Meaningful art: the KGB HQ ablaze

Pavlensky infront of the Beria-designed ablaze door

Pavlensky is a hero, as far as I'm concerned. This image above will outlive him. Reblogged with permission.


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By Gabriel Levy

Russian political performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky, who set fire to the doors of the Federal Security Service (FSB) headquarters this week, has asked a judge to treat him the same way as political prisoners from Crimea.

On Monday [last week] Pavlensky poured petrol on the doors of the notorious building on Lubyanka square – used since the 1940s as the offices and detention centre of the KGB, the Stalinist security police – and set light to them. Supporters filmed the action. Pavlensky was arrested and charged with “vandalism motivated by ideological hatred” – to which he responded: “It would be strange to have any other attitude to the Lubyanka.”

In the Taganka district court on Wednesday, Pavlensky said that “the so-called ‘Crimean terrorists’” were charged with terrorism offences for setting fire to doors, in cases fabricated by the FSB. “I demand that I be suspected of terrorism. I consider this to be the logic of your system. Until this demand is met, I refuse to participate in all your juridical rituals.” He then declined to answer further questions.

The Crimean prisoners to which Pavlensky referred are anti-fascist activist Aleksandr Kolchenko and film director Oleg Sentsov, political prisoners jailed for their part in protests against the Russian annexation of Crimea in March 2014. Kolchenko and Sentsov were in August sentenced to ten and twenty years respectively by a court in Rostov-on-Don, southern Russia, on fabricated terrorism charges. A third frame-up victim, Gennady Afanasiev, gave evidence under torture that was used to secure convictions, and is serving a seven-year sentence. Human rights organisations denounced the trial as a parody of justice and demanded the defendants’ release.

The connection made by Pavlensky was to Kolchenko’s admission that he had been involved in causing a fire at a building used by pro-Russian forces in Crimea, in which no-one was hurt and only minor damage done to property. His lawyer argued that a hooliganism charge would have been appropriate. (For detailed information on the Crimea case see the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group site.)

Pavlensky, 32, has been remanded in custody for a month. The court rejected his lawyer’s request for release on 1 million rubles (about £10,000) bail, and/or being placed under house arrest while caring for his children, who are seven and four years old.

Pavlensky named his performance “Threat. The Lubyanka’s burning doors”. In a statement published on line, he said:

The burning door of Lubyanka is a glove thrown by society in the face of the terrorist threat. The Federal Security Service [FSB] operates through continuous terror and holds sway over 146,000,000 people. Fear has turned free people into a sticky mass of isolated bodies. The threat of imminent reprisal hangs over anyone within reach of surveillance and eavesdropping devices and passport checks. Military courts are eliminating the last vestiges of free will. But terrorism can exist only due to the animal instinct of fear. An unconditional defensive reflex makes the individual oppose this instinct. This is the reflex to fight for one’s own life. And life is worth fighting for.

Pavlensky nailing his balls to Red Square

Pavlensky’s previous performances have included lying in St Isaac’s Square in St Petersburg, wrapped in barbed wire, and sewing up his lips in protest at attacks on freedom of speech. He considers himself an actionist, in the tradition of the artistic school of that name established in Vienna in the 1960s. Earlier this year he organised a group of people to burn automobile tyres and bang metal sheets with sticks in the centre of St Petersburg, to echo the atmosphere of the Maidan demonstrations in Kiev that brought down the government of Viktor Yanukovich in February 2014.

Some Russian socialists have argued that Pavlensky’s action was motivated by middle-class individualism. I sympathise with the response by Ivan Ovsyannikov, a socialist and trade union activist:

Yes, I understand all that about “middle-class/ decadent/ individualist rebellion” that “lacks class consciousness”. I’ll even allow that the FSB’s doors are a valuable artistic monument. But I spit on those doors and on pseudo-left phrases. Right now they are cynical, wretched, inappropriate. Pavlensky isn’t a political strategist. But he is a brave person who can serve as an example (no, not in respect of his particular way of doing things, but with his unbending non-conformism at a time when total cynicism prevails). I do not know how good an artist he is, but in any case I know that those who are judging him “wouldn’t do art like that themselves”. Of course, there is no need to imitate Pavlensky, but there’s nothing to despise him for, either. At the end of the day, the Marxists of the early 20th century disagreed with the methods of the People’s Will and Socialist Revolutionaries – but that didn’t stop them from acknowledging their heroism. And of course this is a different case. But from a moral point of view, I repeat, Pavlensky is right. And we need to defend him. And “to defend” does not mean to say “oh, bless him, he didn’t mean anything nasty, just give him 15 days”. No, the main point must be this: [government] power, which has spit on morals, rights and justice, that power, which has surpassed all the limits of good and evil, has no right to judge the artist Pavlensky, even if he burned the whole FSB to a cinder.

St Petersburg picket for Sentsov + Kolchenko

For readers who doubt the rationale of Pavlensky’s action, I would add two points of my own.

First, it is almost impossible either rationally or emotionally to get our minds round the cruelty of the sentences on Kolchenko and Sentsov, and the absurdity of the fabricated case against them. Pavlensky’s courageous action helps.

Russian social and labour movements face a state that is not yet a dictatorship … but under which even small acts of political defiance potentially carry the price of devastating, disproportionate repression. Pavlensky didn’t answer the question “what to do?”, but he focused on the inevitably inadequate nature of our responses to the Crimea case. Of course, inadequate: Kolchenko and Sentsov are in jail and may remain there for years.

Second, the site of Pavlensky’s performance was well chosen. From the 1930s the Lubyanka epitomised Stalinist terror. It crushed and destroyed people – socialists, activists, and innocent bystanders alike – on site. Its continued use in the post-Soviet period as the security police headquarters is a pretty eloquent expression of the continuity between past and present regimes. Resistance continues too.



See also:

• Sanctions response needed to Sentsov, Kolchenko case. 
• Information about the campaign to support the Crimean prisoners on the Kharkiv Human Rights Protect Group site, the Free Alexander Kolchenko facebook page, and on the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign site. A statement by Amnesty International on the trial is here. 
• On Pavlensky’s art, read The Body Politic: how Pyotr Pavlensky’s performance art is breaking the mould – Calvert Journal, 13 November 2014. Information on the Vienna actionists here.
• Articles on People & Nature about Ukraine including an update on workers’ organisations in eastern Ukraine and War as a means of social control by Gabriel Levy (October 2014)
• Russia's brave 75yo protester 
• Moscow Times: Pavlensky's Flaming Doors: The Tweets 
• Pavlensky being slagged off as not very good art, not as good as (Benneton's) Oliviero Toscani!  
• The Moscow Times saying that the Kremlin doesn't know what to do with Pavlensky.

How Mother Nature exposed one Gulag mass grave

Reblogged with permission from Global Voices.

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By Kevin Rothrock

Sergey Parkhomenko, a Russian journalist and publisher, has worked as a reporter, an editor, a radio show host, and more. He is also immensely popular on Facebook, where he has more than 133,000 subscribers.

A man of generally anti-Kremlin views, Parkhomenko challenged his social media audience on November 2 to tell him if they know the history of a Russian town called Kolpashevo. He received more than 5,000 responses—most of them saying no. Five hours after polling his readers on the subject, Parkhomenko wrote on Facebook again, telling a story very few Russians, it turns out, have ever heard.

This post has attracted more than 12,700 “likes,” more than 13,000 shares, and more than 1,200 comments. RuNet Echo reproduces that text below, translated into English.

Sergey Parkhomenko. Photo by Evgeniy Isaev

Well what do you know. Five thousand people answered my impromptu survey in my last post. I asked if my readers can tell me anything about a place called Kolpashevo, located in the Tomsk region. Or if they knew anything about a particular place inside Kolpashevo: the Kolpashevsky Ravine.Colleagues at [the human rights organization] Memorial assure me that Kolpashevo’s history is well-known, has been written about many times, and is all over the Internet. In the 90s, moreover, a small book was even published on the subject.

Of the 5,000 people who responded to my Facebook post, however, only 30 or 40 said they know about the history behind the town. And most of these people live in the Tomsk area (or used to live there), so they know the history from their relatives and their neighbors… The rest answered: no, don’t know, never heard of it.

So now I can go ahead and tell the story.

The town of Kolpashevo (home to a little more than than 20,000 souls, according to the latest census) sits on the high bank of the Ob River. The water makes a turn at Kolpashevo, and every year it “eats away” a few feet of a sand cliff there, inching closer and closer to the homes on streets named after Lenin and Dzerzhinsky [the founder of the Soviet secret police forces]. This is how it’s been for as long as anyone can remember, and everyone in town is used to it.

Location of Kolpashevo in Siberia

On April 30, 1979, exactly one day before May Day, the Ob’s waters knocked down another six-foot chunk of sand from the riverbank. Sticking out from the newly exposed wall were the arms, legs, and heads of people buried there. A cemetery at least several yards wide had been exposed. The people had been packed in and layered tightly. The top layer of bodies were decayed almost completely, while the lower layers were very well preserved, mummified in pure sand. It’s said that you could easily see the clothes they were wearing, and in some cases you could even make out the faces. There were men and women of different ages, and there were children. All in civilian clothes.

Some of the skulls from the uppermost layer rolled out from the sandbank, and little boys picked them up, put them on sticks, and started running around the town, scaring passersby. Soon the whole town was aware of what had happened. People started gathering at the sandback. Some thought they could even recognize one person’s coat, or place another person’s face… The police and neighborhood watch volunteers then cordoned off the whole thing. Then, very quickly (literally within a few hours), they built around the crumbling sandbank a thick fence.

The next day, the Communist Party staged gatherings all throughout town, at various enterprises, and in the so-called “red corners” [the Party meeting areas of factory floors]. The Party’s activists began to explain to the population what they’d been told by the Party’s district committee: buried here were traitors and deserters from the war. But the explanation wasn’t entirely convincing. Why was everyone dressed in civilian clothes? What were the women and children doing there? And from where, for that matter, did so many deserters come in a town of just 20,000 people?

Kolpashevo via brizzz on panoramio.com

Meanwhile, a bit more of the sandbank slipped into the river, and it became clear that the burial site was enormous. There were thousands of people. People around town recalled how there used to be a prison on these grounds in the late 1930s. It was general knowledge that there were executions there, but nobody could imagine just how many people were shot. The perimeter fence and barbed wire had long ago been dismantled, and the prison itself was closed down. Even the prison house had been moved to another location farther from the disappearing coast, to a place where it served for many years as a dormitory for students at a technical institute.

In fact (to the knowledge of few people in the town), Kolpashevo’s prison operated a full-fledged assembly line of death. There was a special wooden trough, down which a person would descend to the edge of a ditch. There, he’d be killed by rifle fire, by a shooter sitting in a special booth. If necessary, he’d be finished off with a second shot from a pistol, before being added to the next layer of bodies, laid head-to-toe with the last corpse. Then they’d sprinkle him lightly with lime. This process repeated, until the pit was full. When that happened, they filled in the hole with sand, and moved the trough over a few feet to the side, and began again.

And so the river bank continued to recede and bodies were falling into the water and drifting all the way to the town. People watched this happen from the shore.

Russia intent on revising unfortunate history

Petr Pavlensky early on Monday in front of the FSB door he set alight

The message could not be clearer, in Russia history is decided by the state. The labeling of the legendary human rights group Memorial as a so-called 'foreign agent' underlines a process that has been going on for some time.

Last month the armed forces announced that they were setting up a unit which “will examine, first of all, the history of the Second World War, the facts related to the falsification of Soviet people’s victory in the Great Patriotic War and other events in the life and the armed forces.”

Official state media is publishing denial of the Holodomor, the "Terror-Famine", as Robert Conquest called it, ordered by Stalin that killed as many as seven million Soviet peasants, most of them Ukrainians, in 1932-33.

Approval of Stalin is on the rise both officially, even from the head of the Orthodox Church, as well as among Russian people. Nikolai Svanidze, a writer and historian whose grandfathers died in the purges, told the LA Times that Stalin restoration is as a rival to the West, "which is the context in which he interests Putin." Only two museums dedicated to the gulag exist. Writes Shaun Walker in the Guardian:

The Gulag is not ignored completely, but is “contextualised” in a way that plays down the horror and pairs it with the war, suggesting the two come as a package.

The deputy director of a new Gulag museum in Moscow told Walker that in remembering the Gulag “you can either put up a big portrait of Stalin and note goldmining achievements, or you can put up death rates and haggard faces." Unfortunately, she says, "more often it’s the former."

In an interview with XSoviet News, activist Alex Sinodov said:

People have the idea that Stalin solved problems. Stalin would take care of for instance the neighbours they don’t like. If you look at history the purges mainly took place within the military and government. During Stalin’s purges two percent of the general public were a target, but in the military and MGB (currently FSB) it was as high as 25 percent. If Stalin would be back then people believe that he would take care of parts of the government that they don’t like. Repression starts at the top of the government. As an example Stalin killed heads like Yagoda and Yezhov, the top people in the government suffered a lot.

I also think that by bringing Stalin back into society the Big Brother is watching you is brought back to life. Anything about Stalin also always really pisses off the opposition. That is a big difference between Stalin and Putin, Putin puts people who failed in high places, where Stalin would have eliminated them immediately. Putin doesn’t have control as Stalin did, I think the murder of Boris Nemtsov shows that. Kadyrov took care of Nemtsov, that probably wasn’t a direct order.

There are plenty of Russia though who are fighting back. Early on Monday morning Petr Pavlensky, the performance artists famous for nailing his scrotum literally to Red Square, set fire to a door at the FSB headquarters - the same HQ as the KGB. The door was personally designed by KGB Head Lavrentiy Beria (who Stalin called ‘my Himmler’).

The week before Russians had stood in the square outside the former KGB HQ to mark the annual day of remembrance for Stalin's victims. Thanks to Memorial, each participant had a piece of paper in their hand with the names of two victims, their ages, professions, and dates of execution. Now Memorial's branches in Moscow, Yekaterinburg, the Komi region and the St Petersburg branch discussed below carry a label which echoes the Stalin-era denunciations of alleged anti-Soviet spies.

Reblogged with permission.

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By Halyna Colnash

“A huge blow for all those involved in remembering the victims of the Soviet Terror” is how the decision by Russia’s Justice Ministry to forcibly add the St Petersburg Memorial Research and Information Centre to its register of so-called ‘foreign agents’ has been described. Arseny Roginsky, Head of the International Memorial Society, goes on to explain that RIC Memorial has put together a unique database listing the places where victims of political repression were buried. “No state or civic organization has such a list”, Roginsky stresses.

It was RIC Memorial that played an enormous role in uncovering the mass grave of victims of the Terror at the Sandarmokh Clearing, near Karelia. It was at this place from Oct 27 to Nov 4, 1937 that 1, 111 prisoners from the Solovky camps were executed as part of a killing quota. They included 290 Ukrainian writers, poets, intellectuals and scientists.

The Justice Ministry’s decision was announced on Nov 6, and came unexpectedly since the organization had been informed that they had two weeks “to refute the document confirming the check” and had only just received the document in question. The decision will certainly be appealed.

The Memorial Research and Information Centre was created by historian Veniamin Ioffe, who was himself a political prisoner in the 1960s. It was planned from the outset as a centre providing the research backup for the historical-archival commission of the Memorial Society. It now has archives, a library and the extremely important Virtual Museum of the Gulag.

After hours offline, the Centre’s site now has a statement explaining the Justice Ministry’s decision and the fact that this would oblige them to have a preface to all material saying that it had been pretended “by an organization fulfilling the functions of a foreign agent”. It states that it does not intend to use this label, but will continue all its projects and programs.

“We inform all those interested that the public activities previously carried out by the Memorial Research and Information Centre will be undertaken by the Educational Centre, named after Veniamin Ioffe Просветительный центр имени Вениамина Иофе.

Candles lit at KGB building in Minsk in memory of victims of Stalin's repression, Via Andrei Sannikov

The notorious law on so-called foreign agents came into force on Nov 2012, obliging non-commercial organizations receiving grants from abroad and engaging in what the law very loosely described as ‘political activities’ to register as ‘foreign agents’. The law was boycotted by a lot of civic organizations, so in June 2014 President Vladimir Putin signed into force a law which allows the Justice Ministry to forcibly include organizations on the register. This it has been doing ever since, targeting organizations probing and publicizing grave violations of human rights, or those probing the deaths of soldiers in Russia’s undeclared war against Ukraine, etc.

This is by no means the first attack on Memorial and organizations linked with it. There had been attempts to force ‘foreign agent’ registration in 2013 and then in Oct 2014 a major offensive was launched by the Russian Justice Ministry and the pro-Kremlin television channel NTV. The Justice Ministry announced that it was asking the Supreme Court to dissolve the Russian Memorial Society claiming to have found infringements in its organizational structure. See: Kremlin plays ‘extremist’ card against ’Memorial’ rights organization

There have also been repeated attempts over recent years to whitewash Joseph Stalin and the crimes of the Soviet regime.

On March 12, 2014, a decision was issued by the Inter-departmental Commission on State Secrets to keep the majority of Soviet secret police classified as secret for a further 30 years. This includes the vast bulk of material regarding the Great Terror of 1937-1938.

The drive which Putin initiated in 2007 to highlight the positive aspects of Russia’s history has already resulted in a record number of Russians viewing Stalin in a positive light, and in the first house-museum and monument to Stalin opening in the Tver oblast.

Soviet repression is at the same time being underplayed or denied. An example is seen in the fate of a vital museum on the site of the notorious labour camp Perm-36. The NGO Perm-36 which ran the museum has been driven from the museum and forcibly registered as a ‘foreign agent’. The museum has been taken over by the authorities, and, as a recent visitor wrote, the words ‘Stalin’, ‘dissident’ and Gulag are nowhere to be seen.

Graffiti on Memorial HQ, reads 'foreign agent'

Statement by chairman of board of Memorial human rights centre, Alexander Vladimirovich Cherkasov

On November 9 the Memorial human rights centre received in the post the results of the “Act of Planned Inspection” of our organisation (see excerpt below). The inspection from October 5 was conducted by the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation for the city of Moscow. In this “Act” the Justice Ministry, among other things, puts forward a political accusation addressed to our organisation: “By their actions the members of the Inter-Regional Non-Governmental Organisation the Memorial human rights centre have undermined the foundations of the constitutional order of the Russian Federation, by calling for the overthrow of the current government and a change of the political regime in the country.”

What kind of “actions” are these? What do you have to do to incur such serious accusations?

It turns out that Memorial “undermines the foundations” by forming a negative public opinion “about the state policy that is being conducted by the higher bodies of state government, expresses disagreement with the decisions and actions of the mentioned institutions of government, the results of preliminary investigations and court verdicts that have been given in high-profile criminal cases”.

In the course of our human rights work we gather facts. On their basis, in the course of discussions within the organisation and in a wider circle we develop opinions and evaluations. We publish these materials – evaluations, opinions, factual materials and so on.

Thus we implement freedom of thought and speech and freedom of association, which are guaranteed to us by articles 28 and 30 of the Constitution of Russia. And we do not consider it appropriate to be silent if we see that representatives of the government – including the highest Russian authorities – are violating human rights and the norms of international law.

This, from the point of view of the Justice Ministry, is “forming a negative opinion” and “undermining the foundations”.

Since as examples of “undermining activity” the “Act” gives, firstly, our evaluation of Russia’s actions towards Ukraine. We indeed think that these actions come under the definition of aggression – in full accordance with the UN definition.

Secondly, we are accused of publishing “the opinion of leaders of organisations” about the fact that Russian troops have participated in combat actions in eastern Ukraine. But this “opinion” is also based on a multitude of irrefutable facts.

Thirdly, the Justice Ministry is upset by our disagreement with the unjust verdict given in the Bolotnaya case. Indeed, in our materials and in the materials of other human rights organisations, and in media reports, there is a multitude of proof that the charge in this case was fabricated and falsified.

But where are the calls to “overthrow the current government” here, which the creators of the “Act” immediately accuse us of? Obviously the Justice Ministry equates criticism of the government with attempts to overthrow it.

The Justice Ministry’s “Act of Inspection” which accuses us of “undermining” reports about political prisoners is dated October 30, the Day of Political Prisoners in the USSR.

The prosecutors’ “understanding”, which incriminates the Memorial human rights centre for maintaining a list of political prisoners and a register of people detained at demonstrations, on the basis of which we were included on the “register of foreign agents”, was given to us on April 30, 2013. On the 45th birthday of the dissident “Chronicle of Current Events”, which wrote about judicial and extra-judicial political repressions.

Symbolic coincidences

Since the Justice Ministry’s “Act” itself directly returns us to the times of the Soviet government’s battle against dissidents.

It is probably worth recalling the Constitution of Russia, the section “Foundations of Constitutional Order”, article 2: “The person and his rights and freedoms are the highest value. Recognising, observing and defending the rights and freedoms of the person and citizen are a duty of the state.” And then everything falls into place. It becomes obvious: it is not we, Memorial, but the Justice Ministry that is undermining the foundations of the constitutional order of the Russian Federation by its actions.

(Translation by Sarah Hurst.)


See also:

• Video about Last address a project in which ordinary people, in their own homes and in different cities, install plaques in memory of those for whom this address was their final one, marking the building from which a person was taken away to be put behind bars, and never returned. 
• The night Stalin tried to destroy the Belarussian nation
• Why has Komi Memorial Human Rights Commission decided to close down?
• Memorial Human Rights Centre recognizes Gennady Kravtsov as political prisoner 
• Moscow State University researchers forced to obtain FSB approval for publications 
• Russia says Poland, not USSR, was Hitler’s Ally and Responsible for Holocaust 
• Kremlin-funded Sputnik Int. claims West criticizes Stalin to weaken Russia & its leadership 
• Russia’s ’new approach’ to Stalin and extended secrecy about his victims 
• Stalin Museum: Putin’s Russia Immortalizes Bloody Dictator 
• Anger and Protest over Stalin Monument in Yalta 
• Stalingrad as latest step in re-glorification of tyrant 
• Russia Denies Stalin’s Killer Famine
• Russia's Gulag camps cast in forgiving light of Putin nationalism
• Stalin’s Englishmen: the lessons for today’s left