Friends,
As a pacifist, I have no right to tell the people of
Ukraine they should use nonviolent resistance. This is Lolja Nordic’s
perspective: “It is absurd to demand that an occupied country stop fighting for
its liberation and essentially give up its land for peace. It’s the same as
telling a victim of violence to not resist a person who tries to abuse, rape or
murder them. Why would we tell that to Ukrainians?” Kagiso, Max
Exiled Russian Activist
Challenges Pacifist Approach to Ending War on Ukraine
Lolja Nordic at a street protest action
against gender-based violence. November 25, 2021, Saint Petersburg, Russia.
SOTA (SOTAPROJECT.COM)
November
13, 2022
Russia’s war in Ukraine
is intensifying. In response to victories on the battlefield won by Ukrainians
this fall, Russia has responded by launching a wave of missile and drone
attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure throughout the country. As a
result, over 15,000 Ukrainian civilians had been killed or injured by early October, and another 1,043 by early November. Despite
this state terrorism, Ukraine has continued to put up a valiant resistance to invasion
and occupation.
Faced with a failing war,
Vladimir Putin’s regime has conscripted hundreds of thousands of men into his
armed forces and deployed them to his frontlines. That, in turn, has triggered
a rise in antiwar resistance in Russia. In an exclusive for Truthout,
Ashley Smith interviews Lolja Nordic from the Russian activist organization
Feminist Antiwar Resistance about the movement against Putin’s regime and its
imperialist invasion of Ukraine.
Lolja Nordic is anarcho
ecofeminist, antiwar activist and artist from Saint Petersburg, where until
recently she organized for gender equality, human rights and climate justice.
She is a co-coordinator of Feminist Anti-War Resistance, a group created in
February 2022 to protest the war in Ukraine. Since January 2021 Lolja has been
facing political repression, arrest and threats for her activism. In March 2022
she had to flee Russia and continue her work in exile after becoming a suspect
in a “phone terrorism” criminal case, which was
fabricated by the Russian secret police to put pressure on several antiwar
activists.
Ashley Smith: What is the nature and roots of Putin’s invasion of
Ukraine? Why did he launch it and what are his war aims?
Lolja Nordic: Putin actually started the war back in 2014 when he
annexed Crimea. He just escalated it in February. His reasons are clear, and he
has repeated them over and over. He has a very colonial mindset; he opposes any
country in the post-Soviet space gaining its independence. He has ambitions to
rebuild the old empire.
He considers Ukraine to be a
part of Russia and will not allow it to exist as an independent country. He
denies it is a nation, rejects its right to self-determination, and refuses to
acknowledge Ukrainians’ agency and subjectivity.
After Ukraine’s Maidan uprising
in 2013-2014 that drove Russia’s corrupt ally, Viktor Yanukovych, from power,
Putin feared that the country was slipping out of his control. So, over the
last eight years he has deployed troops to Ukraine, backed up the so-called
People’s Republics in Donetsk and Luhansk, and plotted to carry out the
colonial seizure of the whole country.
Putin’s imperialism flows from
his abusive, toxic and patriarchal worldview. You can hear this in how he
speaks about Ukraine. His language is identical to how rapists and abusers talk
about their victims.
The Ukrainian
resistance has scored a wave of victories and forced Putin to conscript
hundreds of thousands of people. What impact has Russia’s military defeats and
the mobilization had on Russian society?
The defeats and mobilization
have forced the war into the middle of Russian society. Men are being called up
and deployed in large numbers and against their will. Almost every family in
Russia has a loved one that could be forced to fight in Ukraine.
This has triggered broader
questioning of the war. Before the mobilization, conservative Russians could
believe Putin’s claim that it would not affect your life. They had supported
Putin for years based on his promise of stability and his claim that without
his rule there would be chaos.
That is no longer credible.
Hundreds of thousands of people have fled the country to avoid conscription and
repression, others have gone into hiding; some conscripted men even committed
suicide or died in suspicious circumstances at the training
camps; large numbers have been deployed in battle, and many are already dying
at the front. People are beginning to realize that Putin’s regime is the source
of instability and chaos.
That does not mean everyone who
is against the war or mobilization has become an antiwar activist. Putin
retains a base, especially in the elite but also among broader sections of the
population. But now there is much more questioning and that has given space for
more resistance to Putin and his war.
In February and March there
were daily antiwar protests in cities all over Russia. The regime crushed them
with harsh repression, arresting more than 16,000 people by June. By October this number had
risen to 19,000. Many activists were tortured and some even raped.
Putin immediately criminalized
all expressions of antiwar opposition. You can get arrested for posting the
word “war” or even for wearing clothing with the colors of the Ukrainian
flag. This repression drove protests for the most part off the streets.
Most Russian people are not
wealthy, many are struggling on low wages and find it difficult to meet their
basic needs. So, they are reluctant to risk the safety of their families or
lose their jobs by openly opposing the war when faced with possible, arrest,
fines and torture.
But the mobilization triggered
another wave of protests. The most significant ones were in Republics
like Dagestan and Sakha (Yakutia) where women led marches against
conscription. This took incredible bravery, because in regions like Dagestan
protesters face even more severe repression than people do in cities like
Moscow or St. Petersburg. For over a decade, Russia has carried out mass repression and counter-insurgency to
impose its rule in Dagestan.
But protests are not the only
form of antiwar resistance. Thousands of Russians are involved in the
grassroots networks to provide humanitarian aid to Ukrainians who have been
abducted and forcefully relocated from Ukraine to Russia. Those networks also
help them flee from Russia across the border back to Ukraine or into Europe.
There is also a large partisan
movement made up mostly of anarchists. They have been disabling
railway lines to disrupt the transport of military vehicles and weaponry to the
front. They have thrown Molotov cocktails to set fire to military offices all
over the country on weekends when no one was inside with the aim of slowing
conscription.
What has your
organization Feminist Antiwar Resistance been doing to build opposition to the
war? What specifically feminist arguments do you stress in your organizing?
For feminists worldwide, war is
one of our central issues. We see how all kinds of violence are interconnected,
including militaristic violence. War has its roots in patriarchal culture, its
oppressive structures, and systemic violence. So, when Putin ordered the
invasion of Ukraine, we decided to unite different feminist groups from all
over Russia and from other countries to form Feminist Antiwar Resistance.
It is a horizontal network with
groups and activists both inside and outside Russia. We have a lot of different
campaigns to confront the regime and weaken Russia’s war machine. We have
organized many street protests and actions since February 24. When the
mobilization was announced, we worked with a youth-led democracy group, Vesna (Spring),
to call demonstrations throughout the country.
Together with Anti-job and
Antivoenny Bolnichny (Antiwar Sick Leave) — two organizations which fight for
labor rights in Russia — we built a project called Anti–War Fund that
provides help to workers whose labor rights were violated because of their
antiwar activism. This is important because many people are threatened with
getting fired illegally for being spotted at protests or just posting antiwar
content online. To build a sustainable antiwar movement we need to support
these kinds of workers with free legal help and protection, so it would be more
difficult for the bosses and companies to pressure and silence them.
We built our own network of
volunteers providing humanitarian aid to Ukrainian refugees in Russia. We
started a hotline where antiwar activists can get urgent, free psychological
help. We provide counseling and advice to people who face all sorts of risks.
We organize help to political prisoners and help activists find temporary
hiding to escape repression.
One of our goals is to break
through the regime’s propaganda both online and offline. We have established
Feminist Antiwar Resistance social media on Telegram, Instagram, Facebook and
Twitter as a form of digital resistance and launched a printed newspaper that
exposes the reality of this horrific imperialist war.
We produce a newspaper
called Zhenskaya Pravda (Women’s Truth). It looks like an
ordinary local free newspaper, but it’s filled with antiwar articles. We
disguise it like that so it could be spread widely in different public spaces
in Russia. Anybody can print it at home and spread it secretly at campuses,
malls, community buildings, etc.
Often, we design our posts as
memes or jokes to go viral, reach a broader, conservative, or apolitical
audience. But once you dig into them you can find the information and arguments
against the regime and the invasion.
One of our most important new
initiatives is collaborating with different decolonial antiwar movements
organized by Russia’s ethnic minorities and Indigenous people. They have been
fighting to protect their culture and fight for their independence. We are
working with them to give them a platform to give voice to their struggle.
Russian forces in
the occupation have suffered enormous casualties. Is there any resistance to
the war developing in the Russian troops?
There are signs of this
beginning. A lot of people who were conscripted are really angry. They were not
adequately trained, did not have adequate equipment, and were just sent to the
front lines. Many of them posted videos expressing anger over these conditions.
Some groups of conscripted soldiers have staged protests and sabotage at the training
camps.
At this point, we don’t know if
this is leading to large-scale resistance within the Russian troops. There is
no transparency of what is happening at the front inside the Russian army and
soldiers who try to sabotage or desert face the risk of being executed at the
front by their own commanders.
But we do know that people are
sabotaging Russia’s war just by refusing conscription either by fleeing the
country or going into hiding. Some people don’t look at it that way, but I do.
Anything that weakens the
Russian army is helping Ukraine win. People refusing conscription deprives
Russian imperialism of foot soldiers. However, conscious or not, that is part
of the antiwar resistance.
Given the setbacks
Russia has suffered, Putin has turned to state terrorist attacks on civilians
and civilian infrastructure to break Ukraine’s will to fight. What is Putin’s
strategy now?
It’s really hard to get inside
Putin’s head. To be honest, his assessment of the war and therefore his
strategy is a bit delusional. He does not get accurate reports from his
underlings.
So, he can’t really come up
with an effective strategy. Everything about this war demonstrates his
strategic incompetence from the initial failed siege of Kyiv to the defeats
Russian forces are experiencing now.
Faced with these setbacks,
Putin is now using tactics he used in Chechnya and Syria — massacring
civilians, blowing up apartment buildings, and destroying civilian
infrastructure like water and electric plants. He doesn’t care about human
lives in Ukraine or in Russia. He’s sacrificing us all for his imperialist
ambitions.
We endured this in Russia
through his 22-year reign. He’s launched war after war from Chechnya to Georgia
to Syria and now Ukraine. None of this has benefitted anyone but his regime and
its cronies. Ordinary Russians and Putin’s international victims have paid the
price with their lives and livelihoods. His regime is a terrorist state.
But the governments in Europe
that now denounce Putin are hypocrites. Many of them up until February met
with him at summits, shook his hand, and some, especially among the
far right elite, spoke about him as a strong leader and somehow part of the opposition to the U.S.
They did this while they knew that he was murdering independent journalists,
killing his political opponents, and jailing and torturing Russian activists.
European activists and
leftists, as well as those in the U.S., have to criticize their own governments
for enabling this regime to rule. European states, even now in the midst of
this war, are still financing Putin’s military machine with every payment for
Russia’s fossil fuel exports.
In the West, many
pacifists have argued for an immediate ceasefire and a negotiated settlement.
What are the problems with such calls?
It is absurd to demand that an
occupied country stop fighting for its liberation and essentially give up its
land for peace. It’s the same as telling a victim of violence to not resist a
person who tries to abuse, rape or murder them. Why would we tell that to
Ukrainians?
Our task is to stop the
aggressor. That means first and foremost building solidarity with Ukraine and
its people. They have been screaming for help for months. They don’t have
enough weapons to fight against Russian aggression. They don’t have defensive
weapons to protect their citizens from missile attacks. They deserve all the
military and financial help to liberate their country.
Instead of putting demands on
Ukraine to stop fighting, we should be focused on doing all we can to weaken
Russia’s war machine. If we are disturbed by global militarization, we should
be first of all focused not on the question of whether it’s good to provide
weapons to Ukraine, but on how to demilitarize and weaken the Russian army, how
to put pressure on those countries that have been providing weapons to Russian
soldiers or equipment to Russian police to beat and arrest protesters. To begin
with, countries should stop financing Putin’s war and reinforcing the Russian
military by buying Russian fossil fuels.
Where do you think
the war and the resistance to it are headed? What should we expect in the
short, medium and long term?
It is very difficult to
predict. There are just too many variables. What I do know is that we have to
keep building the resistance to the regime in Russia and it is a lot of work.
We need to build and enlarge grassroots horizontal networks of resistance to
cover the whole country, provide mutual aid and sustain it.
We need to expand the number of
people who are aware, ready to act, and trained to co-organize so we are
prepared to act fast in critical moments. We need international solidarity with
Ukraine against this war. We need international solidarity with people who are
fighting Putin’s regime in Russia.
In Russia, we are fighting for
a future free of Putin and his oligarchs and their militarism. That future will
be one where women, queer people, ethnic minorities, Indigenous people and
working people can all live together in peace and with equal rights.
Copyright © Truthout. May not be
reprinted without permission.
Ashley Smith is a socialist writer and activist in Burlington,
Vermont. He has written in numerous publications including Truthout,
The International Socialist Review, Socialist Worker, ZNet, Jacobin, New
Politics, and many other online and print publications. He is currently
working on a book for Haymarket Books entitled Socialism and
Anti-Imperialism.
Donations can be sent
to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206,
Baltimore, MD 21212. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at]
comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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