IP: Let's start by going over some general information about KAS, what it is, when and how it started, and what are some of its ideas.
Vlad Tupikin: The founding congress of KAS took place in Moscow in May 1989, but the beginning of creating an anarcho-syndicalist organization started earlier and by August 1988 the organization which became KAS already existed. KAS was created on the basis of several groups which independently came to the same ideas.
In Moscow this was a student group called Obshchina, community or commune, which dates back to 1983. There was a group of people, friends, and in 1985-86 they had the organizing committee of the All Unions Revolutionary Marxist Party. Later there was some evolution of ideas and by the time the Obshchina group was created in 1987 the main participants already knew that they stood for anarcho-syndicalism. This was mainly under the influence of Bakunin's critique of state socialism and Marxism. These people were mainly historians and had the possibility to read materials in the archives, which was closed to the general public.
IP: Bakunin's writings were not available except to historians?
Mikhail Tsovma: Almost not. There were editions which were published in 1919 by the anarcho-syndicalist printing house. Since then there was only the Marxist in quotation marks, in fact Stalinist, interpretation of his activity.
VT: In May 1987 we created the Obshchina group in the Moscow Teachers College and started organizing different discussions, for example about Komsomol (the Communist youth organization), how it should be organized, and about Stalinism. We were one of the first to discuss this here before the official newspapers and this was the beginning of these activities in Moscow.
In Irkutsk the group which later became part of KAS was called Socialist Club. It was created in 1988 and the people who established it were previously involved in dissident activities. Igor Podshivalov was an anarchist from 1981 and he participated in publishing a samizdat magazine called Candle, and after this was busted by the KGB all these people were kicked out of university. Two days before the founding congress of KAS took place in Moscow they found out that there were anarchists in Moscow and they just came.
There was a group in Leningrad called Anarcho-Syndicalist Free Association, influenced by the ideas of Benjamin Tucker, a well known American anarchist.
In Kharkov, Ukraine there were two groups which emerged during the elections to the congress of People's Deputies of USSR in 1989, with some activities before that.
Piotr Siuda one of the participants of the workers insurrection in 1962 in Novocherkassk also joined this group, though he had some kind of mixed ideas. He called himself a Bolshevik, but the ideas he was propagating had nothing to do with the communist establishment. He was very close to us and considered himself an anarcho-syndicalist and a Bolshevik at the same time. He had some people whom he worked in the south of Russia where Novocherkassk is and he also had some contact with miners.
In Khaboravsk there was a group called Labor Day. Some of the people from this group later went to the radical-liberal democratic union. The major part became anarcho-syndicalist and they are active until now.
During the founding congress on May 1 and 2, 1989, there were people represented from 12 different cities around Russia and the Ukraine. In Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkov and Khaboravsk they were mainly young people students or young teachers, young intellectuals, and in Siberia, they were mainly people who were a little older, maybe due to the patriarchal traditions of this region where you have to be quite an old man to be something.
The major role in creating a nationwide organization was the magazine Obshchina published in Moscow which was a samizdat [underground] publication put out on photocopiers. The readers of this magazine later became the local groups of KAS in different places of Russia. This magazine was one of the top five popular samizdat magazines. It was launched in September 1987.
KAS was created as a confederation of real existing local groups. It also participated in a broader movement called the Federation of Socialist Public Clubs (FSOK). The Socialist party of [Boris] Kagarlitsky [currently a leader of the Party of Labor] was also part of this broader formation.
FSOK was created in August 1987, but it really started active campaigns and propaganda in December 87 and continued until September 1988. After that it started to disintegrate. KAS was created and also the Socialist party of Kagarlitsky, and many people from FSOK joined one of those organizations.
IP: Those were the two largest?
MT: KAS was the larger and for some time it was the major left non- communist organization nationwide and was mainly young people.
Mainly youth
IP: When you say young people, what age range?
MT: Sixteen or seventeen to twenty-five years old.
IP: How old are you three?
MT: I'm twenty-one, Vlad, who is one of the founders of KAS, is twenty-eight, and Nikolai is twenty-seven. So we're getting older, there are no seventeen year olds around
IP: What did Obshchina and KAS actually do, in terms of street activities? Or was it primarily a propaganda group?
VT: Obshchina group arose after a series of public discussions organized by these revolutionaries in the teachers' college. They were discussing Soviet and Russian history, the history of Stalinism, the history of socialist thought. It was an alternative system of education because there were no books, no publications in the media and no discussions in the official propaganda. The people that gathered around this group later became the Obshchina group in Moscow Teacher's College.
Obshchina also participated in gathering signatures for Yeltsin to speak at the Central Committee meeting when he was expelled for his anti-bureaucratic and anti-privilege statements. This was in November, 1987 and Obshchina group was making a campaign not for or against Yeltsin, but a campaign for glasnost in Yeltsin's affair because the party was trying to make it clandestine and no information was published. This campaign was part of this broader campaign for glasnost. There were several other groups, for example in the university that were for or against Yeltsin, but this was not our case.
There were campaigns during the 19th party conference. At those times there were no parliamentary elections, the party was the state, so by influencing the elections to the party conference, people tried to propagate their own ideas and tried to change things.
Obshchina group and some other groups like liberals were also the organizers for the first demonstrations in Moscow.
IP: I saw a picture of Vlad in a demonstration, can you tell me the circumstances of that and what the banner said?
VT: This was the famous demonstration, the first march through the city on the 28th of May 1988 and was a part of the campaign against the so-called temporary rules which banned any meetings and demonstrations in the street. This was a big public campaign against these rules for the freedom of meetings and street actions. Different groups, Obshchina and liberal groups like Civic Dignity, participated in this campaign, tried to organize demonstrations and leafleted.
We understood that police can prevent meetings if people are standing somewhere, but don't know what to do if people are marching in the city. We organized this march not on the telephone but out on the street so the KGB would not know. On the 28th of May we marched from Bolshoi theater to Pushkin square and established a type of Hyde Park there like in London, where people can gather and discuss. It was for a long time a public meeting place and Samizdat literature was distributed there.
MT: The banner read "Freedom without Socialism is Privilege and Injustice. Socialism without Freedom is Slavery and Brutality," a famous quote from Bakunin.
IP: When was the last demonstration in Moscow like that?
VT: The last march through the city was the illegal Trotskyist demonstration in 1927 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of October. Since then there were no marches of the left. Mainly there were some meetings where people gathered and were arrested by police.
This was May and June 1988 when there were quite a number of meetings, ecological meetings, meetings about Karabagh, etc. This was when a lot sincere people were taking part in these activities and there were almost no politicians trying to make a career, because it was very dangerous to participate in the movement in those years.
In the end of 1988 members of Obshchina group and other groups created the Union of Student Youth, an attempt to create an independent trade union or student organization to try to solve some of the problems of the students. In February 1989 we launched a campaign of boycott of military studies in the colleges. In some places like the Moscow Teachers' College this was quite successful. Another campaign was against compulsory studies of Marxism-Leninism in the high schools.
In 1990 one of the biggest campaigns was solidarity for Chinese students, protesting the Tienanmen Square events, in which Obshchina and various democratic groups participated. For two years there were organized camps near Moscow University, and demonstrations near the Chinese Embassy where we were beaten by police. When Li Peng was in Moscow we organized protests against that.
IP: Mikhail, can you and Nikolai tell me about your background and how you came to KAS.
MT: I was some kind of honest Marxist-Leninist and just Marxist, a critical communist. I was critical of the communist party and the regime here. In school my friends and I had discussions. Later we met these people from Obshchina who came to our school, were teachers there for some time there and inspired everybody. We created a group called the Socialist Revolutionary Party which had five members and we organized many different campaigns in school, mainly with the help of Obshchina. We put leaflets on the walls and made handwritten newspapers. Together with Obshchina we organized public disputes in our school. We were the most active political group in our school.
This was quite a widespread thing in schools. Students were trying to discuss all these problems because this was on the television and radio and in the news in 1988-89. We were not satisfied. We were listening to Russian rock music which was in some ways quite radical. This was quite a widespread movement of people dissatisfied with Gorbachev's policies even, we wanted more glasnost and we wanted to be more radical. These people often came to groups like Obshchina.
IP: Nikolai, I understand you were active in Latin-American solidarity groups. Can you tell us about the Che Guevara brigade and some of your history?
Nikolai Muravin: This was quite a long time ago. These groups existed semi-legally during the Soviet years, beginning from 1984 to 1988-89, when some people became members of the Obshchina group in Moscow.
So the Che Guevara Brigade, the group I was in, is a little older than the Obshchina group. Besides the Che Guevara brigade there were all different groups that were building solidarity links with Latin America. This was one of the parts of official propaganda, but these people participated in it sincerely.
Che Guevara group consisted of both Soviet people and Latin American students and refugees that were here. They were trying to raise money for Chilean communists and radicals, and they were making links with the wounded people from Salvador and Nicaragua who were in Soviet hospitals. In 1985, they helped leftists organize an election campaign in Moscow because there were a lot of Peruvian students here. They made cards for one of the leftists who was running for president and though in Peru the right wing person won, in Moscow the leftist won.
There were some people working in Ukraine in agricultural farms who raised money and sent it to Nicaragua. From 1987, we expanded our contacts to students and refugees from Namibia, Kurdish resistance in Iran, and also started to make links with other leftist groups like Obshchina.
In 1988, there was a little concert to commemorate Che Guevara. I and other people met with Cubans students who were here and I have a feeling that this was exactly the same in 1935 in Russia when there were sincere communists who understood nature of Stalinism but they couldn't do anything about it.
By 1988-89 we understood that these activities were no longer uniting us. Some people joined KAS, some people joined the Party of Labor and some just stopped political activity.
MT: KAS was almost the only organization that tried for some time to keep these international solidarity campaigns going. For example there was the campaign with Chinese students from Tienanmen Square. We also made protests when they bombed Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney in the USA. We protested near the American Embassy.
I just saw Part 1 of this interview I did on your web page "The Beginning of the Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists (KAS) in Russia", part of the International Anarchism and Revolt web pages I guess. In any case I looked in my files for Part 2, since you indicated you didn't have it. Here is the version I found. It may not be identical with the version we printed in Independent Politics (IP). I haven't checked it, but there was usually some final editing done. In any case this is at least pretty close to the final version, and if anything is longer, since we often had to cut later for space.
Alex Chis
====================
This is the conclusion of an interview done by Alex Chis of Independent Politics in Moscow in November 1993 with three activists of the Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists (KAS): Vlad Tupikin, Mikhail Tsovma and Nikolai Muravin. The first section (see IP #5) went through 1989.
AC: What has been the work of KAS since 1989?
VT: In 1990, the KAS-KOR information agency was created. People were trying to get links with the emerging workers organizations and trade unions.
AC: This was the time when there was a big miner's strike?
MT: Yes, after the miner's strike in 1989, there was this process of creating independent trade unions and we tried to get in contact with them. This was also the time when there were a lot of street actions, demonstrations, pickets, distributing literature, etc.
For example, on May 1 we participated in a demonstration at Red Square. There were 500 people there with a black flag.
There were attempts to create independent groups with participation of anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists which were not successful. But there were a lot of anarchist newspapers, thirty of them throughout Russia. Some published only one issue, or stopped soon. They were in Siberia, Thomsk, Kharkov, several in Moscow, Leningrad and other cities. This was like the peak of social and anarchist activities, 1989-1990.
In May 1990 we started KAS-KOR, in an attempt to reach out to the workers and to try to propagate syndicalist ideas, but also to gather information and try to establish informational links between different organizations. For some time KAS KOR was very successful with that.
VT: 1990-1991 was the beginning of decline of public activities. People were quite tired of politics and the social and political activities were centered around the newly elected Russian parliament and support to Yeltsin and we didn't fit in this picture. The newspapers were giving much more information than they did before and were quite cheap. Many people started to buy regular newspapers instead of Samizdat. Almost all Samizdat publications ceased to exist This was a crisis of many of the editorial groups like Obshchina.
Some kind of reemergence of activities occurred during the coup d'état in August 1991 and anarchists also participated in the struggle against the dictatorship. Of course we were not defending Yeltsin but just did not want the Communists and party bureaucrats to come back.
After the August coup d'état, the official trade unions started some changes of the structure and leadership and tried to find a new face for themselves. They proposed people from KAS-KOR and KAS to do their newspaper and for some time we worked on this paper. The paper was quite radical and interesting. Different people had the opportunity to speak through this paper, the Greens, the Party of Labor, anarchists, socialists. This was successful for some time but then we became redundant and were not politically correct. So step by step we were kicked out.
AC: When did that period end?
MT: This started in August 1991 after the coup and for about half a year we were making the paper with no ideological restrictions.
VT: Little by little we were pushed out of making decisions and finally they just cleaned some people out. Not only anarchists but also some Marxists had to leave because their articles were too communist.
Now KAS is quite a small organization but still it has groups in various regions, of Russia mainly. Before it was the only anarchist federation and all different anarchists joined it. Now it is a mostly homogeneous anarcho-syndicalist organization. People are involved in working with different trade unions and workers' organizations. In KAS-KOR we tried to establish information services for these organizations. We do not want to support either old or new unions because we are critical of both. We just want to propagate the ideas of the rank and file independent workers movement and we want to propagate socialist and anarchist ideas among the workers.
In different places KAS activists are involved in working with trade unions and making publications. In Thomsk 7, they have a very good experience of fighting against nomenklatura privatization of the enterprise and fighting for better working conditions and salaries and maybe in some time they will create an independent union.
AC: What is Thomsk 7?
MT: Thomsk 7 is a secret city near Thomsk. There was a big nuclear blowout there. Thirty per cent of the plutonium in Russia is made in this city. They have an anarcho-syndicalist group and a publication there and are active in the fight against privatization. They try to create an independent union.
In Baikalsk (at lake Baikal) one of our activists is involved in independent union activities. There is a big factory there. They created a union recently of about 270 people. This guy is the chairman of this union.
AC: How large is this factory?
VT: There are several thousand people in this factory. In comparison with that the union is rather small but there was a pre-strike readiness in this enterprise and out of eleven people on the strike committee, four were from this union. This shows the popularity of this independent union is quite big. Of course it is very hard for local workers' groups to be big, because the activity of workers in general is not so big. That's why there are so few independent unions and they are now quite bureaucratic because of this lack of rank and file activity. The old trade unions continue to exist because nobody appears willing to change them, but maybe in some time this will change.
AC: What types of newspapers are available for workers?
MT: Generally there are two kinds. There are the local workers' newspapers, all different types -- those that belong to independent trade unions and those sponsored by the AFL-CIO because it is very active in trying to get control over the new workers' unions. Then there are newspapers of leftist groups, they speak about workers but they are party newspapers of political sects, they are not very popular.
AC: Are there a number of sects?
MT: In Moscow there are several Trotskyist groups, some one member strong, usually this a member from Austria or the U.S. Spartacist is the biggest with 5 people, 4 are foreigners. They are very active in publishing their newspaper but the only people who read this newspaper go to Communist and nationalist demonstrations too.
AC: Could you talk about your ideological genesis. You were Marxists or socialists and read Bakunin. But because in fact there were widespread numbers of people that went to anarcho-syndicalism or anarchism, there must have been more general reasons than people reading Bakunin and Obshchina, it looks more like a social phenomenon. Can you comment on that.
MT: Vlad thinks that the evolution of his ideas is quite characteristic for many anarchists and leftist sectors here.
VT: We were all victims of the official Communist propaganda and from early childhood we were taught that the values of freedom, equality, brotherhood and collectivism are very good and this is the real humanism. But life in the Soviet Union and the practice of the CP showed us that the world we lived in was constructed according to different principles. So there were two choices, either to devaluate all these values which were officially propagated or to try to change the world we live in to bring about these values.
So for many of us it was not much different how to call these ideas -- humanism, social democracy, Trotskyism. Later when we got access to different tendencies in socialist thought we discovered that maybe anarcho-syndicalism was the closest one because we were anti-communist, meaning that we were not communist we were collectivist-socialist, and we thought that some of the origins of Communist totalitarianism can be found in Marx and Engels and in the practices of different CPs. That's why we adopted the ideal of decentralism, federalism and the freedom of individuals, but we didn't stop being socialists. Also for every social activist or person who tried to make his own estimations of the situation in this country it was obvious the repressive nature of the state. All these attempts to think for yourself were crushed from the very beginning. That's why we were very anti-statist because we just saw how the state was.
At the same time, we did not believe in Western democracy. As historians the people who founded the Obshchina group knew that there were different kinds of social experience, like Russia in 1917. It was obvious to us that parliamentary democracy in the West is based on money and big business and this was not the ideal that we wanted. We also studied the experience of the Russian revolution. For us it was the experience of a country which for about a year lived without a state. There was a system of soviets, direct democracy, workers' self management. We tried to get what we could from this. We were rather critical of some of it but for the most part this was a big inspiration for us.
AC: What has happened to the founders of the group?
MT: Vlad was a founder of the group. Alexander Shubin is now one of the leaders of the Green Party, perhaps not an anarchist now. Some of the founders, like Andrei Isayev (currently the editor of Solidarnost, the paper of the Moscow Federation of Trade Unions), left for the Labor Party and are not anarchists now. But in the provinces the majority of people who started the local KAS groups in Thomsk, Omsk, Khabarovsk, Irkutsk, Baikalsk are still around.
AC: What is your position in general on elections?
VT: We had many discussions about participating in elections in 1989. There was the election to the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR which we boycotted. The year after, in 1990, there were elections to the Russian parliament and to the local soviets. Of course we boycotted the parliament elections but we participated in the local elections.
AC: Why do you say of course?
MT: It's not a dogma for us that anarchists should boycott elections but for us it's obvious that parliamentary democracy is not what we want and is just run by the propaganda machine, the state and the major party. So we boycotted those. We felt that by participating in the local elections we could propagate our ideas to a wider circle of people. There were some people who were not elected because of illegal manipulations during the elections.
AC: Illegal things?
VT: Yes, in two cases, there were military detachments which voted according to orders. We got approximately fifty per cent of the votes and because of the manipulations this was a little less than needed, in Moscow and Irkutsk.
Also in Kharkov there were two people elected to the municipality which taught us a lot because they distanced themselves from their comrades and the people who elected them and they became bureaucrats. So this was a negative experience. For us as anarchists it was quite understandable. In Thomsk anarchists have one deputy to the local soviet which is a positive experience. He is still an anarchist, and is working with the anarchist group.
These elections also played a very negative role to the democratic and human rights, and ecological and social activist movements in general because people tried to integrate into the system and just became politicians. The civil society which was starting to appear at the end of 80's disappeared. They are people in the Parliament and they do their work and they don't care about human rights anymore. When these people were not in parliament or the municipalities there were much greater possibilities to force the authorities by popular movements to make decisions more or less in the interests of the people.
AC: What about the elections in December 1993?
MT: In Moscow and Khabarovsk we know that anarchists will boycott the elections because we have information on how this coup d'état was made, how it was done with provocation from the government and people who stand around Yeltsin. People in the other regions of Russia, they have just the media picture of what happened, a big distortion. Nothing to do with reality
We are trying to gather information to analyze the situation and communicate it to the regions and give them an alternative picture of what happened because we were all witnesses of these events and know what it was in fact. We think people will want to boycott these elections because it is the only honest position, after they get the information. We think we should either boycott this election or make fake campaigns, like the Subtropical Russian Movement for the Banana Republic, just showing this regime what it is.
This is a person trying to participate in the elections. He chose the university district. Maybe among the students there are more people with common sense who understand what it is about and will vote for him He needs only 4500 signatures to get registered as a candidate. This guy is not an anarchist but is a long time activist, one of the former dissidents and informal lecturers. He has the same attitude as we do of this regime.
There are people previously in these liberal, democratic and human rights groups who are trying to understand what this Russian democracy is about. They know the coup d'état was a great distortion of democracy and human rights, that there is no free press in this country. They as honest people come to the same opinions.
VT: There is now a debate on participating in these elections. Some people think that as many oppositionists as possible should be elected to show Yeltsin that it won't be a pocket parliament and that there are other opinions in the society. Many people who think that are people that just want to be elected and care only about their own political career. This won't change much in the situation.
AC: What was the position of KAS on Yeltsin's coup and specifically on defense of parliament. e
MT: We saw that this had nothing to do with democracy and were quite satisfied with the situation when there was a parliament and president that fought each other and there was some freedom in the society. Now if somebody wins, whether parliament or Yeltsin, it's a distortion of human rights and of freedom. Of course, parliament could not have won because Yeltsin was supported by the western guns and big business. We didn't go to defend the parliament because we knew what kind of people gathered there and that this parliament was not defending the interests of people. The deputies themselves said they are in ninety per cent agreement with Yeltsin's economic policies. These neo-liberal policies would destroy the Russian economy, leave millions unemployed, and are an anti-popular economic policy. Of course we cannot support this policy. But the main thing was to oppose Yeltsin's dictatorship.
AC: While you don't and did not politically support the parliament, you would have preferred that parliament not be overrun by Yeltsin. In a sense, you defended the idea of the Russian parliament.
MT: The exact position is that we called for peaceful resolution of this political conflict because we did not want millions of people to get involved in this and get killed and maybe the best decision was to reelect both Yeltsin and parliament. Of course we would not have participated in the election, but for the sake of democracy it was the best variant. Unfortunately there was not much popular support for this. The population was just manipulated by the media and from that point of view this coup d'état was ninety per cent media-organized. It was very characteristic because before all political changes to a great degree were based on force, army, police, and stuff like that. Of course in this coup d'état the use of force was involved but the main part was the control of public consciousness.
AC: What is your position on the Party of Labor?
MT: From the very beginning we were not supporting this idea, though several years before we tried to get together all the left groups. But after several attempts at that idea failed, we thought maybe this was maybe impossible. We cannot support the strategy of the Party of Labor because it is only a strategy of getting elected into parliament, joining some structure to influence decisions from the inside, like intellectuals integrating into trade unions and the state apparatus.
This is not what we want to be a part of. But we see that the ideas which are alternative both to Stalinism and Yeltsin's or Gaidar's neo-liberal democracy, the ideas which are a kind of socialism with a human face, self-management in the interests of people, they can be popular. But unfortunately not so many groups actively try to propagate these ideas and the groups that do try are either getting into the more political activities of elections or they are very sectarian and are unable to propose any kind of alternative.
AC: I think that you mentioned to me that the circles that formed the Party of Labor do not have a magazine of their own.
MT: No, from people like Kagarlitsky , Segal and Buzgalin, who are quite intelligent people, you would have expected that they try to start a discussion magazine or at least a good newspaper which would try to get these ideas to the general public. But there is nothing. Sometimes Solidarnost was a kind of broad paper, but now it is mainly under the control of the trade union leadership which tries to not be politically active. The only group that gets printed in there is the Party of Labor basically.
Organizing a kind of left, socialist, anarchist publication would be a very great thing, but it is not possible now. We have our own magazine, Obshchina, we try to include all kinds of opinions there. We are not opposed to socialists or liberals who are dissatisfied with the government publishing their opinion there but there is not so much cooperation right now.
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