In spring of 2012, anti-fascist movement of Russia has been targeted with new repressions. An excuse for the repressions was an incident in Moscow club "Vozdukh", where 17th of December, during a punk-hardcore concert, a conflict between public and the security took place. Security of the club consisted of supporters of the far right, and were provoking guests. Due to conflict, concert was got halted prematurely, but the security attempted to take some guests as hostages, promising them punishment from their friends - nationalistic football hooligans. Visitors of the concert resisted, the security opened fire with rubber coated metal bullets, but soon guests of the concert gained upper hand and the security was neutralized.
Alexey Olesinov was arrested 12th of February in Sankt-Petersburg. Alexey Sutuga was arrested in evening of 17th of April in Moscow. Currently, both of them are in a remand prison in Moscow.
But incident in club "Vozdukh" is just an excuse for yet another attempt to destroy anti-fascist movement in Moscow, and in Russia in general. Authorities of the Russian federation are not in a condition to stop nationalists - they are either ignoring the threat all together, or attempt to set up "a controllable nationalist movement", but in the end these attempts just becoming subsidies of the far right from the state - let us keep in mind the close cooperation between pro-Kremlin youth organizations and "Russkiy Obraz", which in turn was connected to armed Nazi underground organization of Yevgeniya Khasis and Nikita Tihonov. But state is harshly intervening against any civic initiatives, which attempt to fight against nationalists using direct action.
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Goal of the most recent operation of the authorities is to neutralize most known and most active anti-fascists of Moscow. Both activists have been in anti-fascist movement for a decade already. Olesinov was already once jailed with bogus charges - in November of year 2008 he was arrested, allegedly for a fight with security in club "Kult" in August of that year. Immediately after that incident, Olesinov was arrested, but released without any charges, as he was not committing even a misdemeanor and club security had no any demands. However, prosecutor demanded 5 years prison sentence on basis of Second part of Statute 213 of Russian criminal codex ("Hooliganism"), but thanks to a wide protest campaign and a number of protests both in Russia and abroad, eventually he was only jailed for a year. But this prison sentence damaged his health for good, and after new arrest in February, he has had continuous health problems. He was diagnosed an early form of tuberculosis, apparently contracted during his previous prison term, but he is not provided a proper medical care.
Remand court of Olesinov involved outrageous violations - prosecutor claims that he was hiding from the officials, and provided judge a warrant not to leave Moscow with a falsified signature, dated to beginning of the February. But there is no way Olesinov could have signed such a paper in Moscow, since he was continuously staying in St. Petersburg since December.
Alexey Sutuga is a member of Autonomous Action since early years of 2000s, he was first active in Irkutsk and then in Moscow. He participated to every single major campaign of anarchist movement during the last ten years, and supported journal Avtonom. In 2007, he joined ecological protest camp against uranium enrichment in city of Angarsk in Siberia, which was assaulted by nationalists in the early morning hours. Ilya Borodaenko from Nahodka of Pacific Ocean was murdered, and a number of other visitors of the camp were seriously wounded.
We should not let state to attack anti-fascist movement yet another time! We call everyone to join common days of actions for Alexey Sutuga, Alexey Olesinov and all repressed antifascists from 10th to 17th of June.
Any kind of actions are welcome - marches, pickets, wheat-pasting, graffiti, writing of protest letters and so on - choose whichever methods are the most actual where you live. But do not forget to contact s in prior, so that we could list you among the participating cities!
If you want to participate, write to info@avtonom.org, or call or send sms to Moscow group of Autonomous Action: +7-985-247-20-65
More on the case in section "Moscow case against anti-fascists", http://avtonom.org/mda
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