I was arrested at an anti-war protest in Moscow / Moscow police beat and torture women after anti-war protests / Interview with Stephen Kotkin: The Weakness of the Despot
Several protest movements announced anti-war rallies in Moscow on 6 March; the team of opposition figure Alexey Navalny announced a meeting on Manezhnaya Square, just opposite the Kremlin. A coalition of feminists and leftists called a rally at 3pm at another public space, the Square of Three Stations. In parallel, a separate group of protesters went to central Pushkin Square.
Since almost all opposition structures have now been destroyed in Russia, and anyone who organises a rally is detained ahead of the protests – just for publishing information about upcoming protests – Russia’s anti-war protest movement is becoming more and more decentralised. In these conditions, the initial starting point and start time for protests can vary....
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/moscow-anti-war-protest-6-march-russia/
Moscow police beat and torture women after anti-war protests
Record numbers of
people have been detained at anti-war protests across Russia since the
country’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February. Although mass coordinated
protests have been hampered by the Russian authorities’ wholesale attack on opposition
organisations in recent years, people are still coming out to protest against
the war – with pickets, unsanctioned rallies and statements online. In
response, the police have detained protesters and passers-by en masse, and
subjected them, on occasion, to brutal treatment.
On 6 March, 2,500
people were detained in
Moscow in connection with several anti-war protests in the Russian capital. One
incident, in particular, caught the public eye: the treatment of 25 women and
four men who were detained near Moscow’s Krasnye Vorota metro station and
placed in two police vans. After one of the vans overturned en route to the
city’s southern outskirts, all 29 detainees were placed in a single van. On
arrival at a police station in the suburb of Brateevo, they were subject to
humiliation and beatings, as documented in an audio recording made secretly by
one of the women….
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/russia-moscow-police-beat-torture-women-ukraine-war-protests/
Stephen Kotkin: The Weakness of the Despot
We’ve been hearing
voices both past and present saying that the reason for what has happened is,
as George Kennan put it, the strategic blunder of the
eastward expansion of nato. The great-power realist-school historian John
Mearsheimer insists that a great deal of the blame for what we’re
witnessing must go to the United States. I thought we’d begin with your analysis of
that argument.
I have only the
greatest respect for George Kennan. John Mearsheimer is a giant of a scholar.
But I respectfully disagree. The problem with their argument is that it assumes
that, had nato not expanded, Russia wouldn’t be the same or very
likely close to what it is today. What we have today in Russia is not some kind
of surprise. It’s not some kind of deviation from a historical pattern. Way
before nato existed—in the nineteenth century—Russia looked like
this: it had an autocrat. It had repression. It had militarism. It had
suspicion of foreigners and the West. This is a Russia that we know, and it’s
not a Russia that arrived yesterday or in the nineteen-nineties. It’s not a
response to the actions of the West. There are internal processes in Russia
that account for where we are today.
I would even go
further. I would say that nato expansion has put us in a better place
to deal with this historical pattern in Russia that we’re seeing again today.
Where would we be now if Poland or the Baltic states were not in nato?
They would be in the same limbo, in the same world that Ukraine is in. In fact,
Poland’s membership in nato stiffened nato’s spine. Unlike some
of the other nato countries, Poland has contested Russia many times
over. In fact, you can argue that Russia broke its teeth twice on Poland: first
in the nineteenth century, leading up to the twentieth century, and again at
the end of the Soviet Union, with Solidarity. So George Kennan was an
unbelievably important scholar and practitioner—the greatest Russia expert who
ever lived—but I just don’t think blaming the West is the right analysis for
where we are....
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/stephen-kotkin-putin-russia-ukraine-stalin
Rohini
Hensman: The Historical Background to Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine
Why we need a new spirit of
internationalism. By EDWY PLENEL; March 4, 2022
Noam Chomsky:
Internationalism or Extinction (Universalizing Resistance)
