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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