May Day in Petersburg: “Your Torture Won’t Kill Our Ideas”

“Your torture won’t kill our ideas.” Anarchists and antifascists march down Nevsky Prospect in Petersburg on May Day 2018

St. Petersburg Anarchist Black Cross
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May 1, 2018

We, people who espouse anarchist and antifascist views, dedicated May Day this year to our comrades, arrested in The Network case, a frame-up by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). Despite the rain, we made common cause and march in the May Day demo. We carried placards inscribed with quotations from the diaries and testimony of the arrested men in which they talk of the torture to which FSB officers have subjected them.

“Send Yuli home! Stop the bullying in Gorelovo!” Yuli Boyarshinov’s mother at 2018 May Day demo in Petersburg.

It was the most important message to convey during this year’s May Day demo.

Six young men were detained in Penza in autumn 2017. FSB officers had planted weapons and explosives in the cars and homes of some of the men. Then FSB officers tortured the antifascists in the local remand prison. They attached electrodes to various parts of their bodies and sent electrical currents surging through them. They hung them upside down and brutally assaulted them. During the torture sessions, the secret services tried to force the activists to memorize the testimony they wanted the men to give to investigators, a story about how they had established a nonexistent “terrorist community” of which they were, allegedly, members.

In late January 2019, two more antifascists were detained in Petersburg. They were also beaten, tasered, and forced to incriminate themselves.

In April 2018, a third young man in Petersburg was charged with involvement in the same fictitious “terrorist community.”

“Viktor Filinkov, programmer.” || “I screamed, ‘Tell me what to say. I’ll say anything!'” Anarchist and antifascists at 2018 May Day demo in Petersburg

Establishing the truth is the essential goal and only value of law enforcement and the institutions of state power that enforce the law. The language of violence is not the language of truth. Confessions and testimony obtained under torture cannot constitute the truth. They are knowingly false. The worldview offered to us by the investigators in the case of the Penza and Petersburg antifascists is completely unconvincing.

Fascists fight for the past. Antifascists fight for the future.

Free Dmitry Pchelintsev, Ilya Shakursky, Armen Sagynbayev, Vasily Kuksov, Andrei Chernov, Viktor Filinkov, Yuli Boyarshinov, and Igor Shishkin!

The Party of the Dead, LEFT FEM, and the Column of Free Trade Unions also voiced their solidarity with the imprisoned antifascists during the 2018 May Day march in Petersburg.

Translated by the Russian Reader. If you have not been following the Penza-Petersburg “terrorism” case and other cases involving frame-ups, torture, and violent intimidation by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and other branches of the Russian police state, please read and repost the recent articles I have published on these subjects.

• “May Day in Petersburg: ‘Your Torture Won’t Kill Our Ideas,'” 2 May 2018
• “Riot Cops Raid Punk Rock in Barnaul: ‘Freaks, Not Patriots,” 29 April 2018
• “Hug Your Son and We’ll Open Fire,” 27 April 2018
• “Denis Lebedev’s Suicide Note,” 26 April 2018
• “‘Are You a Bitch Yet?’ FSB Makes New Threats to Framed and Tortured Antifascist Viktor Filinkov,” 26 April 2018
• “Suicide Invoice,” 25 April 2018
• “Zoya Svetova: Interview with Petersburg Public Monitoring Commission Members Yana Teplitskaya and Yekaterina Kosarevskaya,” 23 April 2018
• “TV Party Tonight!” 21 April 2018
• “Valery Pshenichny: Tortured, Then Murdered,” 19 April 2018
• “They Are Not Terrorists! The Terrorists at the FSB Torture People,” 16 April 2018
• “FSB and NTV Pressure Mother of Man Accused in ‘Terrorist’ Frame-Up,” 12 April 2018
• “A New Face in Hell: Yuli Boyarshinov,” 12 April 2018
• “Wife of Tortured Antifascist Seeks Asylum in Finland,” 11 April 2018
• “The FSB’s Tall Tales,” 10 April 2018
• “Families of Penza-Petersburg Terrorists Form Committee,” 9 April 2018
• “Extremism Inside Out,” 30 March 2018
• “Search and Intimidate,” 29 March 2018
• “Solidarity? (The Case of the Penza and Petersburg Antifascists),” 24 March 2018
• “Anna Tereshkina: At Viktor Filinkov’s Remand Extension Hearing,” 23 March 2018
• “Ping, Ping, Ping: The Remand Extension Hearing of the Penza ‘Terrorists,’” 20 March 2018
• “Tortured Petersburg Antifascist Viktor Filinkov Transferred to Remand Prison in Leningrad Region,” 17 March 2018
• “Svyatoslav Rechkalov: ‘They Proceeded to Pull Down My Trousers, Threatening to Shock Me in the Groin,’” 15 March 2018
• “They Jump on Anything That Moves, Part 3: The Case of the New Greatness Movement,” 15 March 2018
• “The Horrorshow Continues: Svyatoslav Rechkalov Tortured in Moscow,” 15 March 2018
• “The Rowdies Have to Be Apprehended Legally, So We Can Have a Celebration in the City on March 18, not Bedlam,” 15 March 2018
• “Ilya Kapustin: ‘When the Stamp Thudded in My Passport, It Was Like a Huge Weight Had Been Lifted from My Shoulders,’” 13 March 2018
• “Your Husband Safely Made the Flight to Minsk after We Abducted Him in Petersburg,” 2 March 2018
• “‘FSB Officers Always Get Their Way!’” 28 February 2018
• ‘The Case of the Anarchists: Disappearances, Torture, Frame-Up (11 AM, February 15, 2018, Moscow),” 14 February 2018
• “The Strange Investigation of a Strange Subway Attack,” 12 February 2018
• “Arrested Penza Antifascists Talk about Torture in Remand Prison,” 10 February 2018
• “Solidarity with Persecuted Russian Antifascists and Anarchists in NYC and Minneapolis,” 7 February 2018
• “Ilya Kapustin: ‘They Said They Could Break My Legs and Dump Me in the Woods,’” 31 January 2018
• “The Penza ‘Terrorism’ Case,” 30 January 2018
• “Breaking Bad with the FSB,” 29 January 2018
• “How ‘Stability’ Has Really Been Achieved in Russia,” 29 January 2018