The Conquest of Bread, and he was only able
to return to Russia after the nineteen seventeen Revolution. He
died there in nineteen twenty one. It's also worth noting
that Peter Kropotkin is canonically the ancestor to Tommy Pickles

(01:54):
of the rug Rats, but that's something you can look
up on your own now. While some of the most
influential anarchist in history were Russian, and anarchist organizing was
a potent part of pre nineteen seventeen Russian political history,
the success of the Bolsheviks after nineteen seventeen led to
the movements near annihilation um Emma Goldman was yet another
major anarchist, activist, and thinker who was born and educated

(02:16):
in Russia. She immigrated to the United States in eighteen
eighty five, where she promptly helped try to assassinate a
steel magnate in revenge for his brutality against striking workers.
Goldman grew to prominence as a labor activist and women's
rights activist in the last decade of the eighteen hundreds.
In nineteen o one, her work helped inspire Leon Cho
Goosh to assassinate President William McKinley. While Emma Goldman had

(02:40):
no direct connection to Cho Gosh, she defended his actions
by saying, as an anarchist, I am opposed to violence,
but if the people want to do away with assassins,
they must do away with the conditions which produced murderers.
There's much more to say about Emma Goldman, but for
our purposes, what matters is that she was arrested for
opposing the draft in World War One and eventually deported

(03:01):
back to Russia. Right after the revolution. Goldman was initially
psyched that the czars had been deposed, but quickly became
disillusioned by the violence of the forming totalitarian Soviet state.
She considered this a betrayal of the revolution and wrote
a series of articles for The New York World that
have gone down as one of the first expose as
of conditions in the Soviet Union. Goldman's work was criticized

(03:22):
by many left wing intellectuals outside of Russia, but she
was correct about political repression in the new Bolshevik workers paradise.
Matters did not improve for anarchists in the first twenty
years of the new regime. In nineteen thirty seven, in
his history of Anarchism in Russia, E. Yorroslansky wrote, in
the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, at the present time,

(03:43):
the anarchists no longer enjoy any influence over the masses.
They are met with only as isolated individualists. The fall
of the Soviet Union, the coming of democracy, and the
slow rise to power of Vladimir Putin did not enormously
alter this state of affairs. Russian anarchists still exercise relatively
little influence over the masses. Most of them struggle towards

(04:06):
autonomy as isolated individuals. In March of twenty two, in
the third week of the Russian invasion, of Ukraine. I
sat down with one of these people. We've been chatting
online through Reddit for a couple of weeks, and the
process of setting up a proper audio interview was difficult.
To say the least repression of all political descent under
Putin is extreme. More than thirteen thousand people were arrested

(04:28):
at anti war protests in the first two weeks of
the war, so you will understand why our source was
paranoid about his identity. I had to download a secure
app I'd never even heard of before, and he only
agreed to speak with me while using a voice changing
application to further disguise his identity. Due to the difficulties
this created, I will be paraphrasing him and quoting his
words myself at a couple of points here in order

(04:51):
to make listening to this a more comfortable experience. But
here he is at ten years or so. It's bicycle
and co Of course, my initial cell was into weak

(05:17):
ten years ago plush. So just to make it clear,
he's saying that he's been involved in anarchist organizing for
more than a decade since around two thousand eleven. The
initial cell he organized with was affiliated with an umbrella
organization called Autonomous Action. We'll talk about them more in

(05:38):
a minute, but it's important you understand that his cell,
at about fifty people strong, was considered quite large for
Russia once in Moscow. In perspects, I guess in the
artists in linings because whatever they were worked for rental

(06:03):
of course, or concerned. Even in two thousand eleven, organizing
as an anarchist was rather risky. As a result, our

(06:24):
source actually started his career in activism on his own.
As a single protester. He would stand out in public places,
sometimes during other protests, sometimes on his own, holding a
sign that said in Russian peace to the world. Now
I'm reading you the English translation of what he put down.
The the literal Russian words that he had on his
sign were a reference to a famous Soviet slogan officially

(06:47):
adopted in nineteen fifty one. The phrase actually has a
much older origin in the country, which begins under the
Orthodox Church and grew more popular among revolutionaries after the
February Revolution. The first leftist he use peace to the
world as a slogan in Russia may have actually been
a f Kerensky, who headed the brief democratic government that

(07:07):
ran things after the are stepped down. In our sources case,
his sign was an act of protest against a number
of things, including the recent Russian invasion of Georgia and
Russian military operations in Syria. Was kind of past, so
I can't question for I'm promising for against the stuff.

(07:30):
Stuff uh as almost nothing effectiveness organization or one hour home.
We managed to entire winter on a couple of at

(07:52):
least currently home. After he'd been seen doing this for
a while, members of a local anarchists self found this
person and started asking them questions, Hey, who are you,
what are you doing? What do you think of this?
And that he was not specific about the individual political

(08:14):
questions they answered, and we probably don't need to get
into that. They invited him eventually to a building where
a number of them tended to gather and prepare for actions.
In short order, they started organizing together. At the time
our source started organizing as an anarchist. The most notorious
recent action was the Kimki Forest conflict. In brief, Kimki
is a forest with a long histories and nature preserve.

(08:36):
It's kind of outside of Moscow. It's so densely forested
that in the sixteen hundreds, and then in the early
eighteen hundreds, when the Russians were resisting Napoleon, it was
used by partisans and insurgents as a base of operations.
When the Bolsheviks took over, it was preserved to act
as a sort of open air therapy center for tuberculosis patients.
In the early two thousands, local city planners started to

(08:57):
advocate for a toll road to be built through the
middle of the forest. Their argument was that a large
amount of traffic passed through the Leningrad Highway and that
had caused huge amounts of air pollution in the city
of Kimki. Since the forest was protected by national environmental codes,
turning it into a road was a long political process.
Activists protested, arguing that it would be an environmental disaster

(09:18):
which spoilers. It was like anarchists in the United States
in the period before the Green Scare, Russian anarchists carried
out a series of occupation actions to try and protect
the wild lands. So the stand it was poor or
or the governance the cost orgastlands past or section oh

(09:55):
fascists one constraint trains. In the end, it was in
two thousand twelve Shortly after our source began participating an

(10:18):
anarchist demonstrations, the government carried out a major crackdown against
certain anarchist activists. They focused primarily on groups and individuals
who were doing things like making Molotov cocktails and engaging
in property destruction. Now our source participated in food not bombs,
and other non aggressive types of direct action, most of
which involved handing out food and supplies to people who

(10:39):
are helping them to get resources. He did not disavow
insurrectionary anarchists the kind of people who threw bombs, but
that wasn't the kind of thing he did, and he
didn't have a lot of connections with those people because
roughly a year after he started organizing as an anarchist,
most of them in his area at least got cracked
out on and either killed, forced out of the country,
or arrested by the government. This crackdown on insurrectionary Russian

(11:03):
anarchists led to an even more paranoid security culture among
those who remained. Our source and his comrades mostly distributed food,
but they also provided support for a large number of
children whose families had abandoned them due to crushing poverty.
Even though these things were not illegal, they had to
maintain intense security culture to avoid being part of future crackdowns.

(11:24):
One of the first don't talk to anyone or a
structional companization commun don't care for the information, don't give

(11:44):
them infrestion means no one. Long standing tradition among Russian
anarchists was a sort of defensive isolation. People gave each
other as little information as possible about their real identities.
As a result, despite the fact that he has participated
in multiple protests since the invasion of Ukraine and people
have been arrested at those protests, our source insists that

(12:05):
he doesn't know if any of his comrades have been
taken into custody. Now. Some of this probably has to
do with the fact that he's not organizing in a
major city, um, but a lot of it probably has
to do with the fact that he just doesn't particularly
know any people by name. Poles, which are imperfect but
cannot be entirely discounted, suggest that most Russian civilians support

(12:26):
the war and their military. Even so, the scope and
scale of the anti war protests in Russia have beggared
anything from recent memory. Our source says that this has
actually helped to mitigate some of the despair you might
expect Russian anarchists to feel, given the Titanic increase in
state repression from from there, just like, oh, come on,

(13:01):
we can do it all everything and we'll just again
if it's will find us whatever. No, or there is
no despair at least we don't see it. The wants
of action, their words of preparation. From what I understand,
or not only artists, but other rdical firms were gathering

(13:22):
in Russia or in Moscow, in Saint Pasbura obviously because
the most et center of everything be there, not not Carenians.
I guess, oh you some some even throwing like water
us really industries. So it's probably time that we talk

(13:56):
about autonomous action or a D. The Revolutionary Anarchist Federation
that our friend and his comrades are affiliated with a
D actually has members in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. It
was founded in two thousand two and briefly had affiliates
in Armenia before they disbanded in two thousand five. That's
a story in and of itself. A D advocates direct

(14:18):
action in order to quote create a tradition and basis
for a new humanist culture, social self organization, and radical
resistance against militarism, capitalism, sexism, and fascism. They consider the
existing government of Russia as entirely illegitimate. They refused to
take part in Russian electoral politics, seeing even left wing
opposition parties as essentially controlled by Putin and only existing

(14:42):
to provide a sham vision of choice. A D activists
call themselves the Autonomy and see their calling as twofold
to exist as autonomous, free individuals within an unfree system
and to spread revolutionary sentiment and weaken the state. Much
has been said in the West of Alexei Navalny, a
Russian opposition politician who, whatever else you might say about him,

(15:03):
is certainly not controlled opposition. He has survived an assassination
attempt by the Putin regime and is currently incarcerated after
leaving his exile in the West to return to Russia
and fight the sham case against him in court. No
one can doubt that Navalny possesses significant physical courage, and
it seems fair to say the man believes in what
he says. A D Activists, from what I have seen,

(15:25):
do not fault him in his willingness to suffer for
his beliefs, but they believe that he is at the
very least deeply misguided. Navalny, they say, holds to a
fundamentally errant belief that Russia could ever be a parliamentary
democracy in the Western tradition. Their argument is that corruption,
investigations and electoralism are useless in Russia and always have been,

(15:46):
and from a historical standpoint it is difficult to argue
with these claims. Autonomous Action members do not support the
Ukrainian state, and I have read articles from them where
they describe the conflict in the Dawn Bass, which simmered
for eight years before sploating into the current conflagration, as
two fascist paramilitary forces backed by two capitalist governments. However,

(16:07):
they have been consistent for years that the proper stance
of Russian anarchists is to support the Ukrainian people against
aggression from the Russian state, before Putin commenced his broader invasion.
In February of this year, Autonomous Action published an article
with the title why we should support Ukraine quote Putin
is not just the gendarme of Europe, but the gendarme

(16:28):
of the whole world. From Syria to Myanmar. Whenever a
dictator tortures and kills thousands of his old people, Putin
is there to support him. There are no elections in
Russia anymore. Even the most moderate attempts to change something
results in criminal cases and persecutions. I do not believe
that the result of this yet another round of threatening
declarations and building up pressure is a full scale war.

(16:49):
But as the conflict is not disappearing, a full scale
war may start after five to ten years, even as
a result of a cycle of escalation, even if no
one really wants it. And in case of a full
scale war, we should be on the Ukrainian side. As
Mala Testa said, for me, there is no doubt that
the worst of democracies is always preferable, if only from
the educational point of view, then the best of dictatorships

(17:13):
neutrality and a war between Ukraine and Russia would mean
neutrality in an invasion of a democracy by a dictatorship.
Now our source concurs with the extant evidence that Russian
citizens still broadly support the war. As I stated earlier,

(17:38):
nanton attacking Russia with no people don't know, he was
certain to acknowledge that there's still a great deal of propaganda,
largely pro NATO propaganda on the anti war side of things.
Given the information situation within his country, he admitted that

(18:00):
he'd had difficulty parsing some things out, while acknowledging that
his side also lacked perfect information, he felt that their
stance against the war was safe because in the end
it opposed blood letting. You can claim on some kind
of or the Western growing. Oh if even if you're

(18:27):
under some kind of work, even West Western is basically
a case as well, you still of this world on
your side because you don't want to. He did admit
that a number of people in his life, family and
close friends knew about his political sympathies, and he claims

(18:48):
that the outbreak of war and the massive futalitarian swing
Putin has taken over the last month have caused some
of these people to be more open to his beliefs.
So I'm kind of opening for them. One people, one
of them people watch points or oh, my friends, do
you know what I want to kind of stuff what

(19:10):
I'm into, or as the war stone, or they just
came to me. However, personally, hey, you've been concurring for this,
so wint for years you've been telling us on us
or for years I thought you'd be annoyed and not understand.
You're right, What do we do? Oh, we don't have

(19:35):
people knowing about me? What what gives no? Seeing the
picture At the moment, the political situation within Russia is
truviously answered. All the inner of dubious sources have claimed

(19:58):
today palace coup is in the offing or has been attempted.
Some have even spoken of the possibility of a revolution,
or at least a massive protest campaign that forces Putin
from office. Our source did not consider that likely in
the unlikely event the government collapsed entirely, he was not
particularly optimistic about what might result. You mentioned the centralised

(20:18):
governments for you and there is no They're just that,
just the originals like Oh, it's He mentioned me that

(20:54):
a number of his loved ones had come forward recently
to ask what they ought to do. I asked how
he responded to that question. Right now, we try to
organize and help each other because there is a there
is a chance or currency local stuffing, and we'll just
need to survive. That's the first thing weak. So soft

(21:19):
organization and interactions are available than any currency or no.
For what I see it the way, Uh. Second thing
is that we need to use the training or start.
I guess there's there's a term in English cause every

(21:42):
week don't or when you have all infrastructure. Basically for
now we need to have from enough folding of water
points we all can train even with the forums. He
particularly mentioned to the revolutionary importance of finding some way

(22:02):
to either smuggle or produce medical supplies and medications. He
knows one person who already had to flee the country
because his wife could no longer get the medicine she needed.
He mentioned the sanctions levied against Russia as a major
issue for regular working people, but when I asked what
he felt Western countries could do in this conflict, he
was actually quite focused on something else Entirely. He believes

(22:24):
the United States has access to high quality satellite images
of what happened in the immediate lead up to the
Russian invasion of Ukraine. Putin's government justified much of their
invasion on so called attacks from the Ukrainian government that
they claim it escalated against the separatist regions. Our source
believes his government is lying about this, or many states

(23:04):
so here's the same thing, or yeah, we need to cope.
Of course it's been queen so it's I don't believe
that Ukraine or so being with let's say, less of

(23:24):
military or compared to Russia or not so she stuff,
So we didn't need those things coped published at least
maybe not as long as possible. Constan still point all
would at least it's helpful people see you get there

(23:51):
are points queer from its good. Since the invasion, it
has gotten notably harder, but not impossibly hard for Russian
said to get information about the conflict that does not
come from the Kremlin. Are starts explained. How he does
it a combination of using VPNs and understanding the nature
of authoritarian propaganda. In short, even when the government is

(24:12):
lying to you, you can get an idea of what
the truth is by understanding what they want you to believe.
When work stuff all sources, what science, I saw it
South Korean side, Russia side, great side, Oh so stopped

(24:38):
as well. I don't really believe in me. Sal let's
see firsts because they are past they say, what's going to?
What's they're trying to contain to? O? Or if you

(25:01):
have say Okay, let's this one. Uh. When Russian Ministry
of Foreign first selling or down the solution, and at

(25:21):
the same time we hear all the Syrians, Syrian or
mercenaries are going to rail for me, it means one
thing they want to us pull or the pointing to
get some time so professional sources councils. He felt that

(25:43):
one way US activists could be helpful to Russian activists
was by continuing to document and study the different munitions
and tactics used by police in cracking down on demonstrations.
He noticed that Russian police used similar and sometimes even
the same weapons to the ones that the US police
used on crowds in the protests. He believes the documentation
done to study these weapons is helpful to people all

(26:05):
around the world. He expressed some frustration at friends and
colleagues of his, who, after years of failing to truly
grapple with the degree to which Putin had centralized power,
We're now fleeing Russia to avoid living under an increasingly
totalitarian state. A swampy colleagues. I guess our radio whatever

(26:26):
he was trying to support me like stuff scoring all
the sports cop Russians. Yes, if you into bonus, that's
for him trying to blame him hence it and that's

(26:52):
why against against the commers, he has decided to stay
and to resist. While he has admitted to now studying
martial arts and military tactics, he did not have high
hopes for any kind of confrontation with the Russian state,
and as a generally peaceable person, he has decided that
he will continue to resist in the way that makes

(27:14):
the most sense to him, by helping people and providing
them with things that they will increasingly need. Is the
economic situation in Russia degrades further for me? How many
people most kind of since constant sense for yeah, that's

(27:34):
for at least six years or one. Uh, but then
that once a thing about arcists and wishould I call
myself and you okay, before I call myself an alarchists,
then I should make once a more thing. Oh I

(27:56):
need to before I don't know if him people, uh
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(28:17):
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