The latest victim of this tactic is musician and left-wing activist Kirill Medvedev from the group "Arkady Kots". However, the persecution has affected not only him. The Foundation for Support of Left-wing Political Prisoners, which provides assistance to activists who have been subjected to repression, may also come under attack.
The far-right association "Call of the People" (ZOV NARODA) has sent a statement to the prosecutor's office accusing Medvedev of "rehabilitating Nazism" and supporting "left-wing extremists and terrorists".
The formal reason for the denunciation was a charity concert organized in support of left-wing political prisoners. The funds raised were sent to a fund that provides material and humanitarian assistance to arrested left-wing activists. Many of them, such as the defendants in the Tyumen case, the Ufa Marxists case, and the Network case, were arrested on fabricated charges of extremism and terrorism, becoming victims of politically motivated repression.
In addition, the presentation of Medvedev's new book served as the basis. He himself stated:
"The Call of the People movement wrote a letter to the prosecutor's office in connection with the presentation of my book Anti-Fascism for All. Several Z-channels called for the event to be disrupted. Phalanster decided to cancel the presentation for the sake of common safety. It is sad, but the decision is logical. Among the Z-patriots who could have responded to the call and come, there are many unbalanced people."
The tactics of the far-right are unchanged: using denunciations and administrative resources, they try to suppress any manifestations of solidarity and resistance, discrediting public figures, activists, and organizations advocating for justice and human rights.
According to Medvedev, in the book he writes, among other things, that:
"anti-fascism — as the history of the victory of the USSR and the Allies, as the history of the Resistance — is a great legacy that still connects us with Europe."
And he adds that the Russian government is using this legacy for its own purposes, and on the other hand,
"we have long heard from part of the opposition that a revision of history is needed, to the point that the USSR and the Third Reich are equated as two equally evils."
Medvedev believes that this is a path to nowhere:
"The modern official picture of the Great Patriotic War and the accompanying cult of war can and should be criticized, but in the essence of that victory there is a huge, universal humanistic meaning that we need today. Because Russian politics and ideology are part of one far-right turn that has been happening everywhere in recent decades: from Russia and Ukraine to Germany, the USA, Israel or Argentina. Nationalism, militarism, new borders, new practices of exclusion."
In this regard, we call on left-wing activists in Russia to take care of their safety and remember that the enemy is not only in the Kremlin, but also on the streets – in the form of the far-right, who closely cooperate with the authorities.