If you have found a spelling error, please, notify us by selecting that text and pressing Ctrl+Enter.
On Monday 11 of March, we made an intervention in the Russian-greek chamber of commerce and industry in the center of Thessaloníki in solidarity with the anarchists and antifascists who are facing the fierce state repression in Russia. There was a banner opened in front of the entrance and flyers were thrown in the area. Also this text is these days in the roads of Thessaloniki:
«My tortured brothers and sisters, lower and touch your ear to the wall, to all the walls of the world, to hear these knocks, to hear your own voice: The sun is for everybody. Our day is comming. We will walk on.»
On Tuesday 31 October 2018, the 17-year-old anarchist Mikhail Zhlobitsky invaded a police station in the city of Arkhangelsk, Russia, carrying explosives and detonated them, causing his death, the injury of three cops, and material damages in the facilities of FSB, Russia’s security/counter-terrorism agency. A few minutes earlier, he had posted a message online, taking responsibility for the action, in order to salvage its political background from potential state propaganda, writing:
“Comrades, now in the FSB building in Arkhangelsk there will be a terrorist attack, the responsibility for which I claim. The reasons are clear to you. Since FSB fabricates cases and tortures people, I decided to go for it. Most likely, I will die because of the explosion, because I initiate the bomb directly by pressing the button attached to the bomb cover. Therefore, you are requested to spread information about the terrorist attack: who committed it and the reasons. Well, that seems to be all. I wish you to go towards our goal unswervingly and uncompromisingly. I am wishing you the future of anarchist communism!”
This attack, which resulted to the death of our young comrade, was a reply to the fierce and constant wave of repression that broke out from FSB (KGB’s successor) against anarchist and anti-fascist movement about a year earlier, and more specifically since October 2017. The totalitarianism of the russian state goes hand in hand with militarism and nationalism, but also with fierce repression within the borders, at the same time with the domination of capitalism and conditions of extreme poverty for the exploited ones. Perhaps, a typical example could be the degree of connection between state authority and the counter-terrorism agency, since Vladimir Putin himself was appointed as its director before his election.
A few words about the arrests of anarchists during 2017-2018 In October 2017, FSB invents the so-called Network, a “terrorist” organization that, according to the cops, has members in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Penza and Belarus who plan to attack with explosives and weaponry during the World Cup and presidential elections. Under this umbrella-organization they place anyone who resists against the capitalistic and state brutality, in an effort to muzzle every voice of class and political resistance, condemning those who struggle, to years of imprisonment.
And this is how a coordinated rampage of arrests begins. In the middle of October, 6 a narchists and antifascists get arrested with the accusation of integration into a terrorist organization, while warrants of arrest go forth against 2 others who managed to flee from Russia. All 6 comrades impeach that the cops incriminated them by planting the weaponry and that police practiced psychological and physical violence against them. More specific, they mention that FSB agents made extensive use of electric shock, and also hanged them upside down in order to confess. A few months later anarchists in Moscow and Saint Petersburg get arrested as a result of different police operations. During those operations, the 23-year-old antifascist Viktor Filinkov reports that he got electrocuted multiple times on his chest until he confessed and also was threatened that he would be transferred in a cell with tuberculosis patients.
In addition to the construction of the “Network” organization, counter-terrorist force has now upgraded the platform “people’s self-defense” into an organization which is now considered as an extremistic one, something that led to more arrests and torture of antifascists and anarchists over the past year. The context on which the the above took place is pretty much known. The conditions of privatizations, increased poverty and repression in the Russian territory could only prevail the following: persecutions of anarchists and communists, prohibition of public events, assassinations of antifascists, pogroms against people of the LGBTQ community, participation in the war in Syria (next to the United States, Turkey and countries of the EU) and also an effort of expansion, in a series of places. All these create an explosive combination, that proves the despotic, capitalistic and imperialistic nature of the Russian state.
In Greece, Russia, Turkey and USA, state repression against us, the internal enemy, the oppressed who fight against inequality, oppression, poverty, wars, is not going to bend us. We have every reason to keep on fighting against state terrorism and capitalistic growth that shudder over our lives, we have every reason to deepen international solidarity and organization of our struggle. We stand next to the anarchists captives of the Russian state, in solidarity with them and also with every voice that resists against the violence of capital, state and patriarchy.
Freedom to the Russian anarchists We have to give an end to the Russian state’s tortures and repression International solidarity until the destruction of every prison, until there is no more exploitation and oppression anarchist collective from the eastern areas of thessaloniki