“Cossacks” and Nightclubbers in Petrograd

I guess being a “Cossack” is something like being a member of the KKK. You just take all the stupidity in your addled head and hatred in your twisted heart, and convert it into a violent little game of dress-up with other freaks like yourself.

In any case, if there are any “real” “ethnic” Cossacks out there in the world to whom none of the aforesaid applies, they should do something to stop the fake “Cossacks” who like playing dress-up and pushing other people around from sullying the good Cossack name.

For the Russian-impaired, this post was inspired by this news article, published a few days ago in a reputable online national news outlet, about how “Cossacks” are going to start patrolling nightclubs in Petersburg and making sure that “Russian Orthodox” traditions are observed there.

I’m sure these dress-up dolls have no clue what these “Russian Orthodox” traditions are, especially as they apply to nightclubs. (No twerking allowed?)

It’s something on the order of all true Germans being “Aryans” back in the 1930s and how that also meant they could start pushing Jews, Roma, their leftist opponents, and, later, just about everyone else around.

That is, it’s a sick fascist fantasy, conceived by the power elite to satisfy the spiritual and moral longings of powerless people who have been humiliated most of their lives, but hardly by nightclubbers.

Photo courtesy of The Telegraph

The Joseph Brodsky Law

Let’s call it the Joseph Brodsky Law, especially since it was drafted in that incubator of shamelessness and obscurantism known as the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, in Brodsky’s hometown.

I have an acquaintance who was laid off seven months ago from his job of many years in the marketing department at a reputable, Soviet-era instruments manufacturing company. He has been diligently looking for a comparable job (or any good job) since then, but has found nothing.

Part of the reason his company tanked was that the wise guys (pun intended?) who now own it, diversified into real estate development and construction during the “boom” times a few year ago, and lost tons of money building luxury high-rises somewhere in the middle of Leningrad Region which no one wanted to move into.

Igor will be thrilled to learn his country has plans to label him a “social parasite” and assign him to a life of slave labor because he, a hard-working, pleasant, smart, decent guy, had the bad fortune to be born in a country where, in reality, “labor” and hard work have always been vilified and criminalized, whether by the serf-owning noblemen of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the vanguard of the proletariat during the twentieth century or the new overlords, the Ozero dacha co-op and their minions from the worlds of organized crime and petty officialdom.

Joseph Brodsky, convicted social parasite and Nobel Prize winner

By the way, this is yet another reason the abomination known as the Joseph Brodsky Memorial Apartment Museum, which seems closer than ever to becoming a reality, now that the Friends of Brodsky have finally made a deal with the nasty old neighbor lady from the Brodsky family’s communal flat in the Muruzi House who was holding out on the Friends of Brodsky and asking for too much for her portion of the flat, should never be opened, much less have been contemplated in the first place.

The nasty old neighbor lady has been the only (albeit inadvertent) heroine in this tedious, drawn-out saga, because she has been the only one of the players trying to prevent the building of a needless, unwieldy monument to a man who, whatever his other extreme personal and political quirks, would hardly have wanted to return—whether in the flesh, in the spirit, as a bronze suitcase with his severed head propped on top, as yet another salon of old knickknacks and furniture (aka the Russian writer’s museum), etc.—to a city which is not only run by a, so to speak, legitimately elected ex-KGB officer and where homophobia is not merely legalized but almost functions like a quasi-state ideology, but where the law that was used to put Brodsky away when he was just a punk poetry slammer is now being revived, if only, so far, on the “exploratory” and “thought experiment” level.

**Konstantin Simun, Memorial to Joseph Brodsky, Philological Faculty, Saint Petersburg State University**

The Brodsky Museum should not be opened if for no other reason than that all these creeps from the Mariinsky Palace and the Smolny (you can fill in their names), so keen on grinding gays into the dirt and stigmatizing the jobless, among their other hobbies, will show up for the grand opening. And the Friends of Brodsky will have invited them there. God knows that is exactly how Brodsky would have wanted to be remembered—as a door mat for thieves and crooks to wipe their feet on while accumulating cultural capital. (They already have a lock on the real capital, the shiny stuff you can buy swanky digs in London with.)

Finally, note that the only person who talks any sense, in the article, quoted below, is the guy from the Communist Party. Go figure.

_________

In a move reminiscent of the Soviet era, Russian lawmakers have proposed introducing a penalty for being unemployed, and called for amending the Constitution to make labor the duty of each citizen, Russian media reported Monday.

The bill, drafted in the municipal legislature of St. Petersburg and soon to be introduced before the State Duma, would make “employment dodging” an offense punishable by community service, Izvestia reported. The daily claimed to have obtained a copy of the draft bill.

The move would echo the practice of the Soviet Union, whose Constitution enshrined labor as the “right” and also the “duty” of each citizen. It would also echo a law that the former Soviet republic of Belarus adopted recently, making “social parasitism” — a Soviet-era term for unemployment — punishable by a fine, in a bid to crack down on tax evaders.

Joseph Brodsky, one of Russia’s most prominent poets and its last Nobel prize winner in literature, was convicted of social parasitism during a 1964 trial, over the course of which the judge famously wondered who had recognized him as a poet.

Izvestia reported that under the new bill, adult and able-bodied Russians who have been out of a job for more than six months “when there is appropriate work available,” could be sentenced to up to one year of community service.

St. Petersburg lawmaker Andrei Anokhin was quoted by Interfax as saying that jobless Russians should apply to state-run employment agencies, and the “state should provide everyone with work.”

“Then it would be much easier to track down those who avoid working,” Anokhin was quoted by Izvestia as saying.

A lawmaker on the State Duma’s labor and social policy committee, Valery Trapeznikov, said that his panel would review the proposal, adding that Russians who do not work are costing the state income tax losses, the report said.

Communist State Duma deputy Vadim Solovyev referred to the proposal as “unconstitutional” in comments carried by Interfax.

“The introduction of a criminal penalty for being unemployed would mean violating the Constitution and international agreements,” Solovyev said Monday, noting that Russia is bound by its ratification of the International Labor Organization’s convention prohibiting forced labor.

Mikhail Yemelyanov, a Duma deputy from the A Just Russia party, said that he is confident the proposal will not survive a parliamentary vote. “This initiative cannot be approved because it is meaningless,” Yemelyanov told Interfax on Monday.

Meanwhile, Federation Council member Alexander Ryazantsky offered an alternative to the proposed penalty in comments to Interfax, suggesting that the unemployed should lose their rights to certain social benefits, such as advanced medical coverage and pensions.

source: Moscow Times

P.S. Kommersant reports a bill has been introduced in the State Duma that, if passed, would ban the use of hunger strikes “by way of resolving collective and individual labor disputes.”

You cannot make this stuff up, but they can. Have a gander at yesterday’s post, about the work-to-rule strike in Moscow medical clinics, where recent and current hunger strikes by Ufa health workers are also mentioned.

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

Christmas has come and my pocket is empty.
My novel’s finished, but the publisher’s iffy.
The Koran has made the calendar itchy.
There’s no one to visit, no one to worry.
Not my pal, whose kiddies just bawl.
Not my folks nor the broad down the hall.
Everywhere money’s the end and be all.
I sit on a chair, trembling with fury.

Ah! the poet’s accursed craft.
The telephone is dumb, a diet’s at hand.
I could borrow at the local, but that’s
like borrowing from a dame.
Losing one’s independence is much worse
than losing one’s innocence. I suppose
it’s a vicarious pleasure to dream of a spouse,
to say to oneself, “It’s high time.”

Knowing my status, my betrothed
hasn’t changed hers five years in a row.
Where she is nowadays, I do not know:
The devil himself couldn’t make her spill.
She says, “It’s useless to grieve.
Feelings are what’s important! Agreed?”
And from where she sits, that’s keen.
But she, it seems, is more fond of the swill.

I’m altogether skeptical of kith and kin.
My extra stomach offends the kitchen.
To top it off, my personal opinion
of man’s role in life makes them bristle.
They consider me a bandit
and make a mockery of my diet.
With them I enjoy no credit.
“Cut him a piece of gristle!”

I see my unmarried self in the windowpane.
One simple fact I’ll never explain
is how I’ve survived until Christmas Day,
Nineteen Hundred Sixty-seven A.D.
Twenty-six years of jolts and bumps,
scrounging for money, the judge’s thumps,
learning to play the deaf-mute, to primp
for the Law like a lady.

Around me life flows like molasses.
(I have in mind, of course, the masses.)
Marx is vindicated. But, following Marx’s
theory, long ago I should’ve been slaughtered.
Whose balance this favors is anyone’s guess.
My existence is a philosopher’s mess.
I somersault from this age without a net.
Please forgive me my hauteur.

Meaning, there’s every reason to rest assured.
The cry “Mount your horses!” is no longer heard.
The nobles have been squashed to the last earl.
Pugachev and Stepan Razin are long gone, honey.
The palace is taken, if you believe the rumors.
Dzhugashvili lies, a pickled cucumber.
On the forecastle all the cannons slumber.
The only thing on my mind is money.

Money is hiding in safes and in banks,
in stockings, in ceilings, in toilet bowl tanks,
in fireproof tins, in money order blanks.
Nature is drowning in money’s mere!
Packs of the newest notes make a commotion
like the distant crowns of birches, acacias.
I’m overwhelmed by hallucinations.
Give me some air!

Night. The rustle of falling snow.
A shovel gently scrapes the pavement below.
In the window opposite, an icon lamp glows.
I loll on the sofa’s steel springs.
I see only the icon lamp. But the icon is
out of sight. I draw closer to the balcony.
The snow covers the roof with a blanket,
and the houses stand like someone else’s.

[…]

source

Open Left: Moscow Doctors Talk about Their Work-to-Rule Strike

“Two of us covered eight precincts for a week”: Moscow doctors talk about the work-to-rule strike
Alexander Grigoriev
April 22, 2015
Open Left presents a unique set of interviews with the doctors involved in the first protest in the Moscow medical care system since 1993
openleft.ru

Medical workers in Moscow have been on a work-to-rule strike since March 24. The work action has been sparsely supported: around twenty people in seven of the city’s medical centers have been involved. They oppose the downsizing of staff, regular unpaid overtime, and workplace management that is detrimental to standards of good medical care.

The current work-to-rule strike is the first in Moscow since 1993, when ambulance staff protested. Although it cannot be said that there had been no problems in the Moscow and Russian healthcare systems all this time, the situation has deteriorated markedly in recent years, and this is due primarily to ongoing reforms by the government.

Since Soviet times, clinics and hospitals have been funded by the state. This meant that all costs for medical care were covered. In addition, since the 1990s, compulsory health insurance (OMS) funds have been operation in Russia. They are financed by contributions from employers. Currently, the size of each contribution is 5.1 percent of a person’s salary, with the maximum salary capped at 624,000 rubles a year. Higher salaries thus contribute the same amount of money to the OMS funds as salaries of 624,000 rubles. The idea is that the OMS funds allocate money to cover costs incurred by medical facilities in providing care to patients. However, rates for services have been set disproportionately low. For example, a chest X-ray is estimated to cost 275 rubles whereas the real cost is around one thousand rubles. Costs have not been covered by OMS funds, so the entire system has continued to be financed by the state.

2010 saw the passage of the basic law governing compulsory health insurance. The idea was that the money from the funds would “follow” the patient, and medical care facilities would be financed from OMS funds every time they provided care to patients. At the same time, rates for services were not changed, so clinics continued to cover the shortfalls that arose with money from the state budget.

When Putin signed the so-called May decrees on May 7, 2012, it became clear that major changes were coming to the existing system. According to one of the decrees, by 2018, salaries of doctors had to be increased to a level twice the amount of the average salary in each region, but there was no question of correspondingly sharp increases in budgetary allocations. On the contrary, spending on health care has been falling with each passing year. In 2014, the economic crisis further exacerbated the shortage of funds.

The Moscow city government continued to finance municipal medical facilities under the old scheme for quite a long time, but gradually reduced its budgetary allocations. Beginning in late 2013, Moscow authorities researched the municipal health care system in order to identify possible options for redistributing costs. Several options were suggested: casualizing some employees, combining several positions into one and thus preserving the old system of positions and salaries, and increasing the specialization of hospitals.

Queue at a Moscow clinic

Officials settled on the option of reducing the number of facilities in two stages: merging facilities and turning some clinics and hospitals into affiliates of other clinics and hospitals, and subsequently eliminating some of them altogether. Conversion of a clinic or hospital to an affiliate implied the dismissal of specialists who were already officially on staff at the main facility or other affiliates. It was announced that a total of twenty-eight facilities would be closed, including fifteen hospitals.

All this took place amidst protests in the regions, where the situation has been even worse. For example, in 2014, ambulance staff in Ufa twice went on hunger strike. Their demands were generally similar to those being made now by the work-to-rule strikers in Moscow: increased staffing and additional pay for additional shifts. The government of Bashkortostan has repeatedly claimed that it fulfilled all the protesters’ demands, but in March of this year, the hunger strike in Ufa kicked off again and has continued for over a month.

In November and December 2014, there was a series of rallies against healthcare reform in its current form, staff downsizing, and hospital closures. According to organizers, up to ten thousand people attended the largest of these rallies in Moscow. Not only health professionals came to the rallies but also members of various political and grassroots organizations. However, the Moscow authorities chose not to enter into negotiations, claiming it was not medical workers who organized the rallies but outside forces. The demands of the protesters were not met.

The healthcare workers union Action (Deistvie), which originally formed in Izhevsk but is now a nationwide organization with three and a half thousand members in twenty regions, was actively involved in organizing the rallies. It is Action that has now organized the work-to-rule strike by doctors in Moscow.

Open Left has tried to get to the bottom of the situation by speaking with the principal figures in the strike.

Andrei Konoval

Andrei Konoval is managing secretary of the trade union Action. Under his leadership, the organization has carried out a number of protest actions. Konoval talked to Open Left about the reasons Moscow doctors went on strike, why this form of strike was chosen, and the goals the protesters are pursuing.

Andrei, what is the state of the trade union Action at the moment?

The trade union has around forty-five locals in twenty-five localities, cities, and regional centers, about three and a half thousand members in total.

Let’s move on to the work-to-rule strike. What caused you to declare it, and why was this form of protest chosen?

Because other ways of highlighting the systemic contradictions in the management of outpatient clinics would have been ineffective. We had to attract public attention. So we chose a form of protest with a flashy name—an “Italian strike” [the usual name for work-to-rule strikes in Russian]. Although the gist of it is simply that, on the spur of the moment, physicians start working in strict accordance with the Labor Code and the standards of medical care.

What are the reasons for the strike?

The reason is that now a medical clinic employee’s actual workday is ten to twelve hours long, sometimes even longer. This overtime is not taken into account and not remunerated properly, as per the Labor Code. Doctors are put into circumstances where they have to speed up the time spent examining patients, which objectively cannot help but affect the quality of care. Less than ten minutes are allotted for receiving and examining patients, which increases the risk of medical error and reduces the quality of work. Under these circumstances, people who work in health care facilities are deprived not only of the possibility of spending time with their families, raising their children, and relaxing after the workday but also of feeling that what they do is important and useful, because when the pace of work is such that is, their ability to perform their professional duties is discredited. Real professionals with a sense of duty cannot put up with this situation and they are opposed to it. So now we are trying to show that the Moscow healthcare system is totally underfunded, there is a real shortage of doctors, and something urgently needs to be changed.

Do you agree with the argument that the strike has failed?

The authorities are no longer saying this. They are silent on this score. This was said during the first week: it was just a PR attack. As we stated from the very beginning, at the press conference, we have around twenty strikers in six medical centers (seven, even). Others had wanted to join the strike, but they abandoned the idea under pressure. This is normal; there is nothing new here. Taking on the system is something that only people with a certain stamina and courage, and who are also well versed in the legal aspects of the issue, can do.

I want to emphasize that the strike’s success depends less on the numbers and more on the fact that we have provided an example of working the right way. Even if only one person in Moscow said that he or she were ready to undertake a work-to-rule strike—and survived the pressure—even then we would consider the protest a success.

But have you managed to achieve anything by striking?

Yes, at specific institutions. On the eve of the protest and especially in the early days, first they promised and then later they really began making changes to the work schedule in keeping with our wishes: to reduce the intake time, increase the time for house calls to patients, and change the standard exam time for a single patient from ten to twelve minutes, for example. Several strikers set individual appointment schedules in keeping with federal requirements and the real time demands for working with each patient. At Diagnostic Center No. 5, they managed to get the head doctor, who was planning to sack five hundred people, fired. And there are the little things, like the provision of stationery supplies, which previously one doctor had to buy at her own expense. In some clinics, they have stopped putting unpaid Sunday shifts on the schedule. Certain processes have been set in motion, but this is only at the local level, while our objective is to bring about changes to the way the medical system is managed. Our main achievement is that we have attracted the attention of the public and certain authorities to the problem.

Are you going to strike in other regions?

Our trade union operates from the grassroots, not from the top down. If our locals are ready to pose this question, then the central leadership supports them. A strike like this took place in April 2013 in Izhevsk and ended successfully: ninety percent of our demands were met. The know-how we are now amassing in Moscow will be summarized and used in teaching materials. In fact, it does not necessarily have to be used in a work-to-rule strike, because, strictly speaking, what is happening now in Moscow is not a strike at all. The goal of the work action is not to cause economic harm to the employer and, much less, to the patients. On the contrary, when our strikers see them, patients receive objectively better medical care. So we might not call it a work-to-rule strike, but simply introduce this know-how as a recommendation for protecting the rights of medical workers, resorting to the term “strike” only when we need to draw the public’s attention.

How do you see the future of the trade union Action?

Unions have to be massive. This allows them to have a serious impact on social and labor relations with employers. This is not an easy task, but there is no other way.

Open Left also contacted the strikers themselves and asked them about the reasons, goals, and outcomes of the protest.

Yekaterina Chatskaya

Yekaterina Chatskaya is an OG/GYN at Branch Clinic No. 4 of City Clinic No. 180. She had struggled on her own to improve her working conditions, but had failed to change anything. After her little son tearfully begged her not to go to work, because he never saw her at home, she realized it was time for decisive action.

Tell us about the conditions in which doctors are now forced to work in the clinics.

Our situation is like this. Our workload had already been quite large. I work in Mitino, a young, growing district, at a women’s health clinic. We have a lot of pregnant women and, accordingly, women who have given birth, and female cancer patients.

We had always had a shortage of doctors, and yet management periodically took on new doctors, and the staff gradually expanded. This, of course, provided some relief. But when this optimization kicked in, the number of doctors at our clinic was dramatically reduced, and the service precincts were disbanded, but no one really counted how many women there were in the service precinct. The residential buildings were simply divvied up (it is not clear on what basis) and the patient load, of course, has increased significantly.

Even before this, UMIAS2 (Unified Medical Information Analysis System 2) had been installed. This was in 2013. By order of the Ministry of Health, an initial consultation with a pregnant woman should last thirty minutes, and a follow-up visit, twenty minutes, but UMIAS set the new time it should take to see one patient—fifteen minutes. That is, they deliberately reduced the time we have to see patients and made it impossible to really help a woman during this time. However, the numbers of high-tech care techniques, such as in vitro fertilization, grows, and so I end up in a situation where a woman comes to see me and, say, she has been infertile for many years or has suffered many miscarriages (some women have ten miscarriages, twelve miscarriages), and now she has finally become pregnant, as she wanted. How can I consult her in fifteen minutes? It turns out that doctors should just engage in a sham, roughly speaking. It is all just for show, for ticking off a box on a form: the patient came in, showed her face, and left. Everything else is outside the time limit. Or the second option is that the doctor does real clinical work, the whole appointment grid shifts, and the doctor does not have time to do anything during the time allotted for seeing other patients, and she starts seeing the remaining patients on her own time.

I cannot deal with a woman like this in only fifteen minutes. In the end, my working day lasts ten to twelve hours, sometimes even longer. Because I have to do paperwork for all the patients I see, and there are also a lot of reports, whose numbers grow constantly. And it turned out that no one had been taking this time into account, it was of no interest to anyone, and basically everyone got paid the standard salary.

The situation was already critical, and I had repeatedly appealed to management to clear up and resolve this situation somehow. They told me that we had to try and make do somehow, everything had been decided, they were powerless to do anything, and we had to meet the norms. Then we were set a norm of twelve minutes per person, which was even shorter, and were told there would also be layoffs. The time for seeing patients was increased, that is, the number of people we had to see increased. However, this standard is not written down anywhere: it is all a matter of verbal instructions.

So things have deteriorated even further since the reforms to the healthcare system began?

The situation has deteriorated dramatically.

I see. And you got no response at all from management?

Absolutely none. They tried to smother “in house” all our attempts to change anything so they would not go any further. I myself personally repeatedly offered to management to write about this to the higher authorities. I even drew up a document, but I got no support from management.

What was your point of no return? What finally convinced you of the need to protest?

For me personally, as a mother, it was when I would go to work in the morning, and my son would still be asleep, and when I would come home from work, he would already be asleep again. I simply did not see him. At some point, he woke up when I was heading off to work yet again. He grabbed my arm and started crying, “Mom, don’t go!” I just realized that was it, I had to change something. When I got home that day, he was already asleep, naturally, and I was very tired. I had had a very rough day. I came home and sat down. I was crying my eyes out. I simply did not know what to do. I plucked up my courage and wrote it all down. I described the whole situation, as it had come to be at our clinic, and sent it to the labor inspectorate. So far, there has been no response, though it has been almost two months.

In the end, I waited a couple of weeks, and then I realized that the matter would remain there, it would go no further. I started looking for like-minded people, because fighting alone, of course, is quite difficult. And so I found colleagues who also wanted to change something. I met with them and talked, and we came up with the idea of a work-to-rule strike.

Why do you think this strike has not yet evoked such a response within the medical community? Why have other doctors decided not to join you?

It’s all a mess. Doctors probably have a well-developed sense of passivity. Very many of my colleagues support me; I would say that almost all of them do. And no one has ever told me that I was wrong. On the contrary, everyone says more power to you, they are on my side, but very many of them are afraid of taking active steps. In our clinic, however, several colleagues have supported me; I am not the only one involved in this. And yet many people fear activism. We have a lot of retirees who just want to make it to retirement. We have a lot of people who have sized up this whole situation and begun to seek work elsewhere. They are planning to leave. When they leave, it is unclear what will happen.

At our clinic, for example, an ultrasound doctor was laid off. The load on the other doctors dramatically increased, and one doctor left: she could not stand the stress. We were left with one doctor who could do ultrasound tests on pregnant women in a huge district. In my opinion, it is simply absurd that, in the twenty-first century, a pregnant patient of mine should wait two or three weeks for an ultrasound. And it turns out that either I should “gently” hint that it would be nice if she paid to have it done (because it is urgent) or she has to wait, and I worry we will let something slip.

Twenty-four appointments for a pelvic ultrasound were issued for next week at our clinic. Only twenty-four appointments for an ultrasound and gynecology exam! This is an outrage. Ideally, every woman should have an ultrasound at least once a year, and those who have had problems, sometimes once a quarter, sometimes once a month. But we have no such possibility.

I have another question for you. These are not just your problems, after all, but the problems of your patients, of the populace. Does management not react to this in any way, either?

Absolutely not. We have instructions from the health department to increase the availability of appointments. Not the availability of health care, but the availability of appointments. In our clinic, it turns out that the overall time each doctor should receive patients has increased, while the time each patient can be seen has decreased. In addition, all repeat appointments have been abolished at our clinic, meaning that as a doctor I cannot make an appointment for someone to see me again; the woman has to make the appointment herself. But the earliest appointment is generally within two weeks. For example, a woman has come to see me to get a signed sick leave form. I give her five days of sick leave, but I cannot take her off sick leave in five days, because I have no room on my schedule. And I am forced to see her on a first-come-first-served basis, as it were, over and above my scheduled appointments.

In order to further increase the availability of appointments, so that they light up in green on the computer monitor at the health department, they do another really interesting thing. Registrars are given verbal instructions to randomly cancel three or four appointments for receiving physicians. While we are given orders, again verbally, to see both those patients who had appointments and those who had to get new appointments.

This increases your workload even more?

Of course. We are also required to see emergency patients, but that is not even up for debate. Rendering emergency aid is a doctor’s direct duty, and if a woman comes in with pain or bleeding, she has to be seen, too. The patient load is truly enormous.

Our service precincts had not been calculated, and when we began our protest, they finally counted the number of people attached to our clinic. By order of the Ministry of Health, the gynecological norm is 2,200 women per doctor. But after the calculations were done in Moscow, it turned out that there were service precincts with 2,900 women per doctor, and precincts with 7,000 women per doctor. So they just divided all the service precincts in half, and now we all have 5,500 women per doctor in each precinct. But each doctor gets only the standard salary.

And the last question. How do you see the future of your movement and the trade union Action in general?

Our trade union is gaining momentum. More and more people are joining it, because they see the real outcomes of our fight. I think the scenario looks positive.

As for our protest, I am still hoping for dialogue with the authorities. We have already had one meeting at the Ministry of Health’s Public Chamber. They took the proposals that we drew up for them, in which all the problems had been laid out. They took all this and promised to get in touch with us. So far, however, they have been silent, but they promised they would call, so we are waiting.

So there have been no breakthroughs so far?

Sundays had also been made working days at our clinic, though officially we have a five-day workweek. This was done without additional agreements or even oral instructions. They would just make appointments for a doctor on Sundays, and that was that. It was assumed the doctor was obliged to go in to work that day. After my written request to management (I asked them to clarify on what basis appointments had been made for me), such shifts were abolished at our clinic and declared illegal. This is one of our victories

Elena Konte

During the course of a week, Elena Konte had to cover eight service precincts along with another doctor, after which she decided to start fighting for her rights. So far, Konte has seen no major positive changes, but she remains optimistic.

Could you tell us about the conditions in which doctors are now working in the clinics.

Well, there is a lack of personnel. In our department, four doctors are covering eight service precincts.

This was a major problem for you?

Yes, and the instability of wages. A lot depends in this instance on incentive payments, but now they are here, then they are gone, and it is unclear what percentage of extra pay they will give you, and so on.

What impact have the recent reforms had on the situation?

The most direct impact.

It was right after them that the firings began?

Yes. Our GPs were not dismissed, but our specialists were. The physiotherapist, the opticians, and some others were dismissed. Lab technicians.

I see. And how did management behave?

You mean—

The clinic’s management. You probably complained to them about the shortage of specialists. Did they react somehow?

Of course. But these were not written complaints. They were oral complaints at the general clinical conference that is held once a week. They said the same thing in response to all our recommendations: it was a done deal, no one is going to change anything, so that is why we switched to this scheme of working, work as you like, but be patient and keep working, because nothing is going to change, everything was decided long ago. It is standard practice.

I see. But when exactly was your point of no return, the point at which you decided you needed to go on a work-to-rule strike?

Ha! It was after another doctor and I covered eight care precincts alone for a week!

Why do you think many doctors are hesitant to join your movement?

I think it is this “great Russian patience,” passivity.

Last question. How do you see the future of the trade union Action and the strike itself?

That is a great question. I think the trade union Action has a bright future. More and more people are beginning to understand that it is a trade union that is worth joining and that can really solve our problems. For example, many of our doctors are now quitting the state-sponsored trade union.

As for the work-to-rule strike, to be honest, I have the sense that for now we are looking at an indefinite action, because it still has not solved anything at all.

Anna Zemlyanukhina

Anna Zemlyanukhina is one of the strike’s coordinators. She presented a broader picture of what is happening now at the leadership level. She made the decision to strike after facing the total incomprehension of her clinic’s management. She is confident in the trade union’s successful future.

Could you say a few words about the conditions in which doctors work today.

The main difficulty is that there are not enough doctors. They are laying off not so much pediatricians as narrow specialists. So the flow of patients to the remaining doctors is quite large, and often it is a problem getting an appointment to see a particular doctor.

In addition, the Moscow City Health Department has announced a campaign for improving access to healthcare, but given the shortage of doctors this is implemented by lengthening a doctor’s workday and reducing the time an individual patient can be seen. But since it is impossible to examine a patient humanely in that amount of time, we have to go beyond the time limits, and in fact the physician’s workday is increased.

How have the recent reforms in the health sector affected this situation?

Frankly, until January of this year, things were more or less normal. Of course, they were hard, but they have gotten worse. Most importantly, the reforms have led to the closure of inpatient facilities, and now it is much harder for a patient to be admitted to an inpatient facility. There are verbal orders from above not to admit patients to hospital, and when a doctor refers a person to an inpatient facility, the ambulance service refuses to hospitalize him or her. A patient might be refused admission three or four times. Patients are admitted only when they are already quite ill.

What role is played in all this by clinic management? What is their stance?

They are subject to their superiors, who send them their orders.

Meaning that they do not try and meet you halfway?

It depends a lot on the individual. Some try. Typically, the lower-level bosses—the department heads—are mostly competent people, and try and meet you halfway, but at the higher levels… No, there are competent people there, too, but they are hamstrung. They get these orders from the top brass and are forced to follow them.

What was your point of no return, when you realized that protest was the only solution?

My point of no return was the increase in mortality rates among patients. And the top brass’s reaction to our protests. At a meeting with them, we raised all these questions—that it was impossible to see a patient in that amount time, that it was impossible to do our work—and the response was the same: “The decision has been made.” People are trying to get across that this is wrong, and they are told it was decided at the top and nothing can be done about it.

That is clear. Why, in your opinion, has your movement not yet engendered a broad response among other doctors? Why have they not joined?

In fact, some have decided to join. Why is this not happening en masse? Because our system “works” well. In many institutions, as soon as doctors show the desire to join up, the top brass immediately gets involved. They coerce them. They promise to get them put in jail, I don’t know, or fired or something else. And god forbid there should be any leafleting. After that, as a rule, the desire to join up diminishes.

And the last question. How do you see the future of your trade union and your protest action?

I see the future of the union as something quite positive. Many doctors are now exiting the official trade union as they no longer trust it, while our organization is gaining in popularity.

Have there been any concessions on the part of the authorities and top management?

For now, the main and only concession is that they have increased the time for seeing each patient. It is fifteen minutes again. Previously, it had been twelve minutes, and they were thinking about reducing it even more.

Maria Gubareva

The last person with whom we were able to speak was Maria Gubareva. Before the strike, she had had to see thirty-six patients in seven hours or so, which is quite a lot for a gynecologist. She tried to appeal to the Ministry of Health, but received no reply. In her opinion, the protesters have managed to achieve some success, but they have not yet achieved any major changes in the healthcare system.

Could you tell us about the conditions in which doctors are forced to work today in clinics.

Specifically, in our clinic, the length of time we see patients and the number of patients we see during this time have increased. In other words, the grid interval in UMIAS has been reduced. In particular, after all these changes, the daily intake for gynecologists (I am a gynecologist) is seven hours and twelve minutes, and thirty-six patients. This exceeds all conceivable norms. It is physically impossible, agonizing both for patients and doctors. Plus, it is impossible to refer patients for tests (at our clinic, these are usually ultrasounds, blood tests, and such) because some ultrasound doctors have also been sacked, the workload has increased, and when it went critical, they started quitting, because it is also impossible to work in this way. Well, as for tests, you have to sign up for a blood test ten days in advance. Many other tests are just not done at all anymore, quotas on blood clotting test were introduced, and so on.

In addition, some of our midwives were fired. (We work with midwives, not with nurses.) The doctors work alone: there are one or two midwives for several doctors. The midwife is planted in a separate room and “services” patients there. In other words, the women first go see the doctor. He or she makes recommendations. Then the women sit in the queue to the midwife for another hour or two, go berserk, and go ballistic on each other and the midwives. The midwives are supposed to assign them tests and write out prescriptions, make appointments for them to see specialists through UMIAS, and so on. Basically, it is torture for everybody, for doctors and patients.

All these changes occurred as part of the reforms to the healthcare system? The reforms have had such an impact on the situation?

Yes, the changes have been very serious.

And how does clinic management act given the shortage of specialists and the increased load on doctors? Have you appealed to the authorities about this?

Before the start of the work-to-rule strike, we tried, but no one listened to us. When it was first announced, three months ago, that the workload would increase, I personally asked the deputy chief physician, “How is this possible? It is a violation of labor laws and basically just cannot be done.” To which I was told, “Anyone who does not like it can quit. The country is in a crisis: everyone has to tighten their belts.” It is like. “Everyone off to work. Work, while the sun is still high!”

I see. And what exactly made your cup of patience run over and forced you to go on strike?

It was when I was seeing patients in this crazy way for a week. Even before all the layoffs. I had written about all of it to the Ministry of Health and the labor inspectorate, but had gotten no replies from them. Then a week passed, the week when we had this crazy intake, and it became clear that working this way was just impossible. Either I had to do something or I had to leave.

Why have others not dared to follow your example? Why has the strike not taken on a broader scope?

Because people do not believe you can change anything in this country. The general opinion is that fighting the system is useless. Because the changes are implemented from the top down, they are government policy, Ministry of Health policy, everyone thinks the system cannot be moved. It will just crush its tiny functionaries—that is, those of us who do not agree with it. Plus, those who at first had almost decided to go on strike with me (they, as I have said, were in a really difficult situation) immediately came under pressure with the aim of putting the whole thing to a stop. Management acted against us with all possible means, mainly verbal. They accused us of sabotage and treason. They told us that the state had given us a job, and now we had gone against the state. And so on. Many people simply abandoned the idea. They decided to spare themselves the trouble.

How do you see the future of the union and the work-to-rule strike?

I haven’t especially thought about the future of the union. I guess if its membership grows, it will gain strength and might be able to start solving some of our workplace management issues, to do what a trade union is supposed to do: protect the legal rights of its members.

As for the strike, I cannot give you a clear answer, because the statement by the authorities that the strike failed is ambiguous. When viewed from the perspective of the twenty people who have taken part in the strike, all of our demands have been satisfied, because they were legitimate. It turned out that management has had nothing to counter us with: everything had been done strictly according to the law, in keeping with all the norms. And we have observed all the requirements, so now I see a humane number of patients, I have a humane amount of time to see them. Basically, everything is as it should be.

But this does not solve the overarching problem of healthcare, which would have happened had a significant number of people joined the strike. In our department now, where I am the only one on strike, the patients who do not get in to see me are simply fobbed off onto the other doctors. So they are seeing their own patients and that other guy’s patients, and that other guy is me. But if we had all said we would see patients as they should be seen, then half the patients would have been unable to make an appointment to see a doctor. They would have attacked the head physician and the health department, and ultimately management would have had to hire staff, which, in fact, would have solved the problem.

Alexander Grigoriev is a student in the history faculty at Moscow State University.

Publication of this article was made possible with the support of Open Left’s readers. Please help us to develop and publish more detailed reports on social activism and the struggle of workers for their rights.

Photos courtesy of Open Left. Translated by The Russian Reader

Russian Popular Opinion

Lime resists. Do you?

Yakunin is robbing Russian Railways

Photographed in south central Petrograd by The Russian Reader on April 25, 2015

Neoconstructivism

Time is ruthless toward our notions of what is good and what is bad in architectural style, so the district and, indeed, the entire city are rapidly changing in keeping with the culture of their own time. You walk down certain streets on the Petersburg Side and among the “living” buildings, old albeit in need of repair, are the corpses of young houses. The finish is still fresh, and even the windows with the expensive coating are not dusty yet and glisten in the sun like a mirror, but the building is dead and there is nothing you can do to revive it.

Apparently, the deindustrialization of the district, whose consequences have been that industrial enterprises have been moved out to the suburbs or completely eliminated, has thus not yet been to the Petersburg Side’s benefit. However, the people who think this are those old enough to have seen a different Petersburg Side. It is possible and, perhaps, even likely that their descendants will think otherwise.

Sergei Petrov, On the Banks of the River Zhdanovka (Moscow & St. Petersburg, 2012), pp. 9–10

On [sic] Petrovsky Island Residential Complex, Petrovsky Prospect, 14, Saint Petersburg. Studio 44 Architects, 2007

“The project’s architects call its style ‘neoconstructivism.’”

Photos by the Russian Reader

Victoria Lomasko: The BORN Trial

for_prigovor — Defendants Isayev, Baklagin, Volkov, and Tikhomirov

BORN: A Graphic Reportage by Victoria Lomasko
How the most brutal nationalist gang in Russia was tried
Apri1 21, 2015
Meduza

On Tuesday, April 21, the Moscow Regional Court will render its verdict in the trial of the Combat Organization of Russian Nationalists (BORN), one of the most violent nationalist gangs in Russia. They have a series of murders of immigrants and antifascists to their credit, as well as numerous attempted murders. In addition, BORN members murdered a federal judge, Eduard Chuvashov. A jury tried the members of the gang. In their verdict, the jury acquitted one of the defendants, Yuri Tikhomirov (who continues to serve a sentence, handed down earlier, for involvement in the murder of antifascist Ilya Dzhaparidze). The three other defendants—Mikhail Volkov, Vyacheslav Isayev, and Maxim Baklagin—were declared wholly or partially guilty, but deserving of leniency for most of the counts of the indictment. However, prosecutors have requested life sentences for Baklagin and Isayev, and twenty-five years in a maximum-security facility for Volkov. The final decision is now up to the judge.

Throughout the trial, artist Victoria Lomasko worked in the courtroom. Meduza presents her graphic reportage on the BORN trial. Meduza special correspondent Andrei Kozenko, who also followed the trial, has annotated the drawings.

01_10 dec — Isayev, Baklagin, Volkov, and Tikhomirov. December 10, 2014

Photography was strictly forbidden at the trial. It was Tikhomirov who petitioned the court to ban photography; he was the only of the four who completely denied involvement in the gang. The other defendants supported his claim. They said that Tikhomirov was “slow on the uptake,” and was of no use at all in serious matters, such as planning murders.

02_10 dec — Judge Alexander Kozlov. December 10, 2014

Moscow Regional Court Judge Alexander Kozlov presided over the trial. Overall, he was exceptionally tactful and pointedly polite.

“I understand nationalism and all that, but why did you have to kill?” he asked at one point.

Only one thing was forbidden in Kozlov’s courtroom: mentioning that the criminal case had obvious political overtones, that the ultra-rightists had been communicating with people from the presidential administration through a series of intermediaries, and that BORN itself was a project that could not have been conceived without their involvement. Kozlov ruthlessly barred all attempts to discuss this.

03_10 dec — Baklagin: “I came to the conclusion that the state weasels out when immigrants commit crimes.” December 10, 2014

Baklagin is a lawyer by training. He honestly testified that one of the murders was committed on a particular day, because on other days he had to be in court early in the morning. Baklagin was charged with six counts of murder, accessory to murder, and attempted murder. He said that he committed the crimes to restore the justice that was absent in the Russian state.

04_22 dec — Volkov: “I regarded my actions as self-defense in the broadest sense, as an attempt to put the thugs tormenting my people in their place.” December 22, 2014

Mikhail Volkov is a veteran football hooligan and member of the skinhead gang OB-88. He did hard time for a nationalist pogrom at the Tsaritsyno Market in 2002. Several times he was forced to explain he got neo-Nazi tattoos when he was “young and stupid,” but had later changed his views. Volkov was charged with one murder committed on his own and another murder committed with an accomplice. He himself said that his motives were about the same as those of Robin Hood.

05_22 dec — Goryachev: “I have never seen these people before. Until I was arrested I had never heard their names.” December 22, 2014

Ilya Goryachev’s testimony was billed as one of the key episodes in the whole trial, but it did not turn out that way. Educated as a historian, nationalist and spin-doctor Goryachev is regarded by investigators as the organizer of BORN. His case is being tried separately; it has only just been sent to trial. He served as a witness at the main BORN trial. He was expected to name the names of people close to the Kremlin who had in some way been involved in the Combat Organization of Russian Nationalists. But Goryachev denied everything. He allegedly did not even know any of the defendants.

06_12 jan — Tikhomirov: “I do not consider myself guilty, and was not a member of BORN. FSB officers cajoled Isayev and Baklagin into testifying against me.” January 12, 2015

The testimony of the defendants was riddled with inconsistencies. Judge Kozlov occasionally accused them of trying to shield themselves and evade responsibility. One of their main arguments was that BORN did not exist. Volkov, in particular, insisted he had heard the acronym only after he had committed the crimes.

07_12 jan — Tikhomirov and his lawyer. January 12, 2015

Yuri Tikhomirov sat quietly and spoke the least of all. He had never heard of any such gang, had been involved in only one point of the indictment, and had received a ten-year sentence for that crime before the others had been charged. The jury believed him.

08_12 jan — The court views a video recording. January 12, 2015

A significant part of the evidence against the defendants consisted of photos and video. In particular, thanks to surveillance cameras, prosecutors were able to prove that Volkov had committed one of the murders.

09_11 feb — Prosecutor (addressing jurors): “The BORN members were not in the habit of verifying information. Unverified information served as grounds for murders.” February 11, 2015

Prosecutors repeatedly attacked the ideological aspect of the BORN case. The nationalists did not want Russia to become like France, which was “swamped with immigrants.” However, they themselves had never been to France. And yet they sought information about future victims on ultra-rightist websites and in the media.

10_11 feb — Prosecutor (standing behind BORN’s attorneys): “As you have seen yourselves, the gang had more than enough weapons.” February 11, 2015

The hearing during which the physical evidence—the weapons seized from the gang—was presented was like a trip to a theme park. The BORN members used sawed-off hunting rifles and pistols, manufactured in the early twentieth century. They came by these weapons, apparently, through people who illegally excavate battlegrounds.

11_11 feb — Donara Dzhaparidze, mother of a murdered antifascist (Yuri Tikhomirov is seated to the left): “I can’t go into the apartment: Ilyusha is not there.” February 11, 2015

The mother of antifascist Ilya Dzhaparidze left Moscow for Georgia after her son was murdered. She could not go back to the flat where she lived with her son. Few cursed the defendants as she did. The defendants only looked away.

12_16 feb — Isayev’s attorney: “Baklagin has correctly pointed out that the antifascists are just another gang, but with different ideas. They were involved in a turf war.” February 16, 2015

Another mitigating argument mustered by the defense was that contemporary antifascists are nothing like the ones we saw in Soviet films about World War Two. They are an aggressive subculture with whom the nationalists would fight, including on the streets. It sounded plausible, but still did not answer the question of why it had been necessary to commit murder.

13_16 feb — Volkov (his mother seated in the foreground): “What sort of bandit am I? I have a family, kiddies… I read them to sleep at night.” February 16, 2015

The defendants’ relatives rarely came to the hearings and never together. They sat with the reporters, glancing occasionally at the ultra-rightists as they gave testimony. They flatly refused to talk to the press.

14_16 feb — Baklagin: “When the war in Ukraine began, I immediately applied in writing to join a penal battalion.” February 16, 2015

Baklagin asked to be sent to fight in the Donbas: his blood would atone for what he had done. BORN is closely linked to Ukraine. Volkov had escaped there before being extradited back to Russia. One of the most violent members of BORN, former FSB officer Alexei Korshunov, had escaped to Zaporozhye and died when a grenade he was carrying exploded. Finally, another suspect is still in hiding in Ukraine. According to unconfirmed reports, he is even fighting against the separatists.

16_20 feb — Tikhomirov’s lawyer: “Khasis and Tikhonov called each other ‘bunny rabbit’ and ‘kitty cat.’” February 20, 2015

Nikita Tikhonov and his common-law wife Yevgenia Khasis gave the most detailed testimony against the BORN members, which visibly irritated the latter. Tikhonov is serving a life sentence for the murders of lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova. Khasis is serving eighteen years as an accessory to the murders. On the sidelines, the lawyers did not rule out that Tikhonov was taking responsibility for more than what he had done so that he could stay in a Moscow remand prison—near the crime investigation scene—rather than in the transpolar prison for lifers with its incredibly poor living conditions. Khasis just wants to get out early.

18_30 mar — Judge Kozlov: “If you decide that Isayev, Baklagin or Volkov deserve leniency, the court cannot sentence them to life in prison.” March 30, 2015

It took a very long time to empanel the jury in the BORN trial. Ordinary residents of Moscow Region were not chomping at the bit to serve on the jury. The defendants themselves rejected several candidates for “looking like antifascists.” Nevertheless, a jury was seated and they produced a verdict in the trial. The defendants were found worthy of leniency. But not Baklagin and Isayev, who had shadowed Judge Chuvashov. (The late Korshunov was deeemd to be his killer.) The chance of a life sentence for them persists.

19_31 mar — Jury forewoman: “Has it been proven that Tikhomirov was a member of BORN? No, it has not been proven. Six jurors voted yea; six, nay.” March 31, 2015

Those who followed the trials called the jury’s verdict a little too soft on some counts. But be that as it may, only Tikhomirov was acquitted.

Court juries have this peculiarity: all parties to the trial focus the attention of jurors less on the legal aspects and try more to play on their emotions. No lawyers are empanelled, after all. Both the prosecutors and the defense asked the jury to be fair. It rendered its verdict. The judge will turn the verdict into specific sentences for the BORN trial defendants.

Editor’s Note. I thank Victoria Lomasko and Meduza for their permission to translate this article and reproduce Ms. Lomasko’s reportage here. All illustrations courtesy of and copyright Victoria Lomasko and Meduza. Translated by the Russian Reader

Maxim Kantor: Colorful Ribbons

Maxim Kantor
Colorful Ribbons
April 22, 2015
Facebook

Tell me, what you are proud of?
You didn’t fight, not even your fathers fought.
You basically did nothing at all.
That was seventy years ago, in another country.
And it was completely different people who fought, and they fought for something else.
Ukrainians, Russians, Americans, British, Jews, French, Belarusians, and Tajiks fought shoulder to shoulder then against an empire that wanted to devour the world.

And now you are fighting for an empire against the Ukrainians. You are killing your neighbors.
You want to destroy their country.
And you want a decoration for this?
What do decorations from someone else’s victory have to do with this? What does someone else’s war have to do with it?
You are looters. You are bandits. You are imperialists.
Colorful ribbons are pinned to bandits. You think it looks nice?
Take the ribbons off now, don’t disgrace yourselves.

Maxim Kantor is a well-known Russian painter, writer, and essayist.

Photo by The Russian Reader

Fake Finnish Eggs in Russian Stores

In Finnish, hyvää huomenta means “good morning!” (As this package prompts us—in Russian.)

There’s nothing like fresh Finnish eggs in the morning.

For those of you who have the good fortune not to be able read either Finnish or Russian, these eggs were, in fact, produced by a company called Volzhanin, Ltd., in the village of Yermakovo in the Rybinsk District of Yaroslavl Region. They were not produced in Finland, however hard the top side of the carton tries to convince us otherwise.

In Russian, hyvää huomenta apparently means “screw you!”

The odd thing is that on its website, Volzhanin, Ltd., goes out of its way to boast about its environmentally friendly policies and practices.

Interestingly, you won’t find Hyvää Huomenta eggs on Volzhanin, Ltd.’s list of products.

So this is the kind of three-card monte Volzhanin, Ltd., plays with folks in Petrograd, used to buying food at Finnish chain stores like Prisma, which have set up shop in their city, or making trips across the border and loading up on high-quality Finnish produce before heading back home.

For more on this shady business generally, see Sergey Chernov’s fantastic photo reportage from this past January.

Post-Soviet Cassandras (Berlin)

Post-Soviet Cassandras is an exhibition with artists from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, who all deal critically with the social and political situation in their countries. The show is about analysing the current social reality: about women’s rights and gender roles, about the lack of a political dialogue, about happiness and misfortune within marginalized groups. Despite flagrant abuses, the artists envision ideas for a more inclusive future using the means of art.

Participating artists: Anatoly Belov (Kiev), Gandhi (Saint Petersburg), Shifra Kazhdan (Moscow), Victoria Lomasko (Moscow), Marina Naprushkina (Minsk/Berlin), Nadia Plungian (Moscow)

Curated by: Dorothee Bienert, Victoria Lomasko, Nadia Plungian, Antje Weitzel
A project in cooperation with uqbar e.V.

April 25–July 12, 2015. Opening: 6 p.m., Friday, April 24, 2015

Galerie im Körnerpark
Schierker Str. 8, 12051 Berlin, Germany
galerien@kultur-neukoelln.de
+49 30 56823939
Open Tuesday–Sunday, 10 a.m–8 p.m.
U + S-Bahn: Neukölln und Hermannstraße

Russia vs. Russia: Political Art and Censorship

Victoria Lomasko
April 14, 2015
Facebook

During the last discussion at the Russland vs. Russland. Kulturkonflikte forum, the event’s title finally paid off.

Kristina Leko, an artist and teacher at the Berlin Institute of Art, opened the discussion. The organizers had invited her to comment on the forum and the exhibition of Russian “critical art.”

She wondered how much the objets d’art for Marat Guelman’s Perm project (documented at the forum) had cost, whether the money had come from the city’s budget, and if it had, whether the citizens for whose sake this monumental street art had allegedly been made had agreed with this. Leko noted that she had found it unpleasant to listen to the presentation of the project, during which it was stated that the residents of Perm were “insufficiently educated to understand art.” She also said that after carefully viewing the video documentation for MediaImpact, she could not understand where the audience for this sociopolitical art was. Did Russian “critical” artists even want to communicate with the general public? Leko asked whether it was possible to make “critical art” now without taking Russia’s aggression in Ukraine into account, and whether one could be a “critical artist” while ignoring gender and racial discrimination.

Her talk was suddenly interrupted by artist Alexander Brener, who burst into the circle of panelists and yelled, “All of this is shit! We must talk about what matters most!” Brener was not a forum participant. He had come every day to listen to the speakers and several times had expressed his dissatisfaction, but in much more acceptable form.

Brener had interrupted Leko’s talk and continued to shout about shit, but the panelists interpreted his stunt variously. One group sided with Brener, calling him a great Russian artist. This was a performance, a compliment to the forum’s organizer. The talk had been boring: let Brener have his say, they said. The moderator, sociologist Alexander Bikbov, demanded that Leko be allowed to finish her talk. He was backed up by cultural studies scholar Olga Reznikova, who told Brener that there had been many boring and offensive presentations over the past three days and asked him why he had not felt the urge to shout down a high-profile male who had been talking “shit.” The only Ukrainian participant in the forum, Vasily Cherepanin, director of the Visual Culture Research Center in Kyiv and editor of the Ukrainian edition of the journal Krytyka Polityczna, said he felt sorry for us, since we were accustomed to rudeness and could not tell the difference between it and art. As a manager of an institution, he himself kicks out such “performance artists,” no questions asked.

While this was happening, Leko’s hands were shaking. The German audience was shocked. One of the German participants asked perplexedly, “Why is there no solidarity among Russian artists?”

I am certain that the majority of men in Russia who identify themselves as “leftists” are incapable of uniting with women on an equal footing and dealing with our professional work appropriately, without loutishness. Personally, I have no desire to identify with those “leftists” or liberals who try talking down to me or do the same thing with other women. I had had enough of that at the Feminist Pencil show at MediaImpact.

I said that sexism was one of the causes that prevented people from uniting.

Hearing the word sexism, some of the Russian participants began laughing and making faces. They then pointedly left the room altogether when the topic of gender was picked up by Olga Reznikova, Heinrich Böll Foundation coordinator Nuria Fatykhova, and the German audience.

Vasily Cherepanin raised the next topic. He spoke about the war in Ukraine, stressing it was a war of aggression on Russia’s part. At the same time, many Russian socially and politically engaged artists have preferred to remain apolitical on this matter and not make anti-war statements. One of the Germans asked why the Russians were trying to depoliticize the discussion of sexism and the war in Ukraine. After this question, another third of the Russians dashed from the room, while the artist Brener, who had been sitting quietly in the corner, again broke into the circle of panelists, screaming at Cherepanin, “Fuck off!”

Moderator Alexander Bikbov summarized the discussion by noting that too few “critical” artists had stayed for its final part. As soon as the conversation had turned to the things that mattered most—politics within the art scene and the war in Ukraine—many were not prepared to discuss them.

But then at the farewell dinner, the participants who had left the discussion early continued giggling among themselves about gender and feminism.

____________________

Russia vs. Russia: From Censorship to Self-Censorship
New Russian laws—from a ban on swearing to protections for the feelings of religious believers—have made life difficult for artists. But the main obstacle to freedom of creativity has become self-censorship.
Yekaterina Kryzhanovskaya | Berlin
April 13, 2015
Deutsche Welle

**Victoria Lomasko, Prisoners of May 6, from the Drawing Trials project**

For several years, Victoria Lomasko has been doing socially engaged graphic art, producing graphic reportages from court hearings and political rallies, and drawing the real stories of juvenile prisoners, migrant workers, rural teachers, and Orthodox activists. But the Russian woman can now longer speak openly about what concerns her through her drawings: now her black-and-white “comics” could be subject to the articles of the Russian Federal Criminal Code.

“My work Cannibal State, in support of political prisoners, today could be regarded as insulting state symbols. Liberate Russia from Putin clearly rocks the boat; it’s a call for rebellion, for revolution, and this is ‘extremism.’ A work from the Pussy Riot trial, Free the Prisoners! Shame on the Russian Orthodox Church!, featuring Patriarch Kirill, no doubt insults the feelings of believers,” the artist recounts.

Could she now, as she did earlier, freely post her political posters in social networks or show them at exhibitions?

“Hardly. But just two years ago several of them were even published in magazines,” notes Lomasko.

From censorship…

At the forum Russia vs. Russia: Cultural Conflicts, held April 10–12 in Berlin, Lomasko was not the only one bewildered about the prospects of protest art.

“In Russia nowadays you cannot do anything,” states Artyom Loskutov, an artist and organizer of the annual May Day Monstration marches in Novosibirsk.

In 2014, the Monstrators took to the streets of Novosibirsk holding a banner that read, “Hell is ours.” When the Russian media were excitedly talking about the virtues of federalizing Ukraine, Loskutov and his allies announced they would be holding a March for the Federalization of Siberia.

“If people in Russia hear every day that separatism in Ukraine turns out to be a good thing, that cannot slip through the cracks. We have simply hastened the next stage, when separatism will be seen as good for our country as well,” Loskutov emphasizes.

Russian federal media watchdog Roskomnadzor responded by sending fourteen letters to various media, including Ukrainian publications and even the BBC, demanding that they delete even mentions of this protest.

…to self-censorship

According to many forum participants, however, censorship was not the worst that was happening to them today.

“The worst thing that infiltrates our heads is self-censorship. It is impossible to know about the new laws and not to think about the consequences if you make a work about something that really concerns you,” argues Lomasko.

A congress of ultra-rightist nationalists was held in March in Petersburg, completely legally. And yet the media could not publish photographs of congress participants in clothes featuring swastikas because they would be fined for extremism.

“I really want to speak out on this subject. But if I were to draw something, I could be accused of spreading fascist ideas. And if I put it on the Web, everyone who reposts the picture automatically becomes my accomplice,” explains Lomasko.

Consequently, she said, there have been almost no artworks openly criticizing the annexation of Crimea or the war in Ukraine. Doubts about the legitimacy of Moscow’s actions are now also subject to the Criminal Code. A rare exception is the graffiti piece Broads Will Give Birth to New Ones, in which a pregnant woman holding a Molotov cocktail is depicted with an infant soldier in her belly. But it was produced anonymously by members of the Petersburg group Gandhi.

Monumental propaganda

On the other hand, you can express your joy over the actions of Russian politicians without the sanction of officials. Thus, on the eve of the referendum in Crimea, a monumental graffiti proclaiming “Crimea and Russia: Together Forever” suddenly appeared on the wall of a house in Moscow’s Taganka Square where an officially authorized map of the Tagansky District was supposed have been painted.

“The contractor himself decided that the Crimean agenda was more topical and interesting, and he willfully painted what he did, not the map he had been commissioned to paint,” explains Anna Nistratova, an independent curator, researcher, and artist.

Victoria Lomasko

Later, such monumental propaganda began to appear all over the country, both as commissioned by the authorities, and at the behest of the population, including activist artists, many of whom also believe, according to Lomasko, “Crimea is ours, Donbass is ours, and Ukraine basically doesn’t exist.”

“In matters of propaganda, orders from the top are not obligatory. Our citizens themselves are capable to taking the initiative,” notes Nistratova.

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“Memory” (P = Pamiat’), one of a series of “graffiti” murals produced by the pro-Kremlin youth group Set (“Network”) to celebrate Vladimir Putin’s birthday in October 2014. The five murals, which appeared in different cities, each featured a different letter from the president’s surname; each letter was associated, children’s primer-style, with a different “patriotic” virtue (e.g., such as “memory” of the war). This mural was painted on an apartment block on Petersburg’s Obvodny Canal. Photograph by The Russian Reader

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Lost status

Nistratov points out that there are very few artists involved in political art in Russia. Besides, neither exhibitions nor the very best artworks nor inscriptions on the streets have any effect on society, in her opinion.

“The artist in Russia today is a strange, marginal subject. His status as an intellectual, as a moral exemplar, which existed earlier, has been completely forfeited,” says Nistratova.

Confusion is, perhaps, the feeling that is prevalent throughout the talks given by the participants of the forum Russia vs. Russia: Cultural Conflicts. By and large, the activist artists have no clear strategies for operating under new conditions.

“The only thing that seems to me worthwhile is maintaining one’s own little environment, a bubble inside the shit. Because if this nightmare ever ends, we have to make sure we are not faced with a scorched, absolutely bare field, bereft of political and social art, activism, and civic consciousness,” argues Lomasko.

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This is a real courtyard in my neighborhood, near a playground. Parents stroll around the yard with their children, discussing the news from “fascist” Ukraine.

Do I have the right to draw and show you this landscape featuring a swastika, a landscape that is fairly typical in Russia? During the recent trial of the Combat Organization of Russian Nationalists (BORN), their lawyer argued that the anti-fascists are just another street gang like the fascists. So why not label any denunciation of fascism “propaganda” of fascism itself?

Nationalists freely held an international congress in Petersburg in March. The only people the police arrested were the anti-fascists who protested the congress. Nationalists can walk around sporting neo-fascist symbols, but the authorities will prosecute publications that dare to publish photos of them. Juvenile prisons are filled with skinheads, but nationalist ideas are fomented on television.

Attn: Center “E”. I am opposed to fascism.