A military youth band plays outside the former Lenin Apartment Museum on Cossack Alley in Petersburg as a local hipster documents the happening, 22 April 2023. Photo by PZ, who kindly gave me permission to reproduce it here.
In pre-revolutionary Russia, the raznochintsy were people whose social status did not strictly conform to the notions of “hereditary nobleman” or “eminent merchant.” Minor clerks, retired soldiers, servants of various stripes, laborers and, of course, students and other intellectual workers lived in neighborhoods remote from Nevsky Prospect.
The museum traces its roots back to 1924.
Cossack Lane has been home to a memorial address since 1924. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin) lived here from February 12, 1894 to April 25, 1895, and after his death, residents of the neighboring buildings established “Ilyich’s Corner” on the street.
In 1938, Ilyich’s Corner was turned into the V.I. Ulyanov Apartment Museum, part of the Leningrad branch of the Central Museum of Lenin. In 1992, the mayor of St. Petersburg ordered that the museum be preserved as as a historical landmark. It was granted the status of a state museum under the jurisdiction of the Lenin District (later, the Admiralty District) of St. Petersburg and became known as the Museum of the History of the Revolutionary Democratic Movement of the 1880s and 1890s.
In September 2003, by order of St. Petersburg city hall, the museum was transferred to the jurisdiction of the St. Petersburg Culture Committee. In 2006, in connection with the opening of a new permanent exposition, Around the Semyonovsky Regimental Parade Ground, the museum was given its current name — the Raznochintsy Petersburg Memorial Museum
Leader of World Proletariat with Female Gate Attendant Reflected in Security Mirror, SUV, and New Year’s Tree. December 18, 2016, 11 Lomanaya Street, St. Petersburg
Monument to V.I. Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (pseudonym – Lenin) (1870-1924) was a Russian and Soviet world-class politician and statesman, revolutionary, founder of the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (Bolsheviks), and one of the organizers and leaders of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. The monument was erected on the 87th anniversary of Lenin’s birth on the premises of the former Proletarian Victory shoe factory. Unveiled on April 22 , 1957. Cast from a model by the sculptor P.I. Bondarenko.
Source: 2gis.ru. Photo and translation by the Russian Reader
• • • • •
In Petrograd, “cryptic” messages like this one (spray painted on the fence of the now-defunct Krupskaya Confectionery Factory) are giving the sex ads stenciled everywhere on the pavements and walls a stiff run for their money. Basically, if you want to get whacked out of your mind on “bath salts” and then have sex with a prostitute, this town is the place for you. And it visually reminds you of that fact a thousand times a day, every which way you look. But don’t dream of holding a spontaneous political protest: then the law will come down hard on you. But gnarly, highly addictive drugs and prostitution (amidst an HIV epidemic) it can live with. ||| TRR, December 18, 2015
An important public service message from the kleptocratic post-fascist hybrid regime: Make your family strong, not your liquor! “In Russia, 16% of families break up due to alcoholism.” Uff da! ||| TRR, December 18, 2015
Post-Soviet “ethnic diversity” gone bad. Four “folk singers” from god knows what republic or “little people of the north” lip-synching a folk song at the New Year’s bazaar on Pioneer Square in Petrograd. ||| TRR, December 18, 2015
But in 2000 Putin came to power. Now Putin was director of the FSB (KGB), the executive branch, as it were, of the Soviet government’s war against God. [In reality, Putin was director of the FSB from 25 July 1998 to 29 March 1999. He was acting president of Russia from 31 December 1999 to 7 May 2000, when he assumed the same office as the popularly elected president of Russia.—TRR.] or such a man to become president was therefore a profound shock and a stern warning for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. It was as if the head of the Inquisition had become head of the World Council of Churches, or Himmler, the president of Germany after the war.
Nothing similar would have been tolerated in a western country. But it was tolerated in Russia, first, because, as surveys showed, most Russians still considered the Soviet Union to be their native country, and Lenin and Stalin to be heroes; and secondly, because the west clung on to the stupid belief that over seventy years of the most terrible bloodletting in history (far longer and far more radical than Hitler’s twelve years in power) could be wiped out and reversed without any kind of decommunization, without even a single person being put on trial for murdering innocent people in the name of Soviet power’s collective Antichrist.
The tragic farce has reached such a stage that the KGB has become a hero of Russia literature and film, with its own church in the middle of its chief prison, the Lubyanka in Moscow, not, as it might be thought, to commemorate the martyrs who suffered so terribly within its walls, but for the executioners.
The west concurred with this filthy whitewash. The official Orthodox Church (itself run by KGB agents) concurred. The masses of the Russian people concurred by voting Putin into power repeatedly.
And then the rebirth took place. Without repenting in the slightest of his communist past, and while gradually reintroducing more and more Soviet traditions and symbols, Putin underwent a conversion to Christ. Or rather, from being part of the body of the Soviet Antichrist, which was anti-, that is, against Christ, he is now preaching a form of Communist Christianity that, as Makarkin puts it, copies Jesus Christ, placing its own ideas in place of Christ’s and passing them off as His. And if the copy is a poor one (just as Lenin’s stinking body is a very poor imitation of the fragrant relics of the saints, and the murderous “Moral Code of the Builder of Communism” is a very poor imitation of the Sermon on the Mount) this does not matter, so long as the masses are taken in by it or, if they are not taken in by it, at least convinced that Christ and the anti-Christian state are now on the same side.
So the Russian revolution has mutated from one kind of anti-Christianity to another, from Lenin’s anti-Christianity, which was openly against Christ, to Putin’s anti-Christianity, which pretends not to be against Christ but to copy Him and take His place.
There can be no doubt this new, more sophisticated kind of anti-Christianity is more dangerous than the former, and closer to the kind that will be practised by the actual Antichrist himself at the end of time. For of that Antichrist the Lord said, “I have come in My Father’s name and you do not believe Me: if another shall come in his own name, him you will believe” (John 5:43). In other words, you have rejected the real Christ, and as a direct result you will accept an imposter, a man-god, for the real thing, the God-Man.
In my writings on the national question I have already said that an abstract presentation of the question of nationalism in general is of no use at all. A distinction must necessarily be made between the nationalism of an oppressor nation and that of an oppressed nation, the nationalism of a big nation and that of a small nation.
In respect of the second kind of nationalism we, nationals of a big nation, have nearly always been guilty, in historic practice, of an infinite number of cases of violence; furthermore, we commit violence and insult an infinite number of times without noticing it. It is sufficient to recall my Volga reminiscences of how non-Russians are treated; how the Poles are not called by any other name than Polyachiska, how the Tatar is nicknamed Prince, how the Ukrainians are always Khokhols and the Georgians and other Caucasian nationals always Kapkasians.
That is why internationalism on the part of oppressors or “great” nations, as they are called (though they are great only in their violence, only great as bullies), must consist not only in the observance of the formal equality of nations but even in an inequality of the oppressor nation, the great nation, that must make up for the inequality which obtains in actual practice. Anybody who does not understand this has not grasped the real proletarian attitude to the national question, he is still essentially petty bourgeois in his point of view and is, therefore, sure to descend to the bourgeois point of view.
— Vladimir Lenin, “The Question of Nationalities or ‘Autonomisation'” (1922), Marxists Internet Archive
Thanks to Ivan Ovsyannikov for the heads-up. Photo by the Russian Reader
Arkady Rylov, Vladimir Lenin in Razliv, 1934. Oil on canvas. Collection of the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo by the Russian Reader
Why the Bolsheviks Won
Konstantin Tarasov Vedomosti
November 3, 2017
The question of why the Bolsheviks won in October 1917 was meaningful to the revolution’s contemporaries and has lost none of its relevance today. Over the past one hundred years, numerous mutually contradictory causes have been identified: from the fanaticism of a cohesive band of conspirators to searching for Bolshevism’s roots in the popular consciousness, from conspiracy theories to official Soviet historiography’s stance on the October Revolution’s objective preconditions.
After the February uprising, the most influential leftist parties were the SRs and Mensheviks, who led the Petrograd Soviet and the majority of provincial Soviets. They formed a moderatel socialist bloc that advocated a long-term transition from capitalism to socialism. The SRs and Mensheviks stood for social partnership between the classes and supported the Provisional Government while also striving to control its actions in order to consolidate the February Revolution’s gains. They agreed on the notion of “revolutionary defencism,” i.e., continuing Russia’s involvement in the First World War while rejecting expansionist goals.
The Bolshevik Party was not a significant force as of February 1917. In the preceding years, the left wing of Russian Social Democratic Labor Party had been weakened by the denunciations, arrests, transportation, and exile of its most influential leaders. Many rank-and-file party members had retired from the cause due to persecution by the authorities. Even after the events of February, there were no more than 25,000 Bolsheviks in Russia.
The Bolsheviks had stood out from the broad spectrum of political parties from the get-go. Before February 1917, they had put forward the slogan “Down with the war!” and been heavily involved in the antiwar and defeatist movements. After the overthrow of the monarchy, the Bolshevik leadership argued that the new “bourgeois” government was pursuing its previous goals nor had the nature of the war changed. Disputes among the Bolsheviks touched on the question of power. The party’s Petrograd organization was inclined to refuse supporting the Provisional Government. However, after the return from transportation of the influential Joseph Djugashvili (Stalin), Mikhail Muranov, and Lev Rozenfeld (Kamenev), the party was more inclined to supported the new regime’s decisions if they met the interests of working people. Bolshevik leaders were ready to reject factional differences and unite all currents of social democracy.
Circumstances changed when Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) returned from a long period of exile. He proposed an unexpected program to his comrades: breaking with the moderate socialists supporting the Provisional Government, ending the war, and overthrowing the regimes in all the warring countries. Lenin was certain the so-called bourgeois-democratic phase of the revolution was over, and it was time to proceed to the socialist stage. The emergence of the Soviets, which ensured the presence of workers and peasants in the government, facilitated the possibility of a rapid transition to socialism. During April 1917, Lenin persuaded the party to adopt the slogan “All power to the Soviets!” and accept the bulk of his so-called April Theses.
However, it was not the radical program that made Lenin’s name really famous, but the hype caused by his return to Russia via Germany, which was still at war with Russia. The party’s leader was accused of aiding the enemy and declared a German spy. The claims heightened the tension in society. Bolshevik campaigners were often arrested and beaten. This discredited any criticism of the Provisional Governmment. The moderate socialists in charge of the Petrograd Soviet rose to the defense of Lenin’s views until they went beyond campaigning.
By June 1917, the Bolsheviks numbered around 240,000 people in their ranks. By way of comparison, by the summer of 1917, the SRs had 800,000 people in their ranks, although the vast majority of them were so-called March SRs, i.e., people who had joined the party after the February Revolution. Membership of the Socialist Revolutionary Party did not require paying dues and being involved in party work, so it makes no sense to speak of a unity of action and purpose among its members. The SRs had become the “party of power,” so many of its new members were guided by career ambitions when they joined.
Circumstances had shaped up differently for the Bolsheviks. In early 1917, the party had found itself in a minority in most Soviets. Its members argued with the more influential moderate socialists and often risked life and limb by speaking at rallies. In addition, according to their charter, a person could join the party only on the recommendation of two members. This consolidated the Bolsheviks and brought the stances of its different factions closer together.
Time was on the side of Lenin and his party. A series of political crises and the government’s refusal to implement serious reforms before the Constituent Assembly was convened had weakened the coalition of socialists and liberals. The failure of a July offensive on the front, spearheaded by the socialist war minister Alexander Kerensky, strengthened antiwar moods in the army. The Bolsheviks called for the re-election of deputies who did not defend the interests of voters. By the summer of 1917, large left-wing Social Democratic factions had taken shape in many Russian cities. However, during this period, the Bolsheviks were unable to gain a majority over the moderate socialists in most Soviets.
On July 3, 1917, a spontaneous uprising meant to persuade the leadership of the city’s Soviet to take power broke out in Petrograd. Seeing that the uprising was following its slogans and afraid of forfeiting its influence among the masses, the Bolshevik Central Committee decided to join the demonstrators. July 4 was marked in many Russian cities by Bolshevik-led demonstrations chanting the slogan “All power to the Soviets!” The moderate socialists, however, believed Lenin’s supporters were trying to exert armed pressure on the Soviets and supported the Provisional Government’s pacification of the capital. Meanwhile, Justice Minister Pavel Pereverzev published documents denouncing the Bolsheviks’ alleged ties with Germany.
Pereverzev supervised the drafting of a press release based on the testimony of an Ensign Yermolenko and correspondence between Stockholm and Petrograd, intercepted by Russian counterintelligence. The testimony of the defector Yermolenko, who had been recruited by German intelligence, about Lenin’s involvement in espionage aroused doubts even among his contemporaries, and the Provisional Government’s investigators failed to find evidence the Bolsheviks were funded by the German General Staff. The intercepted documents touched on business matters, and the money had been sent from Petrograd to Stockholm. The investigators had no other evidence.
However, the publication considerably altered the mood in Petrograd, and the demonstrations quickly came to naught. The government arrested the instigators, unreliable army divisions were dispatched to the front, and a criminal investigation into Bolshevik Party leaders was launched. Lenin was forced into hiding to avoid arrest. This was the most difficult period for the party. However, it purged its ranks of waverers, leaving behind only firm supporters of radical action.
The events of October 1917 in Petrograd have often been called a coup. There is some truth in this. The seizure of certain facilities in the city and the blockade of the Provisional Government on Palace Square were effected by military means. But a coup would not have led to a change of regimes without the Military Revolutionary Committee (VRK), established by the authoritative Petrograd Soviet. By October, it was dominated by a block of leftist radical parties led by the Bolsheviks. All the parties delegated commissars to the committee for overseeing military units and key facilities in the city. If the Bolsheviks had attempted to remove the Provisional Government from power only by military means, events would probably have dragged on and could have ended with the defeat of the radicals.
The victory of the left-wing radical parties depended not only on events in the capital: the revolution was a large-scale, nationwide process. There were numerous “October Revolutions.” Moreover, in some places, e.g., Tashkent, Revel (Tallinn), and Kazan, the Soviets had taken power earlier than in Petrograd, while in other places they took power considerably later. Soviet power’s “triumphal march” dragged on for over a year. Circumstances depended on the balance of political forces in the regions. In the Volga River Basin, for example, the Left SRs and SR Maximalists played the main role in establishing Soviet power. In Krasnoyarsk and Kronstadt, it was anarchists who ensured the radical left bloc’s victory.
At the front in the summer of 1917, extreme left-wing forces tried to put up a fight against the moderate socialists in the army’s Soviets. They were most successful at the Northern Front, situated closest to the capital, where a left bloc uniting Bolsheviks, Menshevik Internationalists, and Left SRs from twenty-eight regiments, including Latvian riflemen, was established. At other fronts, the SRs and Mensheviks dominated the leadership of Soldiers’ Soviets at the highest level until October. The Bolsheviks succeeded in winning after the military revolutionary committees were established.
So, it would be inaccurate to say the Bolsheviks took power in October 1917. The transition to full-fledged Soviet power occurred because the moderate socialist bloc had discredited itself by governing in coalition with the liberals. Regime change was ensured by uniting the left-wing radical parties under the Bolshevik slogan “All power to the Soviets!” In this wise, the numbers of Bolsheviks did not play a big role, and the fight with moderate socialists in the Soviets continued for several months. However, Russia was already sliding toward civil war: the chance for compromise had been frittered away. The time for uncompromising struggle had come.
Konstantin Tarasov is a researcher at the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Translated by the Russian Reader
Historical Fantasy
Viktor Sigolayev, The Fatal Wheel: Crossing the Same River Twice (Alfa Kniga, 2012)
No one understood how our contemporary, an officer in the reserves and a history teacher, ended up in his own past, back in the body of a seven-year-old boy, and back in the period of triumphant, developed socialism, when, as far as our hero could remember, there was a lot more joy and happiness.
That is how an adult imagines it, but it transpires all is not as perfect in the sunny land of Childhood as the memory would suggest. It transpires that here, too, meanness and greed exist. There are thieves, bandits, and scammers of all stripes, although you did not notice them earlier, when you were a child. But now you have to do something about it. Now you have to fight it, because evil knows no obstacles in time. Enemies—cruel and insidious, clever and merciless—have again emerged on the horizon. Besides, some of them seem incredibly familiar to our hero.
So, the seven-year-old hero, who has two university degrees, combat officer experience, and a memory singed by the hard post-perestroika years, launches his own tiny war, allying himself with none other than the USSR State Security Committee [KGB]. He unexpectedly finds new friends there, the kind of friends for whom you can risk your life.
Putin’s Russia can’t celebrate its revolutionary past. It has to smother it
Catherine Merridale The Guardian
November 3, 2017
November always brings a welcome holiday for Russians. The day off work is about some great historical event, but most use it to catch up with their families. On 7 November 2017, it will be exactly 100 years since Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik revolution, the one that people used to mark with anthems, weaponry and fireworks.
But this year’s official holiday commemorates not the revolution, but an uprising of 1612 against the Poles. National Unity Day was a tsarist invention that Vladimir Putin’s government relaunched in 2005. Marked on 4 November, its timing has been perfect. After three days on their sofas, will anyone really notice that there are no red flags?
The silence is like a dream in which the dreamer is being suffocated. Centenaries are special: everyone can count to 100. But so far Lenin and his comrades have not rated as much as a commemorative stamp. The man himself is still displayed – in a new suit – in the mausoleum on Red Square, but no one wants to talk about exactly what he did. The current Russian government makes ample use of history – no child is likely to forget the great patriotic war against fascism – but Lenin can’t be made to fit.
It is awkward enough, Moscow’s mandarins must think, that the Russian revolution was a people’s uprising against despotic rule, a fight against injustice and the gross excesses of the rich. With terrorism such a real threat, the Kremlin would be unwise to appear to condone violent revolt. Yet it can’t vilify a man whose corpse still lies in state, whose statue is a landmark in hundreds of towns. And what is it to make of Soviet power? If it condemns the Russian revolution, where does that leave Stalin and the people’s triumph?
So far the answer seems to be to keep things bland. Lenin, after all, is boringly familiar. If he will only stay that way, if young people decline to think, then even this annoying anniversary will pass. There are rumours that Russia’s new left may take to the streets this year to mark the anniversary with demonstrations, but most Russians under 50 regard the Soviet story as a dowdy relic, an embarrassment. The state wants it to stay that way, the province of those staunch old trouts who still sell apples outside metro stops. Its very language, “Soviet”, is an antique. It must be held back in the past, exiled along with dissidents, stretch nylon and bad teeth.
The Russian revolution was a moment when the veil of human culture tore. It was a season of euphoric hope, a terrifying experiment in utopia. It tested to destruction the 19th-century fantasy of progress. It was the work of tens of thousands of zealous enthusiasts.
Yet now their great-great-grandchildren are bored. This situation suits their government. A cloud of tedium hangs over any formal gathering that ventures to discuss the thing. Most choose the safest, dullest line. There is to be a round-table meeting held at [the] Smolny, for instance, the building from which Lenin launched the revolution, working around the clock. Scheduled for late November 2017, the theme will not be revolution but the centenary of Finnish independence.
I tried asking in the museums. The Russian state has preserved every relic of the revolutionary year, including Lenin’s pillow and his brother-in-law’s chess set. You can still run a finger around Stalin’s bath, the one that Lenin must have used before fleeing from Kerensky’s police. But nothing special has been planned, no big event, no cameras. The museum of Pravda, the Bolshevik party’s newspaper, is clearly short of funds. In Soviet times, schoolchildren visited in their thousands – it was part of their curriculum – but now the place relies on tourists.
To attract the schoolchildren back, the staff have been forced to adapt. “We call this the museum of tolerance,” my guide explained. “See? Everything in this room has come from somewhere in Europe. The typewriter there is German, the table is French.”
But mere avoidance doesn’t always work. A centenary of this importance is bound to be marked by someone; there has to be an official response. Ten months ago, the independent journalist Mikhail Zygar launched a website to track the events of 1917 as they unfolded, day by day. Belatedly, but with a considerably larger budget, the state-sponsored Russia Today responded with a handsome Twitter feed, lavishly illustrated with archival photographs and featuring imaginary tweets from some of the key figures of 1917. Both are useful resources, though neither has engaged with what the revolution means. That question haunts Red Square like Lenin’s ghost.
The Kremlin is saving itself for another anniversary next year. In July 1918 the Romanov family was shot. The solemn lessons of that crime are something everyone will understand. A strong state is what people need, the message goes, and Russia’s is a special one. Unlike the regimes of the west, it is not only patriotic but orthodox. That is why Nicholas II is now a saint and why his killing by the Bolsheviks was a martyrdom. Through him, right-thinking Russian people can remember every other martyr of the revolution that is now, thank heavens, safely past.
Victims unite a nation, everyone can grieve. In honour of the sacred dead (the millions, unspecified), a new cathedral has appeared in Moscow: vast, imposing, unavoidable. Help with the funds came from Putin’s close friend and confessor Bishop Tikhon Shevkunov.
In Russia now it is an idealised form of nationalism, not the people’s rule or social justice, that is feted and taught in schools. Russia is the new Byzantium, no longer proud to fly the red flag for the world.
There is one more anniversary that will not pass unmarked. The Cheka, Lenin’s feared secret police force, was founded on 18 December 1917. Its successors have included Stalin’s NKVD and the KGB of spy thrillers, but it will be the current lot, the FSB, who celebrate next month with the commemorative medals and champagne. As a lieutenant colonel in the service and its former boss, Putin could well be a star guest.
The fact that many of the revolution’s martyrs died at secret police hands is a mere detail. Lenin had no problem ordering the Cheka to carry out the wholesale execution of priests and the so-called bourgeoisie. By 1918 there were bodies piled up in the streets. But such truths are easily ignored. Shevkunov’s new cathedral to the revolution’s martyrs is itself a stone’s throw from the FSB headquarters on Lubyanka Square.
That just leaves Lenin and his ghost. In life a restless politician, dangerous and quick, he lies on Red Square like a stuffed fox: moth-eaten and obviously dead. As the heart of Moscow has been reinvented as an orthodox and ultra-Russian space, his mausoleum appears more and more anomalous. But though there is no wish to celebrate the man, a preserved corpse remains a tricky object to throw out. As a former Soviet citizen remarked to me: “We have certainly learned one thing from our history, haven’t we? You must be careful who you pickle.”
Catherine Merridale is a historian. Her latest book, Lenin on the Train, is published by Penguin.
Leader of World Proletariat with Female Gate Attendant Reflected in Security Mirror, SUV, and New Year’s Tree, December 18, 2016. 11 Lomanaya Street, Petersburg
Politics begins where there are millions, not where there are thousands; not where there are thousands, but only where there are millions does serious politics begin.
—Vladimir Lenin, “Speech at Russian Communist Party Congress,” March 7, 1918
We can identify something similar in rhetorical repetitions. They can act to unfold the “plot,” move the presentation along, develop and refine the arguments. In a word, they can serve the progressive or narrative movement of oratorical discourse. They also generate a kind of “dam” by provoking and intensifying expectation, since the “denouement,” explanation or conclusion at which the speaker drives, and with it the fulcrum bearing the main weight of the speech, is propelled forward. Building a phrase or passage can also be achieved by different means, with the same goal of transferring the main weight to the end. These progressive repetitions can be distinguished from others, which, on the contrary, suspend movement, not by building up its pressure, but by turning it inside itself, as it were, forming a kind of motionless whirlpool, whose funnel, figuratively speaking, swallows and absorbs all our attention. Obscuring the horizon, they cut off our sight lines, thus cancelling the aspect of motion. Precisely this type of repetition prevails in Lenin’s discourse and is characteristic of it, as we have seen in the examples cited. As I indicated in my analysis of these examples, Lenin’s preference for this kind of repetition has to do with the very essence of his discourse. He appeals neither to feelings nor imagination, but to will and determination. His discourse does not deploy a panorama for passive contemplation. It does not serve as a guide, leading the indifferent tourist along. It fights the listener, forcing him to make an active decision, and, to this end, it pins him against the wall. “Don’t move! Hands up! Surrender!” That is the nature of Lenin’s discourse. It does not allow for a choice. I would argue this is the specific essence of oratorical discourse, in particular, of the political speech.
—Boris Kazansky, “Lenin’s Discourse: An Attempt at Rhetorical Analysis,” LEF 1 (5), 1924: 124
Tapestry Rug Portrait of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, April 27, 2017. Kuznechnyi Market, Petersburg. The rug was probably woven in Central Asia in the 1920s or 1930s.
Photos and translations by the Russian Reader. Texts excerpted from a special 1924 issue of LEF entitled “Lenin’s Language,” featuring essays by Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum, Lev Yakubinsky, Yuri Tynyanov, Boris Kazansky, and Boris Tomashevsky, and edited by Vladimir Mayakovsky. The English translations of the essays and Mayakovsky’s introduction, “Don’t Merchandise Lenin,” which was excised by censors from the original magazine, will be published in a special edition of a print journal later this summer. Watch this space for more details as they become available.
“The Regime Is Making New Enemies with These Arrests”
Irina Tumakova Fontanka.ru
June 22, 2017
The arrestees who served ten days in jail after Russia Day shared their plans for the future. They once again included the Field of Mars, and Navalny, and the special detention center on Zakharyevskaya Street they had just left.
Ksenia Morozova, holding a placard that reads, “Freedom is within.” Photo courtesy of Sergei Mikhailechenko/Fontanka.ru
A new group of prisoners, who had finished serving the jail sentences they were given after Russia Day, was released on Thursday, June 22, from the Interior Ministry’s special detention center on Zakharyevskaya Street in central Petersburg. They had been sentenced to ten days in police custody, meaning they had committed violations of “moderate severity.” The die-hard violators, who were sentenced to fifteen days in jail, will not be released until next week. The least malicious violators, who had already been released, greeted their recent cellmates with soda pop, flowers, and rounds of applause. The former prisoners were cheerful and praised the prison food. They came out of jail with the same clear conscience they had when they left the Field of Mars in paddy wagons.
The Interior Ministry’s special detention center on Zakharyevskaya is a historical landmark. Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) and Felix Dzerzhinsky had done time there prior to 1917. In June 2017, people who attended an anti-corruption rally on Russian Independence Day were jailed there.
Around 10,000 people had gone to the Field of Mars on the national holiday. Some people celebrated, while others were arrested. Nearly six hundred hundred left the celebrations in paddy wagons, headed to police precincts round the city. From June 13 on, the city’s district courts worked like a conveyor belt for meting out punishment. The arrestees were sentenced for going to the anti-corruption rally and for failing to obey police orders to leave the rally, i.e., they had violated two articles in the Administrative Offenses Code. The majority of those detained at the event got off with 10,500-ruble fines [approx. 158 euros], but a hundred and fifty people were sent to jail, sentenced to terms of three to fifteen days.
The release of the prisoners whose time in jail ended on June 22 was due to start at two o’clock in the afternoon, when the lunch break ends on Zakharyevskaya. At the very same time, as recorded in their arrest records, exactly 240 hours had passed since the first of the “ten-dayers” had been detained. In fact, they had been detained and hauled to the courts wholesale. But the law enforcement machine was carefully counting off the minutes. One prisoner could be released at 2:30 p.m., but another had to be released at 4:00 p.m.
The Support Group
At a quarter to two, people holding plastic bags form a semi-circle at the exit from the detention center. Two vehicles are cruising nearby. One, emblazoned with Open Russia’s logo, is ready to give the released detainees a lift to the courts, where lawyers are waiting to appeal their fines. The other, emblazoned with the police’s logo, is also ready to take them somewhere.
“I’m going to detain you for jaywalking,” a policeman standing on the sidewalk warns me.
“Please arrest me for jaywalking,” I smile back at him, standing on the same sidewalk. The policeman goes back to his car.
The bags of the people waiting outside the detention center are stuffed with bottles of soda pop. There is also a bunch of pink chrysanthemums. Later, the chrysanthemums will be divided and given to the liberated comrades. Everybody knows who nice it is when people are waiting for you with chrysanthemums when you get out of jail. And you are also really thirsty when you get out. The greeters know all of this from personal experience.
“I was in for five days and got out last week,” says a man standing near the gates of the detention center. “And today the guy I shared a cell with is getting out.”
The man’s name is Oleg Maksakov. He is forty-three. He doesn’t know why he was sentenced to five days, while his young cellmate got ten days. They didn’t know each other before they were jailed, but they made friends in the cell.
“The propaganda has no effect on the people aged eighteen to twenty-five who came to the Field of Mars,” Maksakov says of his “accomplice.” “What matters even more is that they’re not afraid. They’re not downtrodden. They have no experience of the Soviet repression machine. I mean, now they are finding out, of course. But it doesn’t scare them. It only makes them mad.”
Another person who celebrated Russia Day at the Field of Mars approaches us. In terms of age, Pavel Ilatovsky is one of the “non-downtrodden.” You could say he lucked out. He got off with a 10,500-ruble fine and spent two days at police precinct while he waited for his court hearing.
“Yeah, I was lucky,” Ilatovsky agrees. “I had my hearing at the Krasnoye Selo District Court, and the judges were okay. They said right off the bat there was no room in the cells, and so they were going fine us.”
The figures assembled by volunteers back up what Ilatovsky says. The Krasnoye Selo District Court heard 59 cases, and no one was sentenced to time in jail. The Kalinin District Court proved to be the most cruel and greediest. Among the 44 cases it heard, around three fourths (the volunteers don’t know for certain) resulted in fines alone, while the rest resulted in fines and jail time. The same court handed down the harshest sentence: fifteen days in jail plus a 20,000-ruble fine.
Ilatovsky volunteers with the detainees assistance group. The group brought care packages to Zakharyevskaya all ten days and raised money to pay the fines. And now they have brought a vehicle, soda pop, and chrysanthemums. This system of assistance improves with every series of arrests. It has started working like a well-oiled machine.
“There are lots of us,” says Ilatovsky. “And we know that if someone wasn’t detained this time round, he or she could be detained next time. When I was at the police precinct, they brought us water and helped out with food. They even brought us shawarmas.”
We are chatting next to the prison’s entrance. Everyone’s mood is upbeat, even joyful. Finally, the iron door opens and a young man exits holding his passport. He is carrying a backpack, and a container of liquid soap pokes out from the pocket. A yellow-and-blue ribbon is pinned to his jacket.
“Oh!” says Oleg Maksakov, rushing towards him. “I spent five days in a cell with that guy!”
“I Hung Out with Interesting People”
Denis Uvarov went to the Field of Mars with a purpose. He wasn’t celebrating the holiday, but combating corruption.
“This dude was walking around with a bullhorn and ordering everyone to disperse, but no one dispersed. Therefore, they did not obey [the police’s orders],” he says by way of explaining why he was convicted of disobeying the police.
Besides, Uvarov chanted slogans offensive to our president, and what is worse, waved the flag of Ukraine, with which he sympathizes. He caught flak for it: ten days in the slammer. He admits it could have been worse. He twice received care packages of food from complete strangers, and that amazed him most of all.
“Of course, we didn’t really need anything in the cell, but it’s nice knowing that you’re in there, and somebody cares,” says Uvarov.
In the two-person cells in which the June 12 arrestees were held, they really did not need anything. Uvarov compared it to a hospital, adding, only, that he couldn’t go into the hallway. But they were taken out for walks every day.
“The biggest problem was not being able to wash up,” he says. “They let us take a shower only once over the ten days. Well and, excuse me for mentioning it, but going to the toilet when you’re not alone in the cell, is, you know . . . Otherwise, it was okay. There was nothing to do, so I read a pile of books, slept in, studied English a bit, and hung out with interesting people.”
The interesting people were other prisoners sentenced to jail for June 12. Uvarov says it was the first protest many of them had attended. Some of them ended up there by accident and were not interested in politics.
“Now they say they’re going to be more active and angrier,” Uvarov continues. “So the regime is deliberately making new enemies with these arrests, as it were. You can do fifteen days in jail, after all. As long as there is a point.”
“What about twenty?” I ask. “That’s nearly a month.”
“Twenty?” says the young man thoughtfully. “Yes, I could probably do it.”
“Yeah, but don’t you need to be arrested twice in six months,” Uvarov asks uncertainly. “I’ll probably need to take that into account. I’ll think it over.”
“I’ll Go to Jail Again”
Ivan Gerasimyuk is one of the young people who collided head on with politics at the special detention center. He looks about twenty years old.
“I was just hanging out on the Field of Mars,” says the young man. “There was a celebration of four eras taking place there. I looked at pre-revolutionary tanks, and then I went to eat kasha in the field kitchen. That’s where the police grabbed me. In court, I said I wasn’t interested in politics, but the judge didn’t believe me and gave me ten days in jail. It turns out you cannot attend celebrations in our country.”
Gerasimyuk thought jail was awful, especially the fact the prisoners were fed not according to schedule, but whenever. And his cell was very dirty.
“I don’t want to go back there,” Gerasimyuk frowns. “But I’ll definitely go to a protest rally now. We have to combat this lawlessness. Well, so I’ll go to jail again. But then other people won’t have to go.”
Alexander, who refuses to tell me his surname, works in a school. He won’t say what he does there, but he deals with young people like Gerasimyuk, only a bit younger.
He shakes his head.
“I don’t talk with the kids about politics at all. I don’t need to. They know it all anyway. They read about Navalny and Putin in the internet. Although what gets them hot and bothered is memes and all, not politics. But their teachers propagandize them, and they see it doesn’t synch with what is happening around them. That generates distrust in them.”
Alexander went to the Field of Mars knowing a rally was supposed to take place there, but he had no plans of taking part in the protest. He only wanted to watch.
“The numbers of true believers who were arrested were small, in fact,” he grins. “It was the rubberneckers like me who got caught. After doing time in jail, some of them are now true believers. But I’ve also spoken with other people, who say they would never do it again. As for me, I’m definitely going next time.”
Vladimir Drofa, who is released right after Alexander, has become a true believer. Or, at least, he says so.
“Until my arrest I was a sympathizer,” he says, looking at my dictaphone. “But now I’m a convinced revolutionary. I will devote the rest of my life to making sure I change places with the people who put me in here.”
“You want to sentence them to ten days in jail?” I ask.
“I’d start with ten at least.”
Drofa knows that, before him, his namesake Vladimir Ulyanov was imprisoned in a nearby cell.
“Let Them Bust Me!”
The convicts opened the iron door one after another. The young women who were released were mobbed by other young women, who gave them bouquets and squealed in delight, as if they were greeting movie stars. The female arrestees who were the last to be released wearily thanked the public and refused to talk to the press, because they wanted to go home. Ksenia Morozova, a social media marketing manager for Sobaka.ruwho had become famous over the last ten days, set her bags on the pavement. She held up a placard reading, “Freedom is within.” She did not hold it up very high, only as high as her own neck
“This is my first picket on the outside!” she yelled. “Let them bust me if they want!”
She was not busted. Her girlfriend grabbed her bags, and the flock of young women ran off towards the subway.
The young people were applauded as they left the jail. They were also given flowers, the very same pink chrysanthemums, until the entire bunch had been divvied up and was gone. The press drifted away. The bus emblazoned with Open Russia’s logo left, taking with it those who wanted to appeal their sentences to meet with lawyers. The last of the dozen and a half “ten-dayers” emerged from the jail after four o’clock, saying almost exactly the same things their special detention center cellmates said. None of them broke their toothbrushes at the doors of the prison.
Translated by the Russian Reader. Thanks to Comrade Uvarova for the heads-up
Religion is one of the forms of spiritual oppression, lying everywhere on the masses of the people, who are oppressed by eternal work for others, need and isolation. The helplessness of the exploited classes in their struggle with the exploiters just as inevitably generates faith in a better life beyond the grave as the helplessness of the savage in his struggle with nature produces faith in gods, devils, miracles, etc. To him who works and is poor all his life religion teaches passivity and patience in earthly life, consoling him with the hope of a heavenly reward. To those who live on the labor of others religion teaches benevolence in earthly life, offering them a very cheap justification for all their exploiting existence and selling tickets to heavenly happiness at a reduced price. Religion is opium for the people.
Milonov No Hindrance to Atheists
Svyatoslav Afonkin ZakS.Ru
February 5, 2017
The ninety-ninth anniversary of the 1918 Bolshevik decree separating church and state was marked by a small group of ardent leftists protesting the current clericalization of the Russian state and Russian society. On February 5, over a hundred people attended a picket on Chernyshevsky Square in southern Petersburg. For two hours, they fiercely criticized both the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and the relationship that has been built between the ROC and the Putin regime.
Members of various low-profile leftist movements gathered at the monument to Russian philosopher and revolutionary Nikolai Chernyshevsky. The protesters held the flags of the Rot Front, the United Communist Party, the Workers Revolutionary Communist Party, and Communists of Russia. Even truckers from the Association of Russian Carriers (OPR) came to condemn the ROC’s increasing appetite for property. Members of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, which holds seats in the municipal, regional and national parliaments, ignored the event, for which they were roundly condemned by their non-systemic counterparts on the podium.
Unlike liberal opponents of plans to transfer ownership of St. Isaac’s Cathedral Museum to the ROC, the protesters made no attempt to be diplomatic and did not mince their words. Some speakers declared the ROC “satanic” and compared it to Islamic State, an organization that has been banned in Russia.
For ten minutes, Ivan Lokh, leader of the Witnesses of Foucault’s Pendulum, an atheist community, fiercely and emotionally denounced the ROC’s desire to exterminate science and culture. He then quoted Chernyshevsky, whose monument was the focal point of the entire rally.
“Religion’s purpose is to inure the unfortunate and hungry to the notion they must perpetually be hungry and rejoice in their plight. That’s what religion is!” proclaimed the activist.
ROC leaders are themselves not inclined to the asceticism they popularize among the oppressed classes, and this can only indicate that the highest ranks of ROC clergymen do not believe in God, said Lokh.
“We see the indecent luxury in which ROC hierarchs live. They do not fear their own God. They don’t fear Him, because they know for certain He doesn’t exist. This is the most obvious proof He really doesn’t exist!” the activist shouted to the applause of the crowd.
During breaks between speakers, the rally’s organizers asked protesters to carefully observe those in attendance in order to weed out provocateurs. The event’s moderator explained to ZakS.Ru that anti-clerical rallies have frequently been visited by people wanting to disrupt them. In addition, MP Vitaly Milonov’s public promise to interfere with the picket had forced protesters to be vigilant.
Semyon Borzenko, a member of the city committee of the unregistered United Communist Party’s regional branch, thrilled the crowd when he called for abolishing the federal law on transferring property to the ROC, which has led to the destruction of numerous museums. Borzenko also said atheists should campaign for the adoption of two law bills, drafted by local municipal deputy Irina Komolova during the previous sitting of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly. The first would protect the feelings of atheists, while the second would strip the ROC of its “totally unjustified tax breaks.” According to Borzenko, the “indecent luxury” mentioned by Ivan Lokh was a consequence of the fact the ROC did not pay taxes, unlike every other organization.
Nikolai Perov, leader of the regional branch of the Communists of Russia, focused his criticism on the “Zyuganovites,” who had welcomed the possible transfer of St. Isaac’s Cathedral to the ROC.
“It’s a crying shame that certain members of the communist movement, who sit in parliament, have retreated from the [Bolshevik] decree and Leninist principles. Shame on Zyuganov! Shame on [CPRF Petersburg Legislative Assembly member] Alexander Rassudov! Shame on [State Duma member and filmmaker] Vladimir Bortko! There’s not a single scientifically minded person left in the CPRF!” stated Perov.
Despite the concerns of organizers, the rally came off without any provocations or crackdowns on the part of law enforcement. Towards the end of the rally, human rights activist Dinar Idrisov (recently denounced by “soldier of Christ” and city parliament speaker Vyacheslav Makarov for insulting the feelings of believers) handed out pamphlets entitled “The Museum Belongs to the City.” Like a week ago, opponents of transferring St. Isaac’s to the ROC had their pictures taken, placards in hand, this time standing next to the monument to Nikolai Chernyshevsky.
Translated by the Russian Reader. Photos courtesy ofZakS.Ru
P.S. Thank God for the truly militant godless, Russian society’s only real bulwark against the militant godless masquerading as god-fearing soldiers of Christ for the tax breaks, luxurious lifestyle, and other perks that come from collaborating with the regime to befuddle and disempower ordinary people. The other bulwark against the maskers is the fact, of course, that the vast majority of Russians are de facto godless, whatever they might say about themselves when surveyed by FOM or some other all-seeing blind eye of the de facto atheist pollocracy. TRR
Thinker and revolutionary, founder of Russian social democracy, and major theorist of the Russian labor movement, Georgi Plekhanov (1856–1918) occupies a prominent place in Russia’s political history. Occasioned by the 160th anniversary of his birth, the exhibition focuses on the political biography of this talented propagandist and popularizer of Marxism, showing how his views evolved as the Russian revolutionary movement (1870–1917) progressed from the Populists to the Marxists. Avoiding both apologetics for an “outstanding Russian Marxist thinker” and Soviet-era accusations of Menshevism and opportunism, the exhibition shows the socio-economic and political conditions that shaped the revolutionary’s worldview.
In 1876, Plekhanov was an organizer of the clandestine organization Land and Liberty, taking part in rallies and strikes, and penning proclamations. During the first political demonstration in Russia, which took place outside Kazan Cathedral in Petersburg on December 6, 1876, Plekhanov delivered a diatribe against the autocracy. He rejected terrorism as a means of struggle, and when Land and Will split in 1879, he headed the underground Populist organization Black Repartition. Fleeing from police persecution, Plekhanov went into exile abroad, spending a total of thirty-seven years in Switzerland, Italy, France, and other European countries.
In 1883 in Geneva, Plekhanov founded Emancipation of Labor, the first Russian Marxist group, which published the works of Marx and Engels and popularized Marxism. Plekhanov became a prominent Marxist theorist and a leader of the international socialist movement, participating in the congresses of the Second International, and producing numerous works of journalism, philosophy, and literary criticism. In 1900, Plekhanov and Lenin launched the underground newspaper Iskra. Plekhanov was also involved in founding the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, but after the party split into Bolshevik and Menshevik factions in 1903, he was at odds with Lenin.
The exhibition deals at great length with Plekhanov and Lenin’s relationship, which evolved from cooperation to confrontation. Plekhanov emerged as a political antagonist of Bolshevism and a critic of Lenin and the October Revolution. (He dubbed Lenin’s “April Theses” “nonsense.”) The exhibition has also captured the fierce polemics about Marxism that Plekhanov conducted with the Populists Nikolay Mikhaylovsky and Lev Tikhomirov, the revisionist Eduard Bernstain, the Legal Marxist Pyotr Struve, and Yekaterina Kuskova, ideologist of the so-called Economists.
The exhibition features documents, photographs, and works of Georgi Plekhanov, as well as numerous exhibits on the history of the Russian revolutionary movement, including Land and Liberty’s first leaflets from the 1870s. Paintings and drawings illustrate the events to which Plekhanov responded.
Georgi Plekhanov’s funeral, Petrograd, 1918. Photo courtesy of humus.livejournal.com
Plekhanov’s death mask and a documentary film about his funeral (provided by the Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive) witness the end of his life. On June 9, 1918, Plekhanov’s coffin was escorted by students, clerks, teachers, journalists, lawyers, and workers—by no fewer than ten thousand Petrograders who refused to obey the instructions of Bolshevik leaders. People of different political views and convictions marched should to shoulder in the funeral procession, including Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, Constitutional Democrats and ardent monarchists. Only the official Bolshevik authorities demonstratively refused to be involved in the funeral. One of the greatest men of his time was thus laid to rest.
Leader of World Proletariat with Female Gate Attendant Reflected in Security Mirror, SUV, and New Year’s Tree. December 18, 2016, 11 Lomanaya Street, St. Petersburg
An important public service message from the kleptocratic post-fascist hybrid regime: Make your family strong, not your liquor! “In Russia, 16% of families break up due to alcoholism.” Uff da! ||| TRR, December 18, 2015
Post-Soviet “ethnic diversity” gone bad. Four “folk singers” from god knows what republic or “little people of the north” lip-synching a folk song at the New Year’s bazaar on Pioneer Square in Petrograd. ||| TRR, December 18, 2015
The Russian Reader 