Russian Reader
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Absolutely Horizontal
Before the girl left, Katya and her guest hugged tightly. The girl ended up in Germany. “I was constantly thinking about what is it like to live when your city has been wiped off the face of the earth,” says Katya. Continue reading
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Voices in the Wilderness
Today, near my building, I saw that my neighbors had painted the “Z” symbol on their cars, this new swastika that marks the Russian military equipment going to attack Ukraine. They’re all in favor of the hellishness, the blood and death, the war. It’s so scary. Continue reading
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The Grassroots Insurgency in Moscow City Politics
In several districts, local councilors practically took on the role of city councilors while current deputies either hid from their voters or openly stood with the Moscow city government, as in the case of the planned property development at the enormous Bitsa park. Continue reading
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Putinism and Acquiescence
Things were not exactly peachy during the first years of the Putin regime, but they became a hell of a lot worse after the Kremlin invaded Ukraine and went flying off to Syria to save Assad’s bacon from the fire of popular revolution. Continue reading
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Free the “Network” Prisoners
The Penza Remand Prison was at such pains to show that none of the suspects were being tortured anymore that every evening all ten were “inspected.” Continue reading
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Wonderland
“In Penza, the FSB does not even bother to hide what they are doing. Officers show up at the remand prison there, and take their man to another room, where they have a generator and electrical wires set up.” Continue reading
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This Is What Antifascism Looks Like
The more publicity this case gets, the safer our comrades will be in remand prison from violence at the hands of prison stooges and more torture at the hands of the FSB. Continue reading
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The Anthropology of Death
The Putin regime has a flagrantly necrophiliac tendency. Even under Stalin, there was nothing like this savoring of death. Continue reading
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Russia’s Working Poor
“I hear the call to be a patriot from every radio, TV set, and kitchen appliance. What are you going on about, guys? I have been humiliated my entire life, paid crumbs for a difficult job.” Continue reading
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War, Revolution, and “Patriotic” Revisionism in 2017 Petersburg
“Monumental propaganda” is made to short circuit all of Russian/Soviet history, especially the country’s triumphs, to the current regime and its ruler for life. Continue reading
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Surviving the Siege
“Leonid Ilyich, no one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten. But it has so happened that I, a survivor of the Siege of Leningrad, awarded the medal For the Defense of Leningrad, and my husband, a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, have to huddle with our daughter in a sixteen-square-meter room on Lublin Alley.” Continue reading
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On the Road with a Fed-up Trucker
“It’s a rebellion, but that’s for the time being. We’ve been promised a crackdown in April, and those aren’t empty threats.” Continue reading
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The Kids Are Alright
“I’m glad so many people showed up to the rally. People realize that corruption is an evil, that something has to change. I hope the teenagers who went to the rally will keep involved in civic activism.” Continue reading
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Refugee Stories in Russia
“I used to really miss my family and my home in Syria, but not anymore. I have lost my family and simply see no point in life. I even think it would have been better had I been with my family the day the bomb fell on my house.” Continue reading
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The Fight Is in the Countryside
Since politics has finally defeated the economy in Russia, instead of solving problems with employment and wage arrears the regime feeds people stories about war with the West. During a war, it is unpatriotic to demand payment of back wages. Only internal enemies would behave this way. Continue reading
MANIFESTO
The Antidote Writers Collective seeks to resist and counteract the poisons that course through the veins of our politics, our cultures, our movements, our relationships, ourselves.
We believe that a strong collective immune system is built through knowledge and understanding and that the struggle against division and repression requires building a new culture of discussion that goes beyond flat definitions, brittle ideologies, stubborn dogmas, idle preconceptions, and petty rivalries.
We will share knowledge with each other, aiming to build empathy, and in turn enable the emergence of genuine solidarity—one which does not demand uniformity across contexts, one which does not “include” you, but in which you include yourself.
In this spirit, we will provide a platform for a diverse set of voices, especially for those otherwise silenced or ignored in “mainstream” discussions. We want to hear from people engaged in radical struggles all over the world. We seek neither agreement nor conflict, but rather to identify issues at their roots, and to consider different radical approaches to their resolution. And though we at the Antidote Writers Collective have voices—and we will use them—we will not presume to speak for anybody.
On the contrary, we invite you to offer us new ways of thinking, new ways of seeing. It’s not about establishing a space for comfy ideological self-indulgence, but for questions, for a true diversity of voices and viewpoints, and for turning all of this into action.
One World. One Struggle.
TOPICS & VOICES
Alternative Structures Anarchism Anti-capitalism Autonomy Bureaucracy Climate Change Colonialism Corruption Countermedia Culture of Resistance Deutsch Ecocide Ecodefense Ed Sutton Education Greece Housing Justice Insurrection Islamophobia Kurdistan LeftEast Minneapolis Mutual Aid Neoliberalism No One Is Illegal No Pasarán! One World One Struggle Palaces & Vaults Police & Prisons Political Prisoners Post-Socialism Post-work Propaganda & Disinformation Que Se Vayan Todos Racism Rojava Russia Russian Reader Self Defense & Non/Violence Smash the Patriarchy Solidarity Squats & Occupations States & Borders Street Movements Switzerland Syria This is Hell! Transcripts Translations Turkey Ukraine United States of America War & Empire Work & Wage
ARCHIVES
“… in the midst of putative peace, you could, like me, be unfortunate enough to stumble on a silent war. The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.” – Arundhati Roy
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.