Twenty years ago, on November 13, 2005, Timur Kacharava, an anti-fascist and a hardcore musician, was murdered in a barbaric attack by neo-Nazis in the very center of St. Petersburg, Russia. Although for us, his death was not only a huge personal loss, but also an event that largely determined the further trajectory of our lives, we do not want this text to read as an obituary, a sentimental memoir, or a biographical note. The goal we are pursuing transcends all personal experience and individual biography.

In his Theses on the Concept of History, Walter Benjamin left us a secret key to understanding how an appeal to the losses and unrealized possibilities of the past could operate. He argued that such an action can interrupt the linear course of historical time, suspend the present for a moment, however brief, and fill it with liberating significance. He called this “a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.” Weak, because it has no external, transcendent justification beyond the logic immanent in historical processes. Messianic, because it can be transformed into action that brings humanity closer to liberation.

By appealing to events that took place twenty years ago, we want to speak to the present and, first and foremost, to our friends and to those who may become our friends. Today, as neoliberal capitalism is rapidly transforming into outright fascism, we recognize the messianic appeal and acknowledge an obligation to interpret our own experience of loss and defeat as a collective promise charged with hope.

More than Music

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, as teenagers who had recently graduated from high school and started university, we first learned about the independent hardcore punk scene. Although St. Petersburg’s underground music scene had always been disruptive and diverse, this discovery was a real revelation for us. We encountered something that, as it seemed to us at the time, far surpassed musical subculture. Our spontaneous rejection of the world around us took on a constructive shape for the first time in our embracing of hardcore punk and DIY ethics. Music ceased to be an end in itself and became a form of being-together, a tool for building a community that existed according to its own autonomous rules in spite of cultural differences and state borders.

These rules and principles were interpreted in different ways and took shape in constant disputes and disagreements and were influenced by the ideas of anti-fascism, veganism, and straight edge, actively practiced in our environment. In our own place of residence, we had to create this environment from scratch with our own limited resources: organizing concerts, publishing zines, distributing CDs and cassettes among interested friends and acquaintances. This unalienated activity gradually became for us a glimpse of another possible world, a point of entry into anti-fascism and anarcho-communism, a springboard to political action.

We met Timur when he was only 14. This encounter, due to happenstance, was transformed into profound friendship and collective music making. Timur took from us what we had only recently taken from others. He was recording large quantities of tapes and CDs and photocopying various punk, hardcore, and anarchist publications.

We rehearsed together long and hard, trying to learn to play instruments and create what would later be known as Sandinista! We walked together through the night city, its parks, outskirts, forests, and seashores. We listened to music, read Heartattack!, Inside Front, and Vzorvanoe Nebo [Exploded Sky], exchanged recordings, argued, participated in the first anti-fascist actions, prepared and distributed food to the homeless, and traveled to punk festivals and concerts in Moscow, Minsk, Warsaw, Riga, Vilnius, Prague, Pilsen, and Berlin. Our collaborative music-making gradually came to discover its own language, initially influenced by heavy hardcore bands of the 1990s such as Unbroken and “Rather Be Dead”-era Refused and later moved closer to the more raw and politicized hardcore/punk in the vein of Econochrist, Tragedy, and Catharsis.

Today, these recordings are still relevant to us both musically and substantially as a token of collective work whose overall result always exceeds the sum of the individual effort that was invested in it. At the same time, it is important to note that the final form of these songs should largely be credited to Timur’s restless enthusiasm and musical talent.

Patriotism as a Diagnosis

Unlike what was then a still emerging, small-scale anti-fascist movement, radical nationalists and neo-Nazis in Russia in the early 2000s had a developed infrastructure, their own combat units, and mass support among football hooligans. The murders of migrants, pogroms, and other crimes they committed often not only went unprosecuted but also received silent approval from the authorities and law enforcement.

Without any tradition to fall back on, the anti-fascist movement in Russia initially developed from scratch, based on spontaneous reactions to neo-Nazi atrocities as a small and completely grassroots youth initiative. The official Soviet version of anti-fascism had by then completely lost all relevance and therefore had almost no relation to its emergence.

In the early 2000s, Russia went through various stages of consolidation of state power and strengthening of law enforcement structures after the criminal redistribution of property and mass privatization of the 1990s. The role of nationalist rhetoric in these processes and the connection between the state apparatus and nationalist organizations were emotionally yet accurately described in several analytical articles by the anti-fascist civil rights activist Stanislav Markelov.

In his essay “Patriotism as a Diagnosis,” he describes patriotism backed up by the criminal state as a disease of society, a tool for depoliticizing and maintaining a passive condition of silent majority and a tactic to distract attention from the real problem of growing social inequality.

Markelov is best known as the lawyer of the plaintiff on the high-profile trial of colonel Budanov, who was accused of raping and murdering Elza Kungayeva, a teenage girl from Chechnya. Markelov’s uncompromising stance on nationalism and his consistent support for anti-fascists caused strong irritation not only among representatives of neo-Nazi groups, but also among nationalist-minded military and representatives of law enforcement structures.

On January 19, 2009, several years after the murder of Timur Kacharava, Stanislav Markelov was murdered by a gunshot in the head in the center of Moscow. He was accompanied by a journalist, anti-fascist and environmental activist Anastasia Baburova. She was fatally wounded by shots and died in the hospital later the same day.

During the investigation, it was found that behind the murders of Markelov and Baburova was a neo-Nazi group, the Russian Nationalist Combat Organization. This group was later recognized as responsible for the murders of at least ten other people: anti-fascists, migrants, law enforcement officers, and martial arts athletes of non-Russian origin. Members of the group had access to the addresses and photographs of left-wing activists from the database of the Russian Interior Ministry’s Center for Countering Extremism, and one of the group’s members was an actual Federal Security Service (FSB) employee.

According to our information, the attack on Timur was also not accidental and his killers were hunting him down specifically. We do not know for sure what caused such intense attention. Perhaps Timur turned heads at one of the anti-fascist actions by his striking appearance and eccentric behavior; it is also possible that his markedly non-Russian, in fact Georgian surname attracted attention. We can be certain that Timur had former friends who became neo-Nazis and knew his name and identity.

The bloody street clashes between neo-Nazis and anti-fascists in Russia came to an end when the state completely monopolized the right to use violence. Right-wing radicals who did not fit into the system at that point became an irritation to the authoritarian regime and were crushed by repression. Those of them who proved their loyalty became part of the repressive apparatus themselves. The anti-fascist movement, on the other hand, turned into a full-on enemy of the state, which to this day is systematically persecuted, as we can see, for example, in the “Network” case. and more recent “Tyumen” case.

Stanislav Markelov’s articles are important for understanding how the depoliticization, collapse of social relations, and resentment-based patriotism that accompanied the rise of capitalism contributed to the strengthening of an authoritarian political regime built around a cult of brute power. In 2022, these processes led to an aggressive imperialist war in Ukraine, the possibility of which Markelov was also able to foresee in his writings.

The Struggle Is Not Over, It Assumes New Forms

At first glance, it may seem that the struggle we waged was meaningless and doomed to fail from the outset. Today, we find ourselves in a world turned upside down, with appearances becoming more important than actual messages, language being emptied of meaning, and many concepts getting so subverted as to lose all significance. This emptiness simultaneously breeds suspicion of everything and, paradoxically, forces one to believe in the most irrational explanations of what is happening. In such a world, the fight against Nazism becomes a cover for imperialist ambitions that raze entire cities to the ground, while opposition to antisemitism is used to justify unprecedented genocide and cultural racism, which makes those who do not share a certain set of cultural values unworthy of all sympathy and deprives them of human status.

The distorted mirror of representation, which has completely replaced lived reality, is a direct consequence of the aestheticization of politics, which Benjamin, already mentioned above, had warned about at the very dawn of our era.

Contemporary capitalism is a continuation and a new stage in the development of the society of the Spectacle, which has become a Spectacle of technologically mediated communication; it has proved capable of absorbing, assimilating, distorting, and putting to use almost any liberating, potentially revolutionary idea.

In his Practical Reason (1972), Pierre Bourdieu used the term doxa to refer to generally accepted truths and judgments that are not subject to questioning or critical reflection. He contrasts doxa with opinion—that which can be openly challenged and discussed. We must admit that many of our dreams have become the doxa of the left-liberal mainstream, the currency of cultural wars that numb and disarm us in the face of the real civil war that capital is waging against us with unwavering success.

But to remember is to fight. This slogan of German anti-fascists, Erinnern heißt kämpfen, is not only a reference to the past. It is even more a call to action in the present. The memory of fallen comrades has no collective dimension unless it becomes part of the struggle, unless it recognizes and feels the “weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.” We continue to disavow this corrupt and distorted world and call on you to fight for a new one, to fight alongside us, to fight better, more consciously, and more consistently than we have. We remain with those who are the living, with those who refuse to be victims, who refuse to bargain their oppression, who are ready to sacrifice themselves in this struggle against the multi-headed monster. But we ask you not to forget that even if we strike one of its heads, we can never be sure that a new one will not appear in its place. Our main goal is to strike the hydra in its heart. This heart is the very production of neoliberal subjectivity, the formatting of our relationships, ways of thinking, and lifestyles by capitalism.

Don’t forget that when we go on stage, we all become part of the Spectacle. So avoid identity, this hidden symbolic currency. People who refuse to play the identity game cannot be fully recognized in—and as—the system and therefore pose an invisible but real threat to it. Rejecting the omnipresent identity politics allows us to see each human being not as a collection of predetermined settings, but as a possibility, thus opening up a universalist dimension of living and being together.

Go into the shadows, be anonymous and invisible, look for safe ways to communicate, look for spaces that are inaccessible to control and surveillance. Hide in the cracks and crevices of this world. Only in such spaces are true friendship and real international solidarity possible today; only there can the living word and uncorrupted art exist, and communism still be possible.

NEIN, NO, NET!

Nein! No! Net! That was the cry of those whose children were being murdered. That was the cry of the children who were frightened by the knocking on the door at night and the smell of blood, the knocking on the door at night and the smell. Stop them! stop! Stop them! stop! They don’t know they need freedom. They’ve forgotten that we need… Freedom! You are! My body! Libertad tu eres mi cuerpo! If we give nothing ourselves, we lock them in a cage. If we are incapable of sacrifice, then our way of life is a prison. And the more things and words we have in it, the sooner we all will suffocate. Libertad tu eres mi cuerpo! I still believe, i still know. I will be, i exist.