Query -> Russia & ultra-right

Chip Berlet cberlet at igc.org
Thu Nov 1 09:57:21 PST 2001


Hi,

Thanks, that was very informative. Here is the IndyMedia statement from Russian volunteers.

October 1, 2001

Statement of the Russian Indymedia Collective on changing the editor of

Russian Indymedia, Vladimir Videmann in connection with his ultra-right

views and actions.

In Dec. 2000 the Russian Indymedia site was set up as the Russian branch of the international anti-corporate independent media centers. The site was

founded and was edited by Vladimir Videmann (Guzman) who lives in Berlin and works as a BBC correspondent. The creation of this site wasn't done with the coordination of activists in Russia and other countries where Russian is

actively used but was rather the private initiative of the editor. Despite

this, many people used this site including activists from the anarchist,

ecological, human rights and other social movements in Russia, Ukraine and

other former Soviet countries.

In summer 2001, nationalist texts started to appear on Indymedia, material

from "Zavtra", including texts from the editor of this paper, the famous

national patriot Alexander Prokhanov as well as texts by the famous Russian ideologue of the new right, Alexander Dugin, etc. Activists from Indymedia

Russia tried to explain to the editor that such texts are not in the spirit of the Indymedia project but these comments fell on deaf ears. In response, Videmann started a discussion on "censorship" which served to confuse the

real purpose of he arguments and which was used to make people out to be

against free speech. As we recently learned, in the spring of 2001, Videmann invited new right activists on Dugin's site (www.arctogaia.com) to take part in Russian Indymedia.

In September 2001 we got irrefutable evidence of ideological and

organization ties between Videmann and Russian and European new right

organizations, in part material from the Russian fascist journal "Naslediye Predkov" and from Videmann's own journal "Imperativ". ( See the text,

Russian Indymedia in the hands of the new right on Sept. 28, 2001.)

Taking all this into account, we feel it is impossible to work with the

current editor of Russian Indymedia.

We hope that the international Indymedia community will find some way to

remove Videmann from this responsibility and to hand over editorship to a

new editorial collective, made up, in part, by people from Russian Indymedia in Kasimov, Kiev, St. Petersburg, Moscow and other cities.

We are very concerned about the fact that new right activists have

infiltrated was the journalists have labeled "the anti-globalization

movement" and we would like to prevent such inflitration. On most Indymedia sites around the world they use the principle of open posting where any

person can post on the site. We respect this principle but we feel we must

stress that this works well in countries where there are well-developed

grassroots movements, which can't be said of Russia and other Soviet

countries. Unfortunately political movements here are dominated by

conservative, nationalist and fascist forces which we feel it is necessary

to fight against. Many of us came into the antiglobalization movement in

part to fight such forces.

We also feel that history shows us that totalitarians are very intolerant

towards people with other points of view and that if fascists gain more

influence in Indymedia, all would be lost. Instead of being Independent

Media, it wold become an ideologically limited resource.

We would like to point out that in some countries with strong right

movements (like Germany, Quebec or Columbia), the editorial collectives of

Indymedia can decide to oversee open posting and block certain posts.

Taking into account the position of the right in Russia and other former

Soviet countries, we feel it is necessary to impose some editorial control

on the contents of Indymedia after the current editor is removed from his

responsibilities. We would work out the mechanism for this control working

in conjunction with other Indymedia sites.

Signed:

Maxim Butkevich, Kiev

Ute Weinmann, Moscow

Pavel Golubovski, Kiev Alexei Kozlov, Voronezh

Lyolik Kutsenko, Kiev

Julia Kutsenko, Kiev

Sergei Lushakov, Kiev

Sergei Nedosekov, Kiev

Nastya Osipova, Kiev

Pavel Skurenevski, Kiev

Andrei Tvardievich, Kiev

Yulia Tikhomirova, St. Petersburg

Vlad Tupikin, Moscow

Yevgeni Faizullin, St.Petersburg

Grigory Feldman, Moscow

Tuuli Hakulinen, St. Petersburg

Mikhail Tsovma, Moscow


> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Chris Doss
> Sent: Thursday, November 01, 2001 11:18 AM
> To: 'lbo-talk at lists.panix.com'
> Subject: RE:Query
>
>
>
> Chip said:
>
> Hi,
>
> Oh good, a Red/Brown coalition. Just the coalition we need.
> Such a good
> history,
> pioneered by the national socialists in Germany. So, is the
> Indymedia site
> in
> Moscow still run by an anti-corporate-globalization fascist?
> I heard a bunch
> of
> the volunteers quit because of the antisemitic articles claiming
> globalization
> was a Jewish plot. Is there more information on this you
> could share? I get
> nervous when I hear about these types of coalitions.
>
>
> - -Chip
>
> And I say:
>
> Actually, last night about 100 people the government
> identified as members
> of Russia National Unity, which is a Nazi group, went on a
> well-organized
> rampage, if that's not an oxymoron, in one of the markets in southern
> Moscow, beat up loads of people and killed two. Market
> vendors tend to be
> immigrants from the Caucasus, Armenia, Azerbaijan and
> whatnot, so they're
> targeted a lot by racist thugs.
>
> The CPRF isn't really red-brown; they're not even Communists,
> actually. If
> you read their 2000 program (which is on their Website, in
> English), you'll
> see that they are basically Soc.-Dems.: They're big on
> support for small and
> medium business, increasing social programs, free education,
> etc. So, even
> if they do wave around pictures of Stalin, they're actually
> not Stalinists
> or even Leninists in actual practice. (I think one problem
> for left-wing
> organizations in Russia is that the only time social justice
> was made a
> theme was during the USSR, which results in people linking
> social programs
> and Stalin.) And they hate fascists like the plague, since a large
> proportion of the CP constituency are elderly and remember
> WWII. They're
> also very attentive to trying to get accurate vote counts,
> since they know
> their position depends upon their popularity with the
> electorate -- 40% of
> Russians regularly vote Communist, and the CP wants to make
> damn sure those
> ballots don't get dumped in the river by some regional
> governer or city
> mayor.
>
> They're also not nearly as anti-Semitic as portrayed in the West: Most
> anti-Semitic comments come from rinky-dink regional
> polititians in some
> place in the middle of b-f. nowhere in Siberia or whatnot.
> This is not to
> say that a lot of people in the CP are anti-Semites, but
> that's because a
> lot of Russians are anti-Semites. It's not part of the party
> program or
> anything. (BTW, when a Russian talks about "Jewish influence in the
> country," it's not as anti-Semitic as it sounds to a
> Westerner: They're
> reacting to the fact that the Mafia is dominated by people of Jewish
> ethnicity and, of all the oligarchs, only one, Vladimir Potanin, is a
> gentile. The most hated man in Russia, Boris Berezovsky, is
> head of the
> Russian Jewish Council.)
>
> The Red-Browns are a bunch of fractured, little groups, like
> the National
> Bolshevik Party, which I suspect is half performance art on
> the part of its
> leader, the writer Limonov -- who writes for the eXile and is
> in jail now
> under allegations of running guns, BTW -- Russia National
> Unity, Slavic
> Unity, etc. (Yes, that's write, Taibbi and Ames are friends
> with the leader
> of the NBP.) A friend of mine used to hover around the
> fringes of the NBP in
> the early 90s, when he was trying to be a badass
> everybody-is-scared-of-me
> punk rocker, and he says Limonov is a fraud and probably a
> squealer. The
> Komsomol, which was kicked out of the CP for being "too
> radical," have some
> brown tendencies -- its doors are open only to Slavs and their pretty
> hypernationalistic. Have pretty cool graffiti though: "A
> steak for the poor,
> a noose for the rich!"
>
> I don't think they pose any threat on anything other than the
> street level,
> as the government is pretty tough on cracking down on them,
> which was not
> the case I understand in Weimar Germany, for example, where
> the gov. used
> them to beat up on the Communists. And they're pretty small
> and fragmented.
> Not that that helps you if you're a Dagestani selling shoes
> in the market.
>
> I don't know about indymedia, but www.left.ru, which Boris Kagarlitsky
> writes for, carries a lot of "Milosevic is a hero" stuff. I
> wouldn't call
> them brown by any means, but they are very nationalistic.
>
> Chris Doss
> The Russia Journal
>



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