Khimki One Year Later: July 28, 2010 – July 28, 2011

July 28 marked a year to the day since the famous demonstration in
Khimki during which 300-400 young anarchists and antifascists from
Moscow and the Moscow Region marched from the train station to the
Khimki town hall (to the applause of local residents), where they set
off smoke grenades, pelted the building with stones, and spray-painted
several slogans on its walls.

It was a protest not only against the blatant clear-cutting of the
free Khimki Forest to make way for a Moscow-Petersburg paid highway of
dubious worth, but also against the methods the woodcutters employed
to shield their actions from public protest. Environmentalists who
tried to get in the way of the construction equipment were dispersed
not only by police but also by masked soccer hooligans. When their
masks slipped off, the protesters recognized several of them as
ultra-rightists.

The demonstration was spontaneous: it was held instead of a concert by
two Moscow hardcore groups. During the demonstration, Pyotr Silayev,
the singer for one of these groups, Proverochnaya Lineika, encouraged
the demonstrators with chants shouted into a megaphone. The megaphone
is one of Silyaev’s traditional “musical instruments”; you can find
old videos on the Web where it is clear that he is shouting his fight
songs into a megaphone: “It’s time to take the consequences for your
culture! It’s time to take the consequences!”

Pyotr has been taking the consequences ever since: after managing to
flee the country the day after the demonstration, he has spent time as
a homeless vagrant in Western Europe, a squatter occupying abandoned
dwellings, and a prisoner in a Polish camp for illegal immigrants. He
is now applying for political asylum in a country neighboring Russia.

Another of the “defendants,” Muscovite Denis Solopov, an antifascist
activist, artist (the first exhibitions of his paintings took place
recently in Kyiv and Moscow), and a jeweler by training, was held in
Lukyanovsky Prison, Kyiv’s notorious pre-trial detention facility,
from March 2 to July 13 of this year. During this time he managed to
catch pneumonia and spent Victory Day, May 9, in solitary confinement.
Denis was meanly arrested outside the offices of the Kyiv Migration
Service, which had rejected his asylum request. The fact that at the
time he had already been recognized as UN mandate refugee and that
this status had been confirmed by the Kyiv office of the UN High
Commissioner for Refugees, did not stop the Ukrainian jailers: they
had in hand a request to extradite Denis to the Russian Federation.
However, all the protests actions organized by comrades in Kyiv,
Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod and other cities were not in vain: on July 28,
2011, Denis Solopov left Ukraine and went further into exile,
traveling to a third country [the Netherlands] which had agreed to
admit him as a political refugee.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yhb9PBfxe8Y&feature=player_embedded

Two more participants in the Khimki demonstration heard the Khimki
city court’s verdict in late June. Alexei Gaskarov, a correspondent
for the web site www.ikd.ru (the Institute for Collective Action has
specialized in coverage and analysis of social protests in Russia for
nearly seven years, and Alexei has worked for them most of that time),
was acquitted, while Maxim Solopov, a student at the Russian State
University for the Humanities, was given a two years of probation. It
was a surprising decision, considering that one and the same witnesses
gave contradictory testimony against both of them, and that the
defense had challenged claims that these witnesses had actually been
in Khimki during the demonstration.

This largely “vegetarian” sentence was preceded by the stint Alexei
and Maxim spent in the Mozhaisk Pre-Trial Detention Facility during
the first phase of the preliminary investigation (from late July to
mid-October 2010), as well as a vigorous public campaign for their
release. Thus, during the first international action days on their
behalf (September 17-20, 2010), thirty-six protest actions were held
in thirty-two cities in twelve countries in Eastern and Western
Europe, as well as in North America. Protests also took place in
Russia, Siberia, and Ukraine, of course. The Campaign for the Release
of the Khimki Hostages managed in a short time to mobilize not only
people in Moscow, Petersburg, and Kyiv in support of the young Russian
activists, but also people in Krakow, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Paris,
London, and Berlin. In Athens and New York, protests for the release
of Alexei and Maxim took place on two occasions in late September.

Political refugees from Moscow who (unlike Denis Solopov and Pyotr
Silayev) have not made official asylum requests, continue to take the
consequences for the Khimki demonstration, as well as for their
protest culture, including the stones, smoke grenades, and spray-paint
cans. They have dispersed to various cities and countries. They have
not seen friends and relatives for a year now, and they are still
afraid to return home. They were forced to flee Moscow a campaign of
mass intimidation unprecedented in recent Russian history. The
campaign has focused on the youth subculture scene to which many of
them belonged – the antifascist punk/hardcore community. Arrests,
searches, interrogations, and beatings took place throughout most of
August 2010 not only in Moscow and the Moscow Region, but also in
other regional capitals, including Nizhny Novgorod and Kostroma. In
Zhukovsky, a town in the Moscow Region, seventy people were arrested
before a concert, while in Kostroma more than 260 people were arrested
in similar circumstances. The police officers who interrogated
antifascist Alexander Pakhotin promised to cut off his ear, and it
took him several weeks to recover from the beating he suffered at
their hands. But they haven’t left him alone even now, a year later.
In early July of this year he suddenly got a phone call inviting him
to report to Petrovka, 38 [Moscow police HQ], for an informal
discussion. Alexander reasonably replied to the caller that he
preferred to talk with police investigators only after receiving an
official summons. For Moscow police investigators, however, an
official summons is, apparently, something incredibly difficult. It’s
probably easier for them to hunt down and beat up obstinate witnesses
– which is exactly what happened to Alexander Pakhotin.

Further evidence of the secret police’s abiding interest in the people
who took part in last year’s Khimki demonstration is the canard that
circulated in the Russian media in late June: Pyotr Silayev had
allegedly been arrested in Brussels by Interpol at the request of
Russian law enforcement authorities. Antifascists quickly refuted this
lie: at the time, Pyotr was fishing, and he was not in Brussels.
Apparently, the authorities were trying their best to patch up their
reputation after losing the casing against Gaskarov and Solopov in the
Khimki court.

And all this time the saga of the Khimki Forest per se has continued.
There was last year’s big demonstration on Pushkin Square [in Moscow]
with headliners music critic Artemy Troitsky, rock musician Yuri
Shevchuk, and Maria Lyubicheva, lead singer for the popular group
Barto. Then was there the temporary halt to the logging of the forest.
This was followed by a vicious musical parody of the activists by a
musician [Sergei Shnurov] who had been previously seemed like a member
of the “alternative scene,” but now turned out to be singing almost
with the voice of the Ministry of Truth. There was wintertime
tree-hugging and springtime subbotniks. And finally, there was Russian
president’s meeting with public figures and his announcement that the
highway would go through the forest after all. Subsequently, we’ve
witnessed the Anti-Seliger forum, to which two of every species of
oppositional beast came (where were all of them during the constant
demos and clashes in Khimki?), and their using the misfortune of the
Khimkians to grandstand in the run-up to the 2011-2012 election
season. Finally, there is the tent camp set up by the Rainbow Keepers
and other eco-anarchists, which opened on July 27, 2011, the eve of
the first anniversary of the famous demonstration.

What has this past year shown us? That in our country, any project,
even one that is obviously directed against society, will be forced
through all the same if big money and the authorities back it. That
there is still no control over criminalized local authorities: not
only have none of the officials mixed up in dubious affairs been put
on trial, but none have even been fired. That the power of social
solidarity still counts for something: if it cannot stop harmful
projects, it can at least defend activists who have fallen captive to
the penal system and get people out of jail. That radical political
action (of which last year’s demonstration was an instance) is quite
effective at drawing attention to acute problems, but that it must be
effectively deployed and backed up with infrastructure, however
informal; otherwise, the emotional, political, and physical toll on
the movement will be too high and may jeopardize its very existence.
This, perhaps, is the most important lesson for the social movement,
but it bears repeating. As you know, in our country, even if you have
brains and talent, it takes a huge effort to roast your enemy over the
fire. For if you relax for just a second, lo and behold, he’s already
roasting you over the fire. But there is hope, and the future still
hasn’t been written.

Vlad Tupikin