Translated material
So my program
Initially, I planned to run for the Nationalist Curia. A strange move, at first glance, because they traditionally expect to meet either leavened patriots with cabbage in their beards, or white racists, or those representatives of national minorities who in their chauvinism are no different from their Russian colleagues. As a matter of fact, it was the “classical” nationalists who contributed to my transition to the general civil list, deciding to keep their obscurantist cabal clean. Also, I could very well go along the left list, but I don’t see the point in competing with good people.
I represent liberation Siberian nationalism. Nationalism of a new type, nationalism that works not to preserve existing identities, but to create new ones, nationalism that serves not to erect boundaries between ethnic groups and cultures, but to destroy them, nationalism of eternal development and movement, and not conservation.
We, the progressive wing of the Siberian national liberation movement, recognize the right of every free person to be called a Siberian. To do this, it is enough to live (or want to live) on Siberian soil and respect the interests of those who live nearby. “Sibiryak” for us is equally Russian, Buryat, Yakut, Ukrainian, Jew, German and any person who has settled in our latitudes.
The Siberian people are a fractal people; they not only do not suppress the small identities included in them, but completely contribute to their development. We stand for maximum autonomy, decentralization and federalization at all levels. Not only each region, but each district, each house must have a sufficient degree of political and cultural independence.
At the international level, our like-minded people and potential partners are the anti-fascist national liberation organization ETA, which operated in Spain, and the Mexican Zapatistas.
So my program:
1. National liberation and freedom from nationality.
The Siberian people and each part of them have the right to independently determine their own destiny. The powers of the federal authorities should be transferred to citizen councils, which, in turn, are formed from below. Moreover, voters will have the opportunity to recall their delegate sent to a higher body at any time. Grassroots councils are formed both according to the principle of place of residence and place of work. Those mechanisms of direct democracy that seemed utopian a century ago are becoming real today thanks to the Internet.
The fate of the region should be determined by the desires and needs of its inhabitants, and not the whims of a distant center, and certainly not someone’s thirst for super-profits. It’s stupid, but the colossal money, the proceeds from raw materials that are pumped out of Siberia, do not end up in our pockets. And not even in the pockets of other Russians. They settle somewhere far away, offshore. While a small layer of officials and businessmen enriches themselves immensely at the expense of the common property, the economy will focus on raw materials, and neither industry nor high technology will develop in the country.
It's time for Russia to get off the oil needle, and we are ready to help it with this.
2. Drug phobia is a disease!
Oil is a dangerous drug. But many substances, for possession and use of which you can go to prison, do not. I advocate for independent scientific research on alcohol, tobacco and other psychoactive substances to be open to the public. Government drug policy is a mixture of prejudice and greed. Equally, the “war on drugs” enriches drug traffickers, police, and government officials. Ordinary people, drug addicts and not, suffer from it. In countries such as the Czech Republic, Holland or Sweden, the crime rate associated with the use of psychoactive substances, as well as the level of their use, is orders of magnitude lower than in Russia.
Only in a country with a repressive drug policy could a drug like “krokodil” appear, which is produced from legal pharmaceutical ingredients and destroys a person in a matter of months.
Drug policy in free Siberia (later in Russia and throughout the world) should be aimed at treatment, not persecution of drug addicts, as well as at studying those areas of medicine and the national economy in which currently prohibited psychoactive substances can be used.
For example, curly parsley.
3. Let's destroy this prison!
Russia's prisons are overcrowded. We have ten times more people per capita than, for example, Norway. And if you compare the conditions in which they find themselves with European ones, then the amount of suffering they receive will have to be multiplied by about ten times. The penitentiary system is a huge, ever-hungry monster that destroys people's lives instead of correcting them.
We need an amnesty for all articles not related to violence, a thorough revision of the criminal code, and the elimination of articles that imply a crime without a victim. People who, for social reasons, commit minor crimes (stealing a loaf of bread or even a cake) should receive help, not punishment. And for some (prisoners in the case of the May Sixth riots, the Pussy Riot group and other political prisoners), criminal prosecution should be replaced with a bonus and a medal. Prisons should be as open as possible to public control, to journalists and volunteers of human rights organizations. When torturing people behind closed doors ceases to be a profitable business, the number of criminals will sharply decline.
In addition to the penitentiary system, those who care about filling prisons should be radically reformed (ideally, reduced to zero): the police, the FSB, the courts and the prosecutor’s office. Everyone who is guilty of injustice should be, if not punished, then at least deprived of the opportunity to further increase injustice.
4. Get rid of all patriarchy!
Representatives of different religious denominations live in Russia. Their ideas about God, Truth, Sin and other things with a capital letter may be very different from each other; things that are sacred to some people will be offensive to others. Therefore, the general principle that will save us from unnecessary religious conflicts should be the secularity of society. Church and state must be separated from each other. In order to prevent action artists from breaking into churches, priests must stop breaking into schools. Respect for Faith is impossible without respect for Unbelief. We must learn to stop being offended by what happens at someone else’s exhibition, in someone else’s blog or in someone else’s head.
The influence of the church should have no greater weight and moral authority than that of any other association of citizens. And we abolished the punishment for thought crimes in the previous paragraph of the program.
Artyom Loskutov, 09/25/2012
illustration by Masha Kiseleva