“Anti-Americanism”

There are eleven Russian words in this poster for the April 29 St. Petersburg Craft Event at Art Play SPb, and twenty-one English words. Photo by the Russian Reader

Oh, how they hate the United States!

My boon companion was just chatting with a neighbor lady, a woman who has lived in our building her whole life and makes the best salt pickles I have ever tasted.

As it happens, our neighbor is friendly with a member of our municipal district council.

If you follow the news from Russia closely, you would know that the beleaguered united opposition, led by Dmitry Gudkov, made significant inroads in Moscow’s municipal district councils during the last elections to these entities. One of the people thus elected, the young, well-known liberal politician Ilya Yashin, has now announced plans to challenge the incumbent, Sergei Sobyanin, during the next Moscow mayoral election.

In reality, municipal district councils are the lowest rung on the political totem poll in Russia. They have very little power and are perpetually too underfunded to do the work they are supposed to do.

However, since Russia’s ruling party, United Russia, is power hungry and paranoid, they try and stack the lowly municipal district councils with their own members.

God knows what could happen otherwise.

The municipal district council member with whom our neighbor is friendly is one such United Russia Party placeholder.

“And she’s a real louse,” my boon companion would add.

The councilwoman recently got back from a trip to the United States. It turns out her daughter and son-in-law have lived there for a long time. They have a big, beautiful house in Silicon Valley.

The councilwoman told all this to our neighbor lady, explaining how much she had enjoyed the trip and how much she liked the United States.

“Why did she have to tell ME this?” the neighbor lady asked my boon companion, “Why couldn’t she have told someone else?”

Remember this little story the next time you see Foreign Minister Lavrov or President Putin or the Russian Ambassador to the United Nations or Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova huffing and puffing and blowing America’s house down.

Everything they say is meant for domestic consumption only. They don’t really hate the United States. They just need a Big Enemy to occupy the minds of the Russian people, to distract them from their own more serious crimes and misdemeanors.

The con seems to be working so far. // TRR

Our humble municipal district newspaper, as published by our municipal district council. This is the one of two spots in our municipal where I know one can read it. Maybe there are more, but otherwise the newspaper is not distributed to the municipal districts’s residents, because the less they know about our municipal district’s business, the better, I guess. Photo by the Russian Reader

David Burliuk: “The Ugly Face of Happy Blockheads Will Be a Hole”

DSCN5460 2 “Arrangment of the burials and cremations of deceased veterans of the VOV [Great Fatherland War], the MO [Defense Ministry], the FSB [Federal Security Service], the MVD [Interior Ministry], etc. Manufacture of tombstones.” Central District, Petersburg, 15 April 2018. Photo by the Russian Reader

We now regard the word “USSR” as a proud acoustic commonplace, and “US” appears as solid as money to us. The first word emerged after the lab experiments of the Futurists. […] I am not writing a research paper here, but for words like “USSR” the term that describes their emergence is alphabetized words. The alphabetization of words involves compacting, abbreviating, and truncating words, turning them into titlos.

When you look at a book printed in Finnish, you see the pulse of life in the land of lakes is slow, and during the long winter evenings people lazily articulate what they want to say without letting their tongues hasten their breathing.

Without knowing it himself, Kruchonykh produced the first poem based on the principle of initializing words [“Dyr, bull, shchol”].

He occasionally wrote down only the initial sounds of words. The initialization of words is a magnificent principle, now in full use in the USSR.

VIL = Vladimir Ilyich Lenin*

NEP = New Economic Policy.

OPAHWENESP = Our Plains Are Huge, WE NEed SPeed.

“Dyr bul shol [sic]” = dyroi budet urodnoe litso schastlivykh olukhov [“The ugly face of happy blockheads will be a hole”].

* This particular abbreviation, spelled Vil (Виль), was used as a male first name in Soviet times, by analogy with the English “Will.” Vil Lipatov, a semi-famous Soviet writer, was probably the most well-known bearer of the name. Vil Lipatov achieved a modicum of renown for his novel A Village Detective, which was made into a movie. TRR

Source: David Burliuk, Excerpts from a Futurist’s Memoirs, Letters, and Poems (St. Petersburg: Pushkinskii Fond, 1994), pp. 41-42. Thanks to Comrades Stas and Lena for the heads-up. Translated by the Russian Reader

“They Are Not Terrorists! The Terrorists at the FSB Torture People”

30716533_1994906870765445_1419384209113350144_n “They are not terrorists! The terrorists at the FSB torture people.” Photo courtesy of St. Petersburg Anarchist Black Cross (@abc.russia.spb)

Anarchist Black Cross-SPb
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April 15, 2018

Today, April 15, a series of solo pickets took place on Nevsky Prospect in St. Petersburg to protest the frame-up of nine anarchists and antifascists, arrested in Petersburg and Penza, and charged with involvement in a “terrorist community” that the Russian security services have dubbed The Network.

Around fifteen activists took part in the pickets and leafletted passersby. The police showed up only when the picketers were rolling up their placards and heading home. The policemen were very sorry they were unable to write down the internal passport info of the picketers.

Many of the passersby who showed an interest in the pickets were informed about the case and sympathized with the arrestees.

On April 11, 2018, yet another Petersburger, Yuli Boyarshinov, was charged with involvement in the so-called terrorist community. He is currently being held in Remand Prison No. 6, located the village of Gorelovo, Leningrad Region. The prison is notorious as a torture chamber. Boyarshinkov is housed in a barracks with as many as one hundred and fifty other inmates, including murderers, rapists, and robbers.

“He has not been tasered, but the conditions in which my client is being held are tantamount to torture,” says his defense attorney, Olga Krivonos.

We demand the authorities close The Network case and release everyone who has been charged in it. We also demand the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officers who tortured the arrested men be brought to justice.

On April 14 and 15, Yekaterina Kosarevskaya and Yana Teplitskaya, members of the Petersburg Public Monitoring Commission, were assaulted by reporters from the pro-regime TV channel NTV, who insolently and intrusively asked the women how often they met with foreign diplomats and why they were aiding terrorists. Today as well, an NTV crew ambushed Vitaly Cherkasov, the defense counsel of Viktor Filinkov, a defendant in the case, outside the lawyer’s home and tried to interview him.

We continue to raise money to pay the defense attorneys for their work and pay for care packages for the arrested men.

Details for Donations
St. Petersburg Anarchist Black Cross Yandex Money Account: 41001160378989
PayPal: abc-msk@riseup.net (Moscow Anarchist Black Cross)

Show solidarity, support the prisoners!

Thanks to George Losev for the heads-up. Translated by the Russian Reader. If you want to learn more about the Penza-Petersburg “terrorism” case, read the extensive coverage on this website and listen to this interview with a member of the Moscow Anarchist Black Cross, recorded in March on The Final Straw Radio Podcast. Thanks to Ed Sutton for the heads-up.