Security forces raid university lecturer’s home over donations
Petersburg police released a video of a search carried out at the home of 58-year-old Igor Zaitsev, a philosophy Ph.D. and lecturer at the European University. He has been charged with “financing extremist activities.”
The grounds for this action were donations totaling 3,500 roubles [approx. 36 euros] to [the late Alexei Navalny’s] Anti-Corruption Foundation. [The foundation, often known by its Russian acronym, FBK] was declared an “extremist organization” and banned by the Russian Federation in 2021. It is now classified as a “terrorist organization.” Zaitsev has been detained pending a remand hearing.
In a video published online, a female investigator, a security officer with his face concealed who handcuffs the lecturer, and at least three men in plain clothes who rummage through his belongings (including an impressive bookshelf) turn up at the Petersburg resident’s flat on Nevsky Prospekt at seven in the morning. Zaitsev admits that he personally supported Navalny. However, Petersburg police edited out the lecturer’s remark that he “considered [Navalny’s] anti-corruption efforts to be a good thing.” This statement appears in another video [see the next item below], which was leaked by the security forces to Baza, a Telegram channel with close ties to the police.
Igor Zaitsev, lecturer at European University, detained in Petersburg over donations to Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK)
⚪ The details. Zaitsev has been charged with “financing terrorism,” according to the Telegram channel Baza. According to the channel, the lecturer is accused of having donated money to the Anti-Corruption Foundation on at least seven occasions between 2021 and 2022. Baza has published a video of Zaitsev’s interrogation. In the recording, Zaitsev states that he donated money to Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption projects.
Neither the security services nor the university has publicly acknowledged Zaitsev’s arrest.
⚪ Who is he? Igor Zaitsev is a Ph.D. in philosophy and an associate professor at the European University in St. Petersburg. He is fifty-eight years old. He specializes in the history of philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and theology.
⚪ Cases against university faculty.Baza reports that in July, the Investigative Committee opened a criminal case concerning [the dissemination] of “fake” war reports against Mikhail Turchenko, a former associate professor at the European University’s political science department. According to Life.ru, the case was prompted by Turchenko’s post about a Russian missile strike that resulted in the deaths of Ukrainians. Turchenko had fled Russia in 2022. Last August, a complaint was filed against Vladimir Gel’man, a former faculty member at the European University, alleging that he had “discredited” the army.
Finland has denied asylum to a Russian man who donated to the late opposition leader Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), with migration authorities ruling that his political activity was not public or extensive enough to have drawn the attention of the Russian authorities.
Valentin Sergienko and his parents were ordered to report to police on 14 August after the Finnish Immigration Service rejected their asylum applications, former St. Petersburg municipal deputy Svetlana Utkina told TV Rain. If the family does not leave the country voluntarily, they could face forced deportation.
The Sergienkos fled Russia in September 2022 after Vladimir Putin’s announcement of mobilisation and initially sought international protection in Germany. Their case was transferred to Finland, where they filed asylum applications in July 2023. The Finnish Immigration Service denied their claims, and an administrative court subsequently rejected their appeal.
Authorities did not dispute that Sergienko had donated to FBK, the human rights group OVD-Info, and other organisations banned in Russia, or that he had taken part in protests. But officials concluded his political activity had not been large-scale or visible enough to put him at risk of persecution by the Russian government.
While the case was pending, Sergienko graduated with honours from Helsinki Business College, completed an internship, and received a job offer, which he was unable to accept as the asylum denial stripped him of his right to work in Finland. His mother is currently undergoing cancer treatment.
According to the independent outlet Mediazona, Russian authorities have opened at least 225 criminal cases over donations to FBK as of April 2026. Courts have handed down 167 convictions, with 24 people sentenced to prison time.
More than 2,300 Russians have applied for asylum in Finland since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but only 604 have received the status, according to politician and former political prisoner Andrey Pivovarov. Even so, the Finnish migration service has acknowledged that convictions in politically motivated cases have tripled in Russia.
Alexander Ivanov, “Gennady Shpalikov: Being Restless” (in Russian, with no subtitles)
Gennady Shpalikov and Guy Debord were nearly the same age, and their popularity peaked at the same time. But is this the only thing that unites the French philosopher and the Russian writer? Alexander Ivanov, founder of the publishing house Ad Marginem, will show that these two figures were connected not only by the time in which they worked but also by the very spirit of the time, which they saw, felt and were able to convey to others.
Debord’s adage “Love is possible only on the eve of a revolution” could well have been endorsed by Shpalikov.
Debord was the founder of Situationism.
An amazing poet, screenwriter, and director, Shpalikov was the Soviet Guy Debord. Like Debord, Shpalikov had an explicitly spatial mind: he understood space not as a receptacle for bodies but as a way of assembling the soul in the gaps, intervals, and flashes of aimless, unprogrammed, slippery movements around the urban environment. Debord called this mode of movement détournement — a deviation, an illegitimate, reverse appropriation in which the spaces and cultural signs captured by other people’s meanings are reappropriated by turning them inside out semantically or simple shifting their meaning. This was exactly how Shpalikov dealt with the anonymous, official space of the Soviet city: by romanticizing its most banal corners and nooks. Both of these artists conjured the mood of an entire epoch in the late 50s and early 60s.
November 1 is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Gennady Shpalikov, the screenwriter, filmmaker, and poet, one of the symbols of the Thaw era, an extremely popular writer and yet one whose work has been poorly read. Igor Gulin explains how Shpalikov looked for an answer to the question of where good people end up, and how the drama of his characters reprised his own.
Gennady Shpalikov on the set of the film I Am Twenty. Photo: Gorky Film Studio
Screenwriting was an honorable profession in the Soviet Union. Screenwriters were not considered to be craftsmen consigned to the sidelines, but serious writers, and so the screenwriter’s name was listed first in the credits, before the director’s. Nevertheless, not even the best of them were stars. Gennady Shpalikov was an exception. From his very first efforts in cinema, his name was a symbol of the new art of the Thaw — first among his fellow filmmakers, then for a relatively wide swath of the intelligentsia. His death in 1974 was a token of the sixties generation’s demise.
The cinematic Thaw was already in full swing by the time Shpalikov joined the profession. Marlen Khutsiev and Felix Mironer’s Spring on Zarechnaya Street(1956), Mikhail Schweitzer’s The Tight Knot (1957), Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying (1957), and Grigory Chukhrai’s The Ballad of a Soldier(1959) had been released, but these beautiful pictures still lacked something that would instill a sense of decisive reform and renewal. Shpalikov carried out a tiny revolution in Soviet cinema — not alone, of course, but he was its leader. He contributed an open sense of form, showing that a movie could be something other than an itinerary from point A to point B. It could be a stroll, a stroll with no clear goals, from one impression to another, from one funny and touching incident to another.
Almost all of Shpalikov’s scripts from the 1960s are just such cinematic walkabouts: A Streetcar to Other Cities (1962), directed by his friend Yuli Fait (1962); The Star on the Buckle (1962) and I’m from Childhood (1966), written for Viktor Turov; I Walk Around Moscow (1963) directed by Georgiy Daneliya; The Wharf and Summer Holiday, which were never made into films; A Long Happy Life (1966), of course; and Ilyich’s Gate (1962–1964) to a great extent. This film was more complicated, however. Khutsiev’s lofty idealism counterbalanced Shpalikov’s nimble gifts, and it was their confrontation and, at times, conflict that gave birth to a masterpiece. This later worked with Larisa Shepitko, when she and Shpalikov agonizingly co-wrote You and I (1971). To produce something truly significant, Shpalikov needed a co-writer-slash-director — a collaborator and an opponent, not a faithful executor of his ideas.
The stroll was the genre not only of Shpalikov’s creative work but also of his life. He existed in the same way, charming everyone he met, traipsing from one crowd to another, from one idea to another. He wrote the same way: on telegram blanks and napkins, not bothering with punctuation and spelling, and often not worrying whether the text was coherent, paying mind to its intonation and pacing, rather than to the idea and the logic of form. His scripts and songs, poems and prose experiments often seem sloppy to a sober eye. But their sloppiness never irritates: it comes across as organic, as a hallmark of authenticity.
Dozens of memoirs have been written about Shpalikov. Their authors constantly wonder aloud how it happened that this carefree, lively man took to drinking heavily and eventually committed suicide. They often blame the era. There is some truth to this, but it is a little different than is commonly thought. The Stagnation was not only a time of disillusionment after the upswing of the Thaw. It was also a time of complication. The members of the Sixties generation who continued to create and grow learned to resist better. It required them to mobilize their inner strength, making them more reflective and deeper. Shpalikov was a genius of splendid superficiality, of drifting and gliding. He understood this perfectly well. The drama of his art kicked off long before the frosts of the Brezhnev era set in.
The same disturbing intuition — sometimes well concealed, sometimes voiced as directly as possible — was evident in everything Shpalikov wrote. Surprisingly, this anxiety was hardly detected by his contemporaries, who remained under the hypnosis of the myth they had created themselves. It concerns the central figure of Shpalikov’s entire oeuvre. What to do with the fact that the “good man,” about whom he always wrote, so easily goes to the bad? What to do with the fact that charming frivolity quickly turns into grim irresponsibility, moral freedom into immorality, the freewheeling life of the tumbleweed into pathetic escapism, and nonstop wittiness into nauseating clownishness? Committed to the utmost sincerity, Shpalikov had an absolute ear for falsity and from the very beginning heard the rudiments of falsity in himself. Perhaps that is why he seemed doomed (and suicidal notes appear in his texts very early on). Drunkenness, however, made it easier for him to accept his fate.
This intuition is almost nonexistent in Ilyich’s Gate, in which the romantics and the bastards are delineated from each other. But it is already present (for the time being, as a quite vague hint) in I Walk Around Moscow (the young Nikita Mikhalkov’s ambiguous charisma works perfectly in this regard). It is also palpable in TheWharf, Shpalikov’s first major feature. (Its director, Vladimir Kitaysky, committed suicide while working on the picture, and the movie was never completed.) The script of The Wharf is an enchanting, airy text centered on a rather savage deed. Coming to Moscow for a single evening, the main character, a barge captain, decides to kidnap his son from his mother, wanders around nighttime Moscow with the boy for a long while, and when he falls asleep on a bench, simply runs away to his barge. A good guy’s transformation into a scoundrel is amped up to wholly Dostoevskyean cruelty in Summer Holiday and A Charming Man’s Day (another script that was never produced). This trajectory devolves into total despair in You and I, in which a Thawnik’s romantic flight to the Far North is played out as an egoistic escape from his own worthless life, frittered-away talent, ruined romance, and lost friendship.
Shpalikov never judges his characters: their meannesses and downfalls just happen. There is no reflection at all in his art. There is only movement, and this movement has its own laws. At the beginning of the trajectory there is a good, harmonious man, but once chosen, the freewheeling life gradually whittles him down to the ugly figure of a cynic, a vulgarian, a scoundrel. Shpalikov has a very frank poem about this:
Аh the streets, the only refuge Not for the homeless, but for those who live in the city. The streets pester and haunt me, They are my comrades and my adversaries.
I don’t feel as if I am walking them, I obey them, I move my feet, And the streets guide me, they lead me Through a sequence set once upon a time,
A sequence of cherished back alleys, A sequence of jaunty notions and good intentions.
The same thing happens in Shpalikov’s only directorial work. A Long Happy Life is usually remembered as a light, lyrical picture, but actually it is chockablock with contempt for oneself and one’s kind. It is a movie about how a typical man of the 1960s, a charming unshaven geologist, runs off into nowhere and away from a beautiful woman, and at the same time from any future, from that selfsame long happy life, simply because he cannot help but run. A lighter note is generated by the finale: the famous five-minute scene of a barge on a river is Shpalikov’s homage to Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, his favorite film.
This is Shpalikov’s main gimmick. As intoxication relieves a hangover, so the shame of escape is relieved by yet another escape. And if the body can no longer escape, there remain flights of fantasy. Distracted from the protagonist’s mediocre fate, the gaze follows the barge and loses itself in this marvelous tracking shot. All of Shpalikov’s best poems are about the same thing: not about the joy of life, but about the desire to escape from it to a place that is obviously impossible, somewhere “where mother is young and father is alive.” To leave, but not by sinking into drunkenness, illness, and rows, but to disappear gently, to be weathered away from the world. “My head is vacant, / Like a deserted place. / I’m flying off somewhere, / Like a tree from a leaf.”
The trials in the so-called Moscow case, in which protesters have been charged with violence against “law enforcement officers” and sentenced to hard time in prison for touching policemen or Russian National Guardsmen, are yet another vivid illustration that violence is not even remotely the issue. The case more resembles lèse-majesté, “doing wrong to majesty,” a modern form of the crime of offending the dignity of sacred authority.
One of the most immediate and common incarnations of this power in the Russian Federation is the Cop’s Body, which has been endowed with more and more mana and has become increasingly taboo. Since the center of power is a void, the ring surrounding the center, the annulus, the sphincter—which, in fact, is the Cop’s Body—has increasingly gained weight. (The numbers of policemen and other “law enforcement officers” in the Russian Federation have been multiplying.)
The Cop’s Body is impersonal, non-individual, and plural. When they are cracking down on demonstrations, law enforcement’s so-called foot soldiers behave like a herd of animals or a swarm of insects. Their faces are concealed. As Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov has argued, they are not citizens.
“In the line of duty,” when “enforcing the law,” their body is transformed into the law’s body. We could also argue, on the contrary, that the law itself is abstract. It means nothing. It acquires reality and efficacy only in the Cop’s Body, which also has no direct connection with the identities of the policeman who constitute it.
As for the “physical” and “emotional” trauma they suffer, allegedly, when protesters throw paper cups at them, this trauma is purely symbolic since non-individual, plural, and impersonal power also suffers.
Generally, then, the Cop’s Body does not suffer nor, probably, does it ever die.
Such is the theology of the police. This summer, it would even seem Russian cops have surpassed Russian priests in their sacredness.
Thanks to Max Stropov for his permission to translate and publish this text. Image courtesy of Max Stropov. Translated by the Russian Reader
Inflated rubber duckie at June 12, 2017, anti-corruption protest rally in Petersburg. The duckie was later detained by police. Photo courtesy of The Poke
Sergey Yermakov Protest Duckies and the Actionism of Fact
The final performances by Voina’s so-called Petersburg faction could be termed “actionism of fact” by analogy with “literature of fact,” a project the LEF mob tried and failed to realize in the 1920s.
Voina took ordinary actions from the repertoire of protest and resistance, actions requiring no special skills—turning over a police car, torching a paddy wagon, dousing policemen with urine—and simply did them in their performances.
What happened to the performances due to their actions?
First, the performances simply were carried out, like ordinary actions, bereft of aesthetic and symbolic depth. (We will bracket the question of Alexei Plutser-Sarno’s defamiliarizing press releases.) “They really did it.”
Second, the actions were glorified by the very fact they were performed by the actionists. They were bathed in an aura of glory, but note that this aura was totally colorless. It had no density whatsoever, and it produced no distortions in the albedo. This was because the actions were as commonplace as could be, actions available to everyone, actions to which nothing was added except their execution. (Well, yes, and the group’s signature.)
The actionist readymade (or “readydone”) and actionism of fact, unlike the classic artistic readymade, have no need of a special aesthetic space, such as a museum. Unlike literature of fact (if this literary project had actually been implemented in the twenties), actionism may well avoid the traps of language and representation.
Voina thus directly took on the issue of politically effective action. There is a certain actionist Platonism to it, but if we bypass Plato (no matter how we regard the violence of his gesture) we cannot ask ourselves about art’s attitude and access to politics.
In the Republic, Plato does not suggest banishing all poets for fobbing off the phantom of excellence (εἰδώλων ἀρετῆς) on citizens instead of virtue (i.e., the thought of action). He would let the non-mimetic poets, who glorify the gods and sing the praises of good men (ἐγκώμια τοῖς ἀγαθοῖς), stay in the city. Voina’s Petersburg faction non-mimetically sang the praises not of citizens themselves, but certain actions as such, simply by performing them. Their implicit message was something like: Look, this is up for grabs for everyone, and yet if you carry out this glorious deed, you will not be unoriginal and overshadowed by us, because this is basically something anyone could do. This is a kind of democratic and non-hierarchical political Platonism.
Voina did these performances before the May 6, 2012, clashes between protesters and police on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow. They seemingly had offered the demos who took to the streets a possible repertoire of elementary actions. (Of course, the total number of such actions is much greater, and not all of them are either criminal or so primitive. What matters in this case is only the dimension itself.) But the demos did not heed their call, preferring to play at making witty posters, from the December 2011 rally on Sakharov Avenue to this day, and exchanging anti-regime memes in the social networks. (That is, the circumstances are in some way symmetrical to the exile of the poets. In this case, however, the demos itself has turned its back on genuinely political artists, immersing itself in the carnivalesque mimesis of the meme.) By rejecting the dimension of the glorious deed, however, the demos has refused to be itself, because it is eventful, rather than substantial, in contrast to the phantasm of the ethnos.
It took Pyotr Pavlensky half a dozen performances to get close to the place where Voina had arrived in the spring of 2011, that is, in order to torch the front door at FSB headquarters in Moscow. In many ways, the performance was a step backwards, for example, when it came to the question of withdrawal. The guerillas of Voina insisted on retreating in a well-conceived way and unexpectedly returning to strike again. (This is the only worthwhile “We’ll be back!” It is a far cry from Navalny and Co.) But Pavlensky, in many respects by way of accommodating an aesthetic impulse, stood his ground to the bitter end. He has thus proven to be a more direct follower of the National Bolsheviks than Voina when it comes to this issue.
So Voina is still waiting for its demos and valiant citizens back in the spring of 2011, scornfully gazing at rubber duckies, meme politics, and witty anti-Kremlin t-shirts.
Translated by the Russian Reader. Sergey Yermakov is a professional translator who was involved in several of Pyotr Pavlensky’s performances. My thanks to Mr. Yermakov for his kind permission to publish this essay here.
And now, a word from our sponsor, the common cause.
Constructing life, however, is undoubtedly tantamount to producing culture. The life that man constructs consciously is, in fact, culture. Culture is the totality of man’s advances in transfiguring the world. Culture is the world, altered by man according to his mind’s ideals.
But culture, in this case, includes not only theoretical and symbolic endeavors, as encapsulated in science and art. A significant and essential part of culture are those modes of work that really change the world around us, not merely in thought and imagination. They include economics, production, agriculture, engineering, medicine, eugenics, practical biology, education, and so on. Indeed, an overview of all the current research and trends makes plain that culture’s contents are revealed as the things people actually to change reality using these means. Culture is not only pure science and pure art, but definitely consists in applying them to production, the mining and processing industry, labor, and technology. Hence, we can say that culture’s ultimate meaning and goal are actually to improve and transform the world through nature’s rational management.
The new culture of the future involves nothing other than identifying this universal culture, revealing it as the work of transfiguring the world.
It follows that the first task, which precedes all construction and organization, is expanding the common notion of culture and including in it the modes of human endeavor that have previously been regarded as outside its scope. In other words, what must vanish are the current disjunction between culture and life, and the consequent separation of theoretical and symbolic work, which generates expressions of knowledge and ideal patterns, from work that really, by means of action, changes our environment.
To this end, we must first clearly understand the source of this pernicious disjunction. Its roots undoubtedly lie in the ancient division of the world into the supernatural world, accessible only to the mind and imagination, and the earthly, material world where human action takes place.
Due to the limitations of his outlook and the feebleness of his power over nature, man was unable to effect a real, comprehensive transformation of the environment, and so he marked off a special field of endeavor where he found it relatively easier to enact the kingdom of his reason and his moral and aesthetic ideals. This was the realm of pure knowledge and the similar realm of pure art. Here, in a special world generated by the mind and imagination, man produced the ideas and images he wanted while passively contemplating external reality and acting on it only in his own inner world by enriching his intellect and furthering his aesthetic powers. In this segregated realm, he scored victories over unreasoning, vicious nature, but what these successes lacked was the fact they led to no changes in real life except for producing generations of especially sophisticated, accomplished people who were quite remote from the mass of humanity, who continued to languish in the grip of a life that was impoverished, meaningless, and misshapen. Thus did passive contemplation and abstract philosophizing evolve. They were joined by pure science and pure art. Scientists have engaged in pure theory, forgetting their work makes sense only insofar as it really transfigures the world, and that they, accordingly, are not a self-sufficient corporation, but merely a committee of sorts, designated by humanity for a particular goal: drafting a project for the world’s transfiguration. For their part, artists have surrendered to the symbolism of images and forgotten they only make sense insofar as they are linked to reality, and that art’s purpose is to provide people with an ideal of a better world and assist in actually converting the present into such a future. Consequently, culture has become detached from life and enclosed in the narrow confines of pure creativity, remote from reality.
The outcome of the disjunction between symbolic and theoretical endeavors and real cultural work has been equally detrimental to both. Without thought, action is meaningless; thought without movement is ineffective; while knowledge, since it is applied to nothing, degenerates into abstract intellectualizing; science that has no practical end ultimately turns into an exposition of methods that have no purpose; and art that produces only dead likenesses turns into a harmful amusement. On the other hand, lawmaking and economics, as endeavors that change the material world; medicine and eugenics, which change the nature of living beings; and education, which changes their mental nature, are likewise bereft of a particular purpose and come to serve private and individual interests instead of pursuing the task of transfiguring the world.
The outcome is humanity’s atomization into a number of warring centers. Culture is no longer produced as the common cause of human efforts, while the latter develop, each in its own field, as self-contained strivings. Hence the birth of the destructive particularism we find at the heart of cultural liberalism, which was proclaimed during the Renaissance and has evolved into modern cultural chaos. In this state, the common conscious action of people, instead of blazing a course for itself through history as a single, powerful stream, has trickled away into a thousand rivulets, which have mostly ended up as standing puddles of fetid water. Each man lives only for his selfish purposes. A number of dead ends arise, discrete lives fenced off from the rest. An idol in the guise of personal prejudice or passion is erected in each such dead end. Mutual bloody war erupts in the name of the idols, tearing humanity apart with strife. However, at the same time, people are united by irrational factors, but this unity is usually based on narrow-mindedness and passivity, and crumbles when it encounters consciousness, even in its primary selfish, individual form.
These phenomena have caused the crisis now experienced by European culture. It is clear it cannot stay in a state of modern individual atomization, and just as clear that the way to past attempts at unification, based on extinguishing consciousness, is forbidden to it due to its hypertrophied modern evolution. The only way left is to produce a culture in which consciousness would not be removed from life but would projectively manage it, moreover, manage it not in the sense of separating people from each other, but, on the contrary, in the sense of uniting them as completely as possible on the basis of a common cause.
That was an excerpt from Valerian Muravyov, “A Universal Productive Mathematics” (1923), in Boris Groys, ed., Russkii kozmism (Moscow: Ad Marginem Press, 2015), 180–184
Back in her day, we recall, Rosa Luxemberg proposed the slogan “Socialism or barbarism!” While not obvious at first glance, the slogan is profoundly and functionally religious, albeit secularized, since it deals with salvation, with socialism as a project of salvation from the consequences of capitalism. In 1916, in the midst of a monstrous imperialist war, it was a secular take on soteriology, the doctrine of salvation.
The “or” is telltale. Although “barbarism” implies the entire subject matter of nineteenth-century Hegelianism and positivism, the theme of progress, as opposed to barbarism, the subject of progress as Bildung, the slogan is, nevertheless, anti-Hegelian. Nothing vouchsafes the Spirit’s final pleroma; the victory of progress is not obvious. Nor is it obvious that the arrow of history is generally pointed towards an increase of the good, and that a “higher” formation will inevitably come to replace the “lower” formation. But because salvation is not vouchsafed, we must work on its behalf and advocate for it. (Whereas, in the Hegelian universe, Self-Development of the Spirit, Ltd., and Progress, Inc., issue you a guarantee in writing, a futures contract for salvation.)
So, dear missionaries and itinerant preachers, boldly introduce the subject of salvation into your sermonizing. When the laymen groan, as they usually do, that the outcome will be bloody and so forth, you tell them, “Revolution or Chernobyl!” (I am serious.)
A regime incapable of maintaining a functioning technosphere, for which it bears responsibility, legitimates its own overthrow. Revolution does not guarantee the emergence of a new technosphere, of course. Politics and science and technics (and even governance and science) hardly run in parallel lines, just as revolution does not guarantee a regime more capable of governance. As a manifestation of the demos, however, revolution, at least for some time, generates a collectively responsible subject, a subject capable of deliberating on its own collective future, including the technosphere.
By the way, for those who find such things crucial, I do not fully understand the meaning of the term “sovereignty” in 2015, but perhaps only revolution is capable of preserving it, simply by generating the dimension of collective responsibility, the sense that “regular dudes are in charge here.” As it is, one ninth of the earth’s land mass has begun to present an excessive danger, given its unpredictability and irresponsibility, toward the other eight ninths, even taking in account the disasters with oil rigs that happen there and monstrously smoky China. God forbid that external management should be required.
P.S. We have to think over whether Luxemberug’s slogan—and the line of campaigning proposed—suggest that revolution (an apocalyptic event towards which the messianic subject is directed) is the katechon, that which holds back (in this case, a technological disaster), because there is an obvious paradox here: the katechon is anti-apocalyptical figure.
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Emergency Shutdown of Second Unit at Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant www.greenworld.org.ru
December 19, 2015
An emergency shutdown of the second unit at Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant took place on Friday, December 18, at 1:50 p.m. local time. The cause of the shutdown and emergency cooling of the reactor was a sudden influx of radioactive steam from a faulty pipe into one of the rooms in the turbine section.
Both of the turbines servicing the reactor were shut down.
During the cooling down, the steam generated in the reactor was ejected into the environment through a pipe. A south-southeasterly wind blowing at five meters per second (such a wind is atypical for this locale) carried the radioactive steam toward the Gulf of Finland in the direction of Zelenogorsk and Vyborg. Green World recorded a background radiation of 20 mR/h at five p.m. local time in downtown Sosnovy Bor, five kilometers away from the affected unit.
Saint Petersburg, a city of five million people people that is situated forty kilometers to the east of the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant, was thus fortunate this time round. According to some sources, the background radiation increased only severalfold in the vicinity of the plant.
In the photo, radioactive steam from the unit drifts towards Vyborg as the unit is cooled down.
The second unit at the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant has been operating for forty years, although it has a projected operating life of thirty years. Its operating life was extended without the legally required public hearings and environmental impact assessment.
At present, all four units at the Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant are operating beyond their projected lifetimes. The oldest of the Chernobyl series reactors at Sosnovy Bor is scheduled to be shut down only in 2018 after forty-five years in operation.
The eastern part of the Gulf of Finland is entering into a ten-year period of heightened risk of accidents at nuclear sites. On the one hand, during this period (lasting until 2026), the service life of the RMBK-1000 reactors at Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant will be extended and there will be a greater likelihood of accidents. During this same period, the new (VVER-1200-powered) units at Leningrad Nuclear Power Plant II are scheduled to come online, and there will be an increased risk of accidents due to errors by designers, builders, and inexperienced personnel.
So we are faced with a headline-making increase in the probability of accidents at the Sosnovy Bor nuclear cluster.
