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Houston Chronicle, United States
Anti-Fascists Chased by Police
Friday, March 28, 2008
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| Sergey Chernov / The St. Petersburg Times Anti-fascist protestors participating in an unsanctioned march along Nevsky Prospekt on Tuesday evening. |
A large group of anti-Nazi youth activists walked down Nevsky Prospekt, St. Petersburg’s main street, in an unsanctioned march protesting neo-Nazi violence in memory of a murdered activist this week. Twenty six were detained by the police soon afterwards.
More than 150 young men and women belonging to unaffiliated the Antifa (militant “anti-fascism”) movement, most with faces covered with scarves and carrying flares and banners, marched 1.5 kilometers from Alexander Nevsky Ploshchad to Ploshchad Vosstaniya during a heavy snowstorm at around 8 p.m. on Tuesday.
The protesters carried two large red banners reading “Make Nazism History” and “Trash Nationalism” and chanted slogans, such as “Antifa,” “Go into the Street and Take the City Back,” “The World is Multi-Colored, Not Brown” and “No to Nazis of Any Kind — from the Street to the Authorities.”
The march was held to mark nine days since the death of Alexei Krylov, a 21-year-old anti-Nazi activist who was stabbed to death by an estimated 15 neo-Nazis on March 16 as he was heading to a punk concert near the club Art Garbage in Moscow.
It was reported that the attack was planned using a website for fans of the Moscow Premier League soccer team Spartak. Three days later an anti-Nazi march that reportedly drew 300 activists was held in the center of Moscow.
Anti-Nazi activist and punk musician Timur Kacharava, 20, was killed in a similar attack in St. Petersburg in November 2005.
In St. Petersburg, the marchers distributed leaflets about Krylov’s murder and asking for financial help for his mother and two younger sisters. Another leaflet described the ideology of “Autonomous Antifascism” and called for street-level resistance against neo-Nazism.
“Antifascists went down to the demonstration to state that they are not going to tolerate neo-Nazi violence, which has become an acute problem in Russia. Reports about attacks on foreign students and killings of migrants have ceased to shock anyone. They have become routine,” said the Antifa group in a statement on website www.piter.indymedia.ru.
“Attacks are also committed on representatives of countercultural youths who try to resist neo-Nazis. Over the past 2 1/2 years, five anti-fascists from different cities were killed for their convictions, St. Petersburg musician Timur Kacharava among them.
“The whole history of the anti-fascist movement shows that it can only be a success if it uses all available tactics of resistance (not excluding direct physical counteraction).”
The police, which has disrupted most demonstrations with no official permission issued by the authorities in recent years — even though the Russian Constitution guarantees freedom of assembly — were not aware of the march, which had been organized in secret, and only reacted when the march was almost finished, as protesters reached Ploshchad Vosstaniya.
Apparently taken by surprise, several policemen tried to stop the marchers from crossing Ligovsky Prospekt, and when they failed, blocked the entrance to Ploshchad Vosstaniya metro, so the group went down Ulitsa Vosstaniya and then turned in the direction of Ulitsa Mayakovskogo.
Arrests started near the Novotel hotel where a policeman attacked a straggler, pushing him to the ground. The protesters’ leader, who gave commands through a megaphone during the march, was detained soon after, along with other activists who tried to run away through courtyards but found themselves trapped.
After reaching Ulitsa Zhukovskogo, the main group ran away in an organized fashion. The police failed to catch them.
“Twenty six citizens were detained, but five of them turned out to be minors and were immediately released and turned over to their parents,” said Vyacheslav Stepchenko, the spokesman for the Interior Ministry in St. Petersburg, by phone on Thursday. According to Antifa’s statement, the minors were only released after 11 p.m.
According to Stepchenko, the activists were detained according to two clauses of the Administrative Code, Article 19.3 Part I (“Failure to Follow a Policeman’s Lawful Orders”) and Article 20.2 (“Violation of the Regulations of Conducting Meetings, Marches, Demonstrations and Pickets”).
The rest of the detained activists were released on Wednesday afternoon, when the court ruled to send their cases to their local courts. Failure to follow a policeman’s lawful orders is the gravest offence of the two and can lead to up to 15 days in custody.
“We didn’t inform the authorities about the march because they wouldn’t have permitted it anyway,” said a participant, who asked that his name be withheld, by phone on Thursday.
“We also didn’t need to advertize it because we can gather that many people without any publicity.”
This year has seen a rise in racially-motivated violence in Russia, with St. Petersburg following Moscow in the rate of incidents reported.
An Uzbek man and a woman either from Yakutia or Buryatiya, were reported to have been stabbed to death in St. Petersburg this week, in addition to three other racially-motivated killings and a number of beatings this month.
For a change someone is doing something positive in the States:
Students talk acceptance and friendship at summit
Greeley Tribune, CO -
But I see people in school going, 'oh, they're emos,' or 'they're gangsters' and stuff."
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