Немного об Анархии

One of the most remarkable features of anarchism - as an ideology which rejects authority and strives for the liberation of the individual from all forms of oppression - is that the ideas have found adherents at all times and in all countries, whatever punishment this may have brought with it. We can bravely say: anarchism is indestructible! Anarchism can be driven underground, all the activists can be liquidated, but new fighters will arise in their place.
That's how it was in the former USSR - after the crushing of the last anarchist groups in the late 1920s it seemed anarchism had finally departed from the socio-political stage. But isolated anarchist individuals and even small groups emerged again in the late 1950s. The eldest anarchist in the Ukraine was and is Nikolai Ozimov from Cherkassy who was imprisoned in the Soviet regime's camps for 15 years in the 1960s and 70s. In 1979 at the State University in Dnepropetrovsk an attempt was made to set up the "Communist League of Anarchists"; Vladislav Strelkovsky, who was arrested for this affair, was also accused of being a member of an anarchist group which had been active there in 1977. One of the activists of what is now the Anarcho-Communist Revolutionary Union (AKRS) was luckier than most - he distributed pro-Makhno leaflets in the villages around the Dibrivsky Forest (a famous base of the Makhnovists in 1918) and seems to have avoided the watchful eyes of the "red" police apparatus.
Thus by the mid 1980s there were anarchists in a number of Ukrainian cities: Dnepropetrovsk, Cherkassy, Zaporozhye... They were not in contact with each other, even those of them who lived in one and the same city, but almost all of them were under observation by the KGB. They had no-one to learn from because the red terror of the 1930s had interrupted any continuity between them and the older generations. Contacting comrades in the west was beyond their wildest dreams. Therefore the experience of European syndicalism in the 1920s, the Spanish Revolution of the 1930s, "Red May" in Paris in 1968, and the new directions in anarchism in the 1960s and 70s remained practically unknown. A. Dubrovsky gives a mosaic impression of this period: "A cult of freedom; Polish "Solidarnosc" of 1980-81 with its inspiring and challenging impulses; working to rehabilitate Makhno and the Kronstadt uprising; reading the books of the classic writers (Bakunin and Kropotkin) - these were the starting points of the theory and practice of the anarchist generation of the first half of the 1980's."
In 1987 the politics of glasnost introduced by the reformist leadership of the Communist Party of the USSR, despite their inconsistency and half-heartedness, allowed the anarchists to express their views and begin agitation openly for the first time. For example, at an open Party meeting (compulsory for all workers) at one of the big factories in Dnepropetrovsk in September 1987 it was suggested to the Communists that they conduct their political education sessions (also compulsory for all) in the form of discussions with anarcho-syndicalists. The party meeting replied with unanimous storms of indignation. But a public challenge had been made, and after 6 whole months of procrastination the Party Bureau at the factory decided to allow such discussions, after having received the direct sanction of the Organization Section of the Industrial District Committee of the Party.
In 1988 the anarchist movement in the Ukraine began an active process of regeneration. Isolated individuals came together to form groups and circles, contacts were established to like-minded people in other cities. Anarcho-communists were active in Dnepropetrovsk and Cherkassy, devoting their efforts primarily to studying the experience of the Makhnovist movement and carrying out appropriate propaganda; syndicalists, above all in Dnepropetrovsk, tried to agitate in workers' collectives, penetrating the structures of the official unions and striving to turn them into a tool for the struggle against the authorities. Anarcho-individualism flourished extravagantly and bore strange fruit in the youth scene in Kiev whose members cultivated their bohemian lifestyle and appearance and thrived on shocking the straight-laced Soviet citizens. (Later, however, the Kiev anarchists were to take part in the memorable students' hunger-strike and also a range of environmentalist campaigns). At around this time the dissident V. Kirichenko from Zaporozhye began elaborating theories of mystical anarchist bio-cosmology. Anarchist publications began springing up, such as the samizdat papers "Makhovets" (The Makhnovist) in Cherkassy and "Dyelo Truda" (The Cause of Labour) in Dnepropetrovsk. These were typed and thus had a limited circulation but were very rich in terms of their content. Probably the Ukrainian anarchists' first mention in the official mass media was a range of publications in the local Dnepropetrovsk Communist Youth League paper "Prapor Yunosti" (The Banner of Youth) in autumn 1988 about how management at one of the factories was trying to suppress anarcho-syndicalist agitation among the workers with the help of the District Committee of the Party and the Regional Committee of the official unions.
A major role in spreading anarchism in the USSR was played by the Federation of Socialist Social Clubs (FSOK), renamed the Union of Independent Socialists (SNS) in mid 1988. This organization brought together anarchists, social-democrats, Trotskyists and leftist Greens. Under the influence of the Moscow group "Obschchina" (Community), which in 1987 began publishing a magazine of the same name, many members of FSOK and later SNS moved towards anarchist positions, and in January 1989 the SNS conference declared its transformation to the Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists (KAS). Almost all the active anarchists in the Ukraine joined KAS, as did many non-anarchist FSOK members, albeit not without some hesitation. At the founding congress of the KAS held in Moscow in May 1989 the Ukraine was represented by delegates from Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Cherkassy, Zaporozhye and the Donbass region.
Such a vigorous return of anarchism from a state of total dormancy could not but produce a reaction from the powers that be. Active anarchists had to come to terms with slander, harassment and threats from the authorities. There was also moral and material pressure - at workplaces Party and union bureaucrats presided over "unmasking" meetings which struck anarcho-syndicalists from elected positions for "denying the leading role of the Communist Party", as it was termed; activists of the anarchist movement were ordered to the Interior Ministry and the Office of the Public Prosecutor for "prophylactic" interrogation in an attempt to intimidate them. The distribution of anarchist publications was suppressed by the police, public meetings and pickets were broken up, and corresponding fines were imposed. In Kharkov, where the anarchists attained great influence among tertiary students, the police conducted special night-time operations - extra street patrols, ambushes, run-ins and arrests - to counter anarchist postering. People's flats were also searched. In March 1989 at one of the industrial plants in Dnepropetrovsk the official union's Factory Committee -evidently having lost all sense of reality and elementary decency - decided to pass on material to the KGB about anarcho-syndicalist O. Dubrovsky's "anti-Party agitation and demoralizing the workplace collective"! In August of the same year the Ideology Section of the Dnepropetrovsk Regional Party Committee sent the Party Committees at the factories and enterprises an operational report on anarcho-syndicalism. It included a short historical survey of the development of the movement and recommended how to conduct counter-propaganda and compromise it in the eyes of the workers.
But the development of Ukrainian anarchism was not be stopped. In several cities in the Ukraine anarchists were involved in initiatives to set up the society "Memorial"*1. Along with work in the official unions in their own enterprises, anarcho-syndicalists took part in attempts to set up an independent union movement. This was a focus of work in 1989 in Dnepropetrovsk and Zaporozhye.