In the opposition

Forest Brotherhood

July 31, 2010 Oleg Kozlovsky

On July 28, several hundred young people who call themselves antifa and anarchists attacked the Himok administration. They beat glass in the building, threw smoke bombs and signal missiles inside. According to avonom.org , two police cars were broken. At the same time, the attackers chanted "Stop lawlessness!" And "Russian forest!" (A rather unusual slogan for this audience). Having defeated the building, the young people walked around the city, chanting all the same chants and shooting in the air from traumatic weapons, after which they disappeared safely.

Many bloggers reacted to the action enthusiastically. "I do not like anarchists and leftists, but today in Khimki they arranged Real Action." “Pogroms and violence are bad. But the anarchists pleased. " “What is not my struggle in the Khimkinsky forest, but well done guys. I hope there will be more further protest. ” “Antifa fellow. The authorities should be afraid of citizens, not Vice Versa. ” These are only a few comments from Twitter, and their authors are liberals, and not anarchists at all.

It is clear what the bloggers rejoice at. The action is bold and impudent. They took revenge on sales officials, put them in place. The police, so courageously dispersing peaceful demonstrations, suddenly frightened the “popular anger” and widened cowardly (and thank God, otherwise the victims would not be avoided). In general, the process was a success. What about the result?

The campaign in defense of the Khimki forest has, like all such campaigns, two goals. One is straight and tactical: to prevent cutting of green spaces. The other is long -term and strategic: to strengthen civil society as a whole. We ask ourselves at first: will this action help save the Khimkinsky forest?

Obviously, no. If before the attack on the city administration there was still some hope of finding a council for lumberjack builders, now it is unrealistic. After all, the solution to the issue is in the hands of the authorities, which has to choose: either defiantly ignore protests, while losing the face, or succumb to pressure and earn political glasses. Moreover, the decision was to be made, most likely, not the authorities of Himk (everything was bought there for a long time), but regional or federal. Now everything is simple for them. Forest defenders are hooligans and gopniks that threaten public peace. Investigators should communicate with them, what concessions may be here! So the builders of the Moscow-Petersburg highway should be grateful to unexpected assistants (we will, after all, believe that it was unexpected), so successfully allowed them to be a difficult situation. Only the Khimchanes are losing: they will lose the forest, and in addition they will have to pay for the repairs of the administration from their taxes. But they do not care about them to everyone-both the authorities and the anarchists.

I will now object, they say, there is nothing to lose, the Khimkinsky forest has already been lost, and in general, this is a minor problem, because of which it is not worth grumbling. As one of the bloggers who warmly supported the action said, “there is a goal - a change of power, the departure of thieves and bandits from it, and the restoration of law. The goals of winning them are not worth a handout. ” Maybe, having sacrificed the forest, we will get closer to this large and important (without any irony) goal? Why not take into service the methods of Antif, if they rather lead us to victory than non -violent resistance?

Let's imagine that such shares have become the main (or one of the main) by our method. What will it give?

Firstly, we will greatly help state propaganda. Instead of engaging in skillful installation or putting Katya “Mu-Mu” under the opposition, it will be enough for them to simply show everything as it is. No need to even comments. Nine out of ten citizens, looking at such a protest, will warmly support any measures to pacify the hooligans. That is, using violence, we automatically give an excuse for violence by the authorities.

Secondly, the police no longer have to suck out delusional accusations from a finger and factory things: each participant in the Khimki promotion can quite legally get his own to eight under article 212 “Mass riots”. And unlike political prisoners sitting behind a peaceful protest, such convicts will not cause much sympathy either in their homeland or abroad. As they say, they knew what they were going to.

Thirdly, such shares repel and scare a significant part of people. Instead of expanding the support base, the opposition will go even more in the marginal region. A typical supporter of the movement will be a mentally unbalanced, stupid and aggressive teenager, and the main stimulus for participation is the desire to receive a dose of adrenaline. All dreams of “middle class” or “advanced youth” will have to be left. They will not join us not so much of fear as out of disgust and unwillingness to waste time on nonsense.

Fourth, waging the struggle with violent methods, we play on the Power Field. The modern state is too well armed to allow to overthrow itself through the uprising. The government has special services, riot police, internal troops, machine guns, tanks and helicopters. Political militants have only stones, Molotov cocktails and a four -shot “wasp”. In the case of Russia, we can be sure that there will always be petrodollars for police forces - this is not Kyrgyzstan to you.

But imagine that, despite all this, it was possible to collect a rather large and well -armed underground army. What will this lead to? Only to the civil war. Victims - both among the warring and among the civilians. Destroyed economy. Perhaps the country's collapsed into pieces. General bitterness. And it doesn’t matter who will win in this war is a government or rebels, but they are unlikely to build democracy. On the contrary, the people will require a “strong hand” to “put things in order”.

Is there an alternative to violent struggle? There was, and always was. True, it is not necessarily as cheerful and fervent as the stones of the administrative building (however, the drive on the peaceful “marshmallows of the disagreement” or on the triumphal square on the 31st of force is not inferior to this). It is necessary to strengthen civil society long, stubbornly and methodically, to conquer from the state of the bridgeheads of freedom, to achieve support for more and more the population. It is necessary to gain strength, to fight in the process of this struggle to learn democracy ourselves. When there is enough strength, and the support will be universal, Molotov cocktails will no longer be needed: it will be enough to shake his shoulders to throw off the “thieves and bandits”. All this can take for many years (Gandhi, for example, took three decades), but then it is unlikely that you have to regret it perfect or remake everything again.

Until recently, with all the problems and shortcomings of our opposition, we definitely had one reason for pride: all the protests in Russia took place exclusively peacefully and civilized. But in the last one and a half, two years, the situation began to change, and mainly because of the same Moscow Anarchists-Antiph: the pogrom near the metro station Tretyakovskaya after the murder of Stanislav Markelov, a raid on the office of one Prochrevskaya youth last fall, now an attack on the Khimki administration. Add to this the seaside “partisans” and numerous incidents in different regions (like the sensational “slap -in the governor” of the Tomsk region) and it turns out that not everything is so simple.

The opposition must decide for itself: violence, no matter how tempting it would seem at first glance, is unacceptable to us. You cannot be “a little pregnant” or “mainly a peaceful” struggle. Any cooperation with those who have chosen the path of violence is as impossible as with the leadership of the current regime. We are building a civilized country. And let them return to their forest.