#and even a bit of lenin

[sh3nlong-promakh0s]

I hate petty bourgeois mfs so much it's unreal

Anyway I'll probably work in data entry again smh bc mfs want me to do that and I need extra money fuck

[psychotrenny]

To all the Anarchists who don't read, could you please understand why people would like you to answer basic questions on the principals of how your planned future society functions. You don't have to produce a hundred pages of technical documents and 5 year plans, but at the bare minimum when people ask "Could you produce the things I/my loved ones need to not die badly?" you need a better answer than "Yeah man we'll work something out. I gotta buddy who's really into biochemistry I'm sure he'll cook something up". If you are unwilling or unable to provide said better answer, then it's only natural that people will be unsympathetic to your ideology and getting mad about it only makes things worse.

Like if you wanna pursue Anarchism as like some sort of Philosophy/Lifestyle/Mindset or whatever that's your business, it's not as though I can send you to a re-education camp* or anything. But doing that is not a very effective way to bring about actual change in the world, and you look fucking ridiculous when you act as though it is. You need to take your ideology serious if you want anyone else to

And to all those Anarchists who do read, do keep in mind that the largest and most vocal contingent of self-identified "Anarchists" are the various political illiterates and LARPers who therefore provide most people's primary point of reference for Anarchism. I'm sure it's very infuriating to see all the contemptuous mockery directed towards the the most weak and incoherent version of your ideology, but you have to understand this is mainly a reaction to what people actually experience rather than a deliberate attempt to strike at strawmen. Like if you're sick of seeing this then getting mad isn't gonna do anything either; your only real option is to improve your collective efforts at education and agitprop. And not only towards the "Statists" and undecided, but towards your supposed Anarchist comrades as well. It's worth preaching to the choir when none of them show up to church

[galactic-mermaid]

I hope all of you are having a lovely holiday and in that vein I hope you would share a bit of your joy with a family in Gaza. Samah Aburakhia (@aburakhiaibrahim ) has been fundraising for her family of twenty eight, but the donations have been incredibly slow. Initially the fundraiser was started so that the family could evacuate to Canada (where Samah currently resides), however with the occupation forces closing the border, this hasn't been possible and now her family is trying to survive through the genocide. Samah is worried sick for her family. She hasn't been able to visit home for thirteen years because of the occupation, and now she has to watch the same occupation destroy the childhoods of all fifteen kids in her family. 

So please, please help Samah. The cost of living is exceptionally high in Gaza because of the bombings and the blockade. So right now even a $5 CAD ( $3.75 USD) donation can go a long way. Please boost and donate. 

Tagging for reach, dm for removal

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@mazzikah  @toiletpotato  @ankle-beez @lonniemachin @heydreamchild

[edwad]

marxism (or whatever) theory is way too esoteric to build a mass movement around. i have two years of philosophy formal training and still find some stuff in capital very hard to wrap my head around of. the idea that the average person is going to have politics this sophisticated is just hopeless. before you reflexively disagree with me, consider that to get where you are you've had reading scholarly texts on this topic as your primary hobby for like over a decade now

this isn't a reflexive disagreement but i do think you're wrong. not just because ive had some relative overexposure to marxist texts or because i think 2 years of formal philosophy training isn't even all that much or wouldn't necessarily make reading capital easier as such (besides, i have 0 years of philosophy training and dont read philosophical texts of the sort that i imagine you're talking about), but because i think the history of 20th century social movements basically proves you wrong.

from chinese peasants reading marx in the mountainsides to poor black workers in alabama reading lenin, i think treating marxism as beyond the intellectual scope of the average mind or whatever is demonstrably false. that you can hone in on a particular element and waste lots of ink on some of the more sophisticated bits and pieces doesn't mean that people can't be mobilized by it. i also don't really see myself as somehow outside of "The Masses" just because i've done a lot of the reading (i obviously started reading this stuff for a reason!)

and of course i wouldn't be able to resist pointing out that im not even a marxist, but to suggest it can't do the things it has very obviously done just strikes me as ridiculous.

[apas-95]

Hello, I'm sorry for bothering.

A lot of fellow comrades have been posting quite a bit about anarchists lately and I've noticed that they seem to be the majorly from North America (predominantly the US).

Do you think the heavy anti-communist propaganda in these countries is a big influence on, at least online, people's radicalization into anarchism and the aversion to us as "authoritarian takies"?

I've always felt like anarchism is not demonized as much (most anti anarchist propaganda, if you could even call it that, is the propagation of the rule-breaker rebel teen that cares for no one stereotype) because it simply isn't a threat to the capitalism like socialism and communism are. It feels like they'd prefer that people get radicalized into anarchism as it would be both improbable to have a revolution and if it did happen power would be easily taken back. Am I crazy, or does this make sense?

In general, yes, anarchism is significantly more popular in the imperial core; and during the cold war all sorts of 'anti-authoritarian' currents of thought were promoted by the west states as a means of countering Marxism-Leninism.

The most popular anticommunist works, like 1984, which was internationally published and adapted directly by the CIA and British intelligence, are ones that promote a supposedly 'leftist' opposition to socialism. The bourgeoisie would much prefer to deal with anarchists than Marxist-Leninists, which shouldn't come as anything of a surprise, given the last 100 years have been defined by their existential scramble to try to defeat Marxist-Leninist projects composed of hundreds of millions of politically-conscious workers armed with the most advanced weaponry and industrial bases - and the most successful anarchist projects have been, at best, small states formed in the power vacuums of civil wars led by Marxist-Leninist parties, or, more commonly, some sort of protest camp/community garden that gets destroyed as soon as a single cop walks into it.

Also posting the image to clown around a bit fhfhfh

[sansculottides]

Maximilien Robespierre was executed on July 28, 1794, or the 10th of Thermidor in the Republican Calendar. A conventional textbook may mark the end of the French Revolution with Napoleon’s coup in 1799. But Ralph Korngold, Marxist historian, wrote:

“No one man creates a revolution or carries it on, but the currents of revolution may sometimes range themselves in such a manner that the fate of one man becomes the fate of the revolution itself. ‘We did not realize,’ said Cambon, ‘that in killing Robespierre we would kill the Republic.” (From Robespierre and the Fourth Estate–the “fourth estate” here referring to the budding proletarian class of the time. Korngold gave particular attention to Robespierre’s role in the attempt to enact the Ventôse Decrees, the most revolutionary laws proposed during the Republic which would have expropriated the wealth of counter-revolutionaries to be redistributed to the propertyless.)

Napoleon’s ascent ten years after the start of the Revolution only marked the final stab in a Republic that was already good as dead. The death of Robespierre and his allies was the death of the Revolution’s radical aspirations, and allowed the propertied men to fully take charge. Though I also appreciate the sentiment that we can also mark the Revolution’s end a bit after Robespierre, with the death of Babeuf, the “proto-communist."

Anyway, what I really wanted to do was talk about a phenomenal short film that came out this year (on Robespierre’s birthday), “La mort de Robespierre” by smileyfaceorg/Janelle Feng (who has done so much amazing art about Robespierre and the French Revolution).

The film focuses on the night before 10 Thermidor, before Robespierre’s forceful arrest. This historical episode has been depicted before, in various ways. In the 1989 movie La Revolution Francaise, Robespierre had gone insane at this point, an interpretation that fed off of years of black propaganda. In Feng’s film, Robespierre is depressed, remorseful and self-loathing, an interpretation that does have its footing in historical record. In the months leading up to his arrest, Robespierre was frequently sick from the mental exhaustion of running and defending the Republic.

Mental health isn’t a new thing, though we have admittedly only recently begun to be articulate on the subject. Mental health amongst revolutionaries isn’t new either. Even Lenin died of sickness likely compounded by the stress of protecting the Revolution’s gains. In the 1871 Paris Commune, the commune council was “a working, not a parliamentary body [but] executive and legislative at the same time,” which allowed members to fully dedicate themselves to the cause of building a socialist future, but also burdened them with a punishing workload with little room for rest, and the mental exhaustion that naturally follows. I’m sure every person in any radical movement knows the weight of the struggle, but that’s one reason why it must be a collective effort.

At one point in the film Saint-Just looks at the 1793 Declaration of Rights on the wall and comments “To think we made that.” It’s another historically-rooted moment, as there was at least one eyewitness account claiming he did something like that on that night. I think the presence of the 1793 Declaration also ties the film in with the radical tradition of interpreting the Revolution. The ‘93 Declaration was more egalitarian than the initial 1789 Declaration, signed off by a pressured Louis XVI and also the one more textbooks would remember.

I love the use of comic elements too. Comic devices in film would make me think of stuff like Spiderverse or Scott Pilgrim where it’s fun and wacky, but in this film Feng uses comic devices to contract and expand space and time to an introspective yet claustrophobic effect. Especially the scenes where panels surrounded by negative space hint at Robespierre’s inner turmoil. It works really well; comic elements can work like poetry, after all.

I love stuff like this, art that is rooted in history (with quite scholarly rigor) while also aiming to go beyond academic scholarship. You can’t quite explore things like emotions and human experience the same way you can through art. Art like this film looks at historical facts and tries to fill in the gaps. How did they feel about this, what kind of effect did it have? And it explores how these historical people and episodes were human. More importantly, it does so with empathy and purpose, keeping in the “spirit” of the historical figures depicted. If you truly read Robespierre, you wouldn’t give in to lazy portrayals of a mad dictator. In contrast, Feng’s short film shows so much care and attention for this person in the past.

I’m so happy that someone like Feng is making art about the French Revolution. Most of the films, novels, games, etc that come out about the French Rev usually just follow the boring, very liberal and mainstream narratives, and calumnies about Robespierre being a dictator or various other kinds of monsters (not true). Korngold wrote about this too: “The Red Terror appears unpardonable to the Whites, and the White Terror to the Reds. Carlyle penetrates closely to the truth when he says that the reason the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution has received so much scathing comment, is mainly because it was directed against the privileged classes and their followers and not against ‘the voiceless millions.’”

Like the rest of history, our interpretation of the French Revolution exposes the undercurrents of ideology, conscious or not. Our ideas of who should be in power, who should be listened to. Ultimately, it did end as a revolution of the budding bourgeoisie, but before that defeat, there were revolutionaries who imagined and fought for a new future for all. Not just a political revolution, but a social and economic one. We should remember their revolutionary example. There is a reason, after all, why the Soviets held the likes of Robespierre, Saint-Just and Marat in high regard.

[read-marx-and-lenin]

I've always been fascinated by science since I was young, and Marxism appealed greatly to my desire to understand the world in materialistic terms and not just pure idealisms. At the same time however, I've been feeling like science itself is attack virtually everything I stand for and exist as. Science says that communism Is Bad and can throw several studies and charts saying why for every piece of literature and theory I throw back. Transphobes point to Science to say that me and my transgender friends' very existence is based on nothing more than mental illness and idealistic fantasy. Even if most mainstream scientists don't support racism nor eugenics, those ideas still have great sway and it feels like they have more support now than ever. I refuse to ever become a science denier, but at the same time how can I put trust an institution that has been captured by capitalists & reactionaries to not be weaponized against marginalized peoples?

Science is not an institution, science is not a collection of data points and observations, science is first and foremost a process through which knowledge is generated and refined. The crude scientism that goes "I can point to a chart and say Bad Number went up in the Soviet Union and Good Number went down", that's not scientific investigation. Out of context, you can manipulate any numbers, twist any definitions, all to suit a particular political narrative. But at the end of the day, that kind of nonsense isn't going to get you any closer to the truth or generate any useful knowledge. That's the difference between actual science and reactionary pap dressed up in scientific jargon.

There's a long tradition of Marxists debating against folks who profess to put forward "really scientific" worldviews. Whether it's Marx criticizing Feuerbach, Engels criticizing Düring, or Lenin criticizing Bogdanov, there's no shortage of classic works built around debates between figures who all profess their viewpoints to be based in scientific rigor. We have never lived in a world where the science is settled, and we never will. That doesn't mean science is useless, it just means we must be careful not to overstate our convictions, and anyone who claims to hold an ultimate scientific truth is quite frankly full of themself.

The very reason why so many ideologues want to proclaim their views are scientific is because science is so useful and accurate when used correctly. If science were nothing more than corrupt institutions and post-hoc rationalizations, nobody would be chomping at the bit to assert that their views are scientific in the first place. The scientific method can be used correctly, and no amount of politically-motivated scientism can change that.

[casanova-lives]

If you're going to go to protests, it's better to get arrested on purpose than snatched. Get a burner, but be prepared to lose everything anyways if You're suspected of being a credible threat or if they need to use you as an example. Use a surgical mask+hat/hoodie to cover facial features. If you see police drones, a bb gun can be bought by nearly anyone you know :3. With a bit of know-how, air rifles are even better.

At the march, keep shituational awareness, stay in the front half unless you have business in the back hall. Dress lightly but warm enough to survive the transition to night. Write important numbers on your person. Don't take pictures unless you are press. Don't snitch on yourself on social media by posting pictures near the protest begin/end, we're living in interesting times. Always go with a buddy. Bring water+stuff but don't weigh yourself down. Don't throw punches at the cops unless you know you can win the fight against his friends. Don't even harass them until it's safe to do so. Avoid arrest unless it's specifically for that: Keep your blip off of their radar. Find something to do with your hands.

Don't start sectarian arguments. We must come together in principled unity on the issue of halting, and then punishing, the crime of genocide. Something we should have been doing all along prior to October. Find people you work well with and make an affinity group united in principle on the activities you all plan to get involved in. Some require more ideological unity than others. Regardless, everyone in your AG needs good information security culture.

Two big methods of organizational strategy and tactics that are known to work are Democratic Centralism, and Crew Resource Management. The former you can read Lenin and Mao. The latter has a tutorial on the FEMA website. Use both.

Most importantly, your health and safety are needed to continue doing this for as long as we need to. Put the oxygen mask on yourself first before helping anyone next to you.

Palestine will be free.

[babylon-crashing]

the psycho'vac

I.        In a glass case                in the dark                         in an alcove                                in the dark                in a church in Rome,        in Sienna, in Florence,                                bits of saints mummified like the monkey's paw or                        Daniel Dravot's withered head                                                sat in the dark                        waiting for the faithful                                                to pass by, tourists to gawk at, for children of archeologists                to be terrified by.        Outside the Uffitzi                        one could buy postcards                                        fragments of Bosch's                                                        Last Judgement (1504)                                        reaction against sexuality                        that was creeping        back into the faith – every where lusty, fleshy figures                        were being torn apart, swallowed whole by frog-eggs,        tossed into pits of fire and snakes,                                        onto pitchforks and trees of thorn                while the saved, the fleshless,                                desiccated, loosely built creatures                        closed their eyes and lay upon the ground to pray.

II.

It starts while you sit in an outdoor cafe near the great clock in the ex-Lenin Square, forever at 11:45, while swallows who nest in the ruined eaves dart low, dark sickle-flashes, sweeping, skimming. Your notebook is open, pen cast down. You sip at the tiny cup of bitter coffee-sludge (when you are at a friend's house the old tatik takes the finished cup from your hands and reads the ground-stains, having you press your thumb into the hot residue, always with the curious shapes rimming the inside lip.) There is a smell thunder in the air. It starts when you walk down one of the city's mud streets, the rain coming down for four days nonstop. You stand in a crumbled doorway, a truck rumbles past full of cabbage heading for the market, spraying mud and gravel into the air. The wave-like clouds come down off the nearby mountains, things urgent and low to the ground, overwhelming the ruined factories and caved-in apartments, the one-room emergency boxes families of eight or twelve had been living in for the last seven years. It starts as you walk down the street. Under your boots, laying in unmarked graves, thousands of bodies, crushed and buried, their calls bubbling to the surface. Waiting for someone to hear.

III.

After the first baby in the orphanage you work at dies, then the second and finally a third, you go on a walk. It has been lightly snowing. Behind the city lays the broken rail yard. Even though there is no penicillin at the rail yard and none of the doctors who refuse to come to the orphanage to heal "things" as they call your babies will be there, you walk without a hat in the late afternoon gusts. You climb up through an abandoned cab engine, the iron sticking slightly to your gloves, its wooden passenger carriages trapped under a fallen wall. The train - its olive green and chrome and red 1940s Soviet art deco - slightly covered in wet-powder. At your feet, in the lee of the cab engine, dozens of empty hypodermic needles. Beyond the cab, the twisted rail lines; toppled buildings and other ruins; open pits of crude oil sunk in the ground; a whole roundhouse with the roof caved-in. It looks like a temple. Something holy, but you who never believed in the sacred or the holy, who saw ghosts as simply cultural abstractions. When you reach the roundhouse you find nothing inside but rubble and years and years of snow.

IV.

Humor. An US Embassy worker, an American working for a Foreign Aide organization and a Peace Corps Volunteer run into each on the street. Soon an Armenian friend walks by.

"This morning for breakfast," the Armenian said, "I had Frosted Flakes with milk."

"You had Frosted Flakes?" cried the Embassy worker, "How did you get Frosted Flakes in Armenia?"

"Oh, I bought them at the black market store near my house."

"You had milk?" cried the Foreign Aide worker, "How did you get milk?"

"Oh, I mixed the powdered milk with water."

"You had water?" cried the Peace Corps Volunteer, "How did you get water?"

V.

All winter long you were in isolation

watching it grow. You had given up

on the poetry brought in the 40-pound

box from home. You had not spoken

English in over three months, ever since the first

frost coated your pillow – there was no heat

in your hut, the rains turned to ice.

You wore your jacket and thermals and gloves

to bed and gave up on poetry. Reading

a poet writing about wasted sex no less

in San Francisco was a hateful thing.

Reading a poet, in Berkeley, where they

have everything, speculate on her fat

soul was a hateful, too. Under your floor

boards the dead called out your name, until

vodka, Russian water, kept the their

voices at bay. Intolerable, how clear they

came in. All of them complained,

griped, belly-ached in a language

untranslatable until your perception:

It was a cross between Armenian

and Russian that the old women spoke

down in the market.

VI.

It is sad to see these old people one, two, three generations apart from their children. These haughty, thin old people unable to speak of these things anymore, needing always to speak around them, as if at the dinner table to speak with clarity would make the magic happen all over again. To listen to them submerge their magic, to protect their children. There was a woman, nearly a hundred, who lived in a nearby village. As a baby she had escaped the Young Turks' Genocide in 1915, had witnessed the USSR rise and fall and had lost eighteen children and grandchildren in the earthquake. You visit her, she speaks in the ancient language, the old Armenian words, "God has forsaken the Armenians" – and spends her time looking for her god among the graveyards where 50,000 of her people died in 4 minutes in 1988. You will be leaving soon, returning on a 32-hour flight. Numbers. Something is inside you. Parasite. You will be leaving soon, and she has no more use for the living. Her words drop away, become muddled, confused, a lexicon of secrets, you pass by gravestone after gravestone on the way to the surface, thousands of them, until there is no more room for air.

VII.

Of course, you

take it with you.

It grows hideous

inside you, even

after the Peace Corps'

doctors arrived and demanded

that you are Medically

Evacuated -- the ol' Psycho

Vac -- three days before your

twenty seventh birthday, you

take it with you. You have

grown thin now, fleshless,

desiccated. They do not

even let you say good-bye

to your babies, such is the state

they find you in. On the flight

back to DC you sit next to

a woman, Dutch ex-missionary,

who explains that sometimes,

the young men God has sent

to do his bidding go crazy.

They, who fear for the safety

of their souls above all else,

do not know how to take

care of themselves so far from home.

She knows this, she assures you,

she has seen it happen. As

the stewardess pushes the cart

for the evening's meal by your seat

the thing that rests inside you

gurgles once in agreement

and then is still.

][][

Notes.

This is it, my grand attempt back in 2002 to put words to my nightmare.

The poem starts out in Italy because that is where I learned, for the first time, about the religious fever dream that is Hell, when I accidentally saw the LSD-madness of Hieronymus Bosch's art and it blew my little brain at the implications of such a concept. It didn't seem like much of a stretch to link the mummified bodies of Bosch's righteous in that painting with the babies dying under my care.

The, "the one-room emergency boxes," are called "domiks" and are basically railroad boxcars used to house the vast homeless population suddenly needing protection from the cold. Gyumri was never really rebuilt and 30 years later there are families still living in their rusted-out boxes.

[soup-mother]

i really wish lenin had made even more references to Australian animals, like to the point it was a bit obnoxious

*guy who wants to remind everyone he knows what a platypus is* "this ideology is some sort of twisted amalgam, much as the Australian platypus was first thought to be by English biologists"

[i-am-dulaman]

petition for that long rant on revolutions here, i really enjoyed the way you laid out your facts and explained the first rant and am not too good at reading theory myself (i am still trying tho) thanks!!

Okay okay so the problem with revolutions is they get messy. Real messy. You get counter-revolutionaries, moderates, extremists, loyalists, and everything in between. One revolution turns into 5, and even if your side wins, its almost guaranteed to have been tainted some way or another along the way.

Take the first french revolution. It started as civil unrest, the estates general initially called for reform of the french state into a constitutional monarchy similar to Britain. Even king louis XVI was in support of this. But extremists wanting a republic and counter-revolutionaries wanting absolute monarchy clashed and things became more and more chaotic and violent. Eventually the extremists won, the jacobin reign of terror ensued, and 10s of thousands of people were executed. Now don't get me wrong, i am all for executing monarchs and feudal lords, but look what happened a few years later; Napoleon used the political instability to declare himself emperor, a few more years later his empire had crumbled, and the monarchy was back with Louis XVIII.

Or take the 1979 iranian revolution. It started as protests against pahlavi, who was an authoritarian head of state and an American pawn. As the protests turned into civil resistance and guerilla warfare it took on many different forms. There were secularists vs islamic extremists. There were democrats vs theocrats vs monarchists. Etc. Through all the chaos, Khomeini seized power, held a fake referendum, and declared himself supreme leader and enforced many strict laws, particularly on women who previously had close to equal rights. Many of the millions of women involved in the revolution later said they felt bettayed by the end result.

Or the Russian Revolution. It started as protests, military strikes, and civil unrest during WW1 directed at the tsar. He stepped down in 1917 and handed power over to the Duma, the russian parliament. This new provisionary government initially had the support of soviet councils, including socialist groups like the menshiviks. But they made the major mistake of deciding to continue the war. Lenins bolsheviks were originally a very tiny group on the fringes of russian politics, but they were the loudest supporters of peace, so they gained support and organised militias into an army and thus began the russian civil war. Lenin won and followed through on his promise to end the war against germany, but its a bit ironic that they fought a civil war, that killed about 10 million people, just to end another war.

Im not saying any of these results were either bad or good. They all have nuance and its all subjective. But the point i am trying to make is that they get messy. The initial goals will always be twisted.

France wanted a constitutional monarchy, they got an autocratic emporer.

Iran wanted democracy and an end to American influence, and well they ended american influence alright but also got a totalitarian theocrat.

Russia wanted an end to world war 1 and got one of the bloodiest civil wars in history.

I cant think of a single revolution in history that achieved the goals it set out to achieve.

But again, im not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, just a warning against revolutionary rhetoric and criticisms of reformism. Sometimes revolution is the only option, when you're faced with an authoritarian government diametrically opposed to change, then a revolution may be worth the risk. But it is a risk.

But if you live in a democracy, claiming revolution is the only way is actively choosing both bloodshed and the risk of things going horribly wrong over the choice of peaceful reform.

So when i go online in some leftist spaces and see people claiming revolution in America or UK or wherever is the only way out of capitalism I cant help but feel angry.

I know our democracy is flawed, and reform is slow and can even go backwards, but we owe it to all the people who would die in a revolution to try reform first.

I know socialist reform is especially hard in our flawed democracy where capitalists own the media, but if we can't convince enough people to vote for socialist reform what hope do we have of convincing enough people to join a socialist revolution. Socialism is supposed to be for the people, but how can you claim your revolution is for the people if you can't even get the support of the people?

So what I'm trying to say is; if youre one of those leftists that are sitting around waiting for the glorious revolution, doing nothing but posting rhetoric online - at least try doing something else while you wait. Join your labour union, recruit your coworkers, get involved in your local socialist parties, call your local representatives (city council, senator, governor, member of parliament, whatever) and make your opinions known, push them further left, and keep pushing.

[rei-ismyname]

X-MEN - MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

A lot of X-Men, indeed a lot of Marvel characters, have transformations, alter egos, symbiotes, etc that cause trouble. Jean Grey has the Phoenix, Angel has Archangel, Malice takes over a lot of women (Dazzler, Sue Storm, Rogue, Mirage, Betsy Braddock, and many more), Gambit has Death, Magik and Darkchilde. That short list is really only scratching the surface. So many heroes get transformed or similar once and once it's defeated or overcome it becomes an ongoing trial for them.

Piotr Nikolaievitch Rasputin made a deal with Cyttorak of Crimson Bands fame for the power of JUGGERNAUT once, for reasons I don't recall right now. I always thought it was a bit of a boring choice tbh - his angsting over being a big dumb monster isolated from the things he loves is already a thing he does. Sure it was fun here and there but it was more of a 'struggling with the Dark Side' thing and Cyttorak didn't have all that much power over him. I think a better choice for a recurring alter ego would have been....

THE PROLETARIAN - WORKER'S HERO OF THE SOVIET UNION! With Vladimir Lenin's face on the chest of his sinister communist red overalls and everything. Obviously the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore but that's even better IMO. What does the Proletarian do after the Cold War ends and capitalism has 'won'? Siezes the MFing means of production for the people, that's what! Does he smash the X-Men too? Probably, they are definitely neoliberal bootlickers who are allied with several billionaires, and while they're not as bad as the Avengers they have an awful lot of faith in the USA as an institution despite it constantly trying to kill them.

Obviously this would never happen. Stan Lee was very anti communist, even if he didn't know a damn thing about it, and Marvel has remained so to this day. More broadly, a century of McCarthyism and Red Scare messaging has done some serious damage. Also, Marvel just does not do anything other than the most milquetoast liberal politics. Anything else is mocked and defeated by the narrative itself. Personally, I think that would make it even more interesting, as being committed to any form of anti capitalism to any degree is soul crushing while living under it.

I'd do anything for a Colossus solo where he interrogates his relationship with Communism, because the man is a true believer despite often defending capitalist interests (as far as he's shown to believe anything.)

This question, for instance. Does his power belong to the state? Xavier handwaves it by saying it belongs to the world (AKA his interests) but it's never truly touched on again. Krakoa would have been a great opportunity, a mostly moneyless society that already had bartering and mutual aid happening. Not everyone's needs were met and plenty of people fell through the cracks - Colossus or The Proletarian would have been the perfect advocate.

It's Kurt and Legion who come closest to forming a commune without hierarchy, and Kurt was working on justice reform. Forge had global poverty and homelessness solved, but ORCHIS and The Fall of X put a stop to that. Lenin's Ghost!

Bring back The Proletarian, you cowards!

[mesetacadre]

Do you know where the stereotype that trots are fixated on selling newspapers comes from?

Saw a lot of people posting jokes about it here and then at a Palestine protest I went to the trots were selling their newspaper, so I have seen it happen in the wild, but I've been curious what the origin of this stereotype was.

PS I've enjoyed reading the articles you've posted, the one about Yugoslav volunteers in Spain was really interesting

Thanks about the articles! I have another translation in the #brigades tag about the arrival of the XI Brigade in Madrid, though it's not as direct a translation:3

As I understand it, it comes from an uncritical application of Lenin's emphasis on the newspaper in his works pre-revolution. It was a very important aspect of agitation because it provided a source of income and was a very effective way of transmitting more complex positions, as well as keeping members and workers informed on the state of the worker's movement, from a class perspective. Nowadays, while newspapers still hold most of these benefits (in my humble opinion), it is neither the only possible way for communicating Party positions nor as crucial. But most trotskyist groups don't take their own conditions into account a lot (totally uncharacteristic for them lmao) and just do literally what Lenin said. Most communist parties with any base wider than a group of friends will probably have some form of newspaper or publication, but trotskyists generally stand out because of how much importance they place on it. One time I was with a trotskyist in a room with other people, he brought out this comically large and thick newspaper, and sold it for like 7 cents to the only person that showed even a little bit of interest.

[eldar-of-zemlya]

A few days ago, I realized that I’ve spent my last three birthdays in three different countries—each one a temporary home, but never quite the real home. And since today is my birthday, it feels like the right moment to share my story—a story about growing up queer in Russia, navigating an absurd system, escaping it, and constantly being on the run. It’s a long journey, but one that I hope will offer some insight as I reflect on where life has taken me so far.

Illustrated by yours truly.

I was born in Russia, in a small countryside town that sits right on the border between Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Like many families in this region, mine is a chaotic blend of Slavic identities, plus a bit of Tatar heritage on my father’s side.

We come from a long line of Orthodox priests who were repressed and executed by the KGB during Stalin’s regime. The only branch of our family that survived had to be constantly on the run, changing towns and professions to avoid persecution as the children of “enemies of the nation.” I guess that’s the family curse I’ve never been able to escape—always searching for a homeland and always running away from it.

My father was an artist and my mother a university professor. My father was so absent from my life that when my parents separated when I was five, it took me two weeks to notice he was gone. My first question wasn’t even about him—it was about our dog. “Mom, where is Julie?… And where is Dad?” After that, my mother had to return to work to provide for me, so I spent most of my early years at my grandmother’s house, left to my own devices.

In pre-school, I was obsessed with Michael Jackson, rewinding the same VHS of his music videos until it barely played anymore. In primary school, I had a bunch of Tokio Hotel’s songs burned onto a floppy disk by my mother’s colleague, who had access to the new wonder of the time—the World Wide Web. I’d wait eagerly for their music video to play on some random music channel, glued to the screen in our cramped, Soviet-era Khrushchyovka apartment. That’s when I stumbled upon something that started a chain reaction that, in hindsight, brought me to where I am now.

The lower third of the screen briefly flashed a title: “LM.C — Ghost†Heart (Japan).” At first, there was nothing particularly strange about the music video, except maybe that it was from Japan. But when the two “girls” began singing with a voice that was unmistakably male, I realized they weren’t girls at all. There was something captivating about how they embodied both masculinity and femininity so beautifully at the same time. I didn’t even know the word “androgynous” back then, but I instinctively recognized that the same thing that had drawn me to my previous interests was now pulling me toward them.

As soon as we finally got our first slow dial-up connection, I searched for LM.C. That’s when an entirely new world opened up to me—J-rock, Visual Kei, a genre of Japanese music that focused on extravagant stage costumes where musicians often wore dresses and makeup. I was immediately hooked.

And I wasn’t alone. There was a small but growing community of J-rock fans across Russia, even a few in my small town. Some were teens, others pre-teens like me, and even a few adults. We would gather on Lenin Square—the heart of our little town—dreaming and talking about Japan, anime, and J-rock. My mom often came with me to our local meet-ups—not just to show support, but for safety. We were what others called “non-formals”—subculture kids. Our high platform boots, chains, band shirts, and unconventional looks made us stand out in our post-Soviet town, often attracting unwanted attention. People would make snide comments, and the police would sometimes chase us off. Once, one of the guys in our group got ambushed by gopniks, and they ripped chunks of his long hair out of his scalp. Being different was dangerous in the Russian countryside.

I was always open about the bands I listened to, which earned me the label “the weird kid who listens to Japanese transvestites and watches cartoons for kids.” (Honestly, I was ahead of my time. Nowadays, kids get bullied if they don’t watch anime.) Through all of this, my mom was incredibly supportive. I would sew Visual Kei-inspired outfits from fabric scraps and even dyed my hair red once. That might seem normal now, but back then it made me the laughingstock of the whole school. Even the teachers thought I was strange and probably wished they could get me in trouble. But there was nothing they could do aside from making the occasional snarky comment about my looks. Our country didn’t enforce a school dress code, and I was at the top of my class, so they had no grounds to discipline me.

Naturally, discovering anime led me to yaoi and slash fanfiction. At the time, our country was still relatively free, and LGBT stories weren’t illegal yet—considered strange, disgusting, and perverted by some, but not illegal. Somehow, I could relate to the characters, even though I was a straight teenage girl, which was incredibly confusing. I wanted to be a man, have a male body, and yet I was also attracted to men. My confusion with gender and sexuality was overwhelming, and I was stuck in a linguistic bubble, trying to make sense of myself with whatever scraps of information I could find in Russian. I read about “tomboy,” “butch,” “femboy,” and even “fag hag,” but none of it quite fit. Then, one night, I stumbled across the Wikipedia entry for “trans man.” I’d heard of trans women from scandalous Russian talk shows and the occasional foreign film, but trans men? At that time, the Russian Wikipedia article on “trans man” was just a single, pathetic paragraph. I could hardly believe it was a real thing, but deep down, I knew this was the answer I’d been searching for.

People often ask trans individuals, “When did you realize?” But for me, there was no single moment. It was a process of piecing together feelings I’d never had the words for—kind of like that scene in The Man From Earth when John Oldman, a man who’s lived for 45,000 years, is asked by a therapist, “When did you realize you were a caveman?” and he responds, “When I heard the word ‘caveman.’”

As always, I turned to movies to understand myself better. I found a clunky Russian website called KinoPoisk (Film Search), typed “LGBT” into the search bar, and watched every movie that came up. That’s how I discovered Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Breakfast on Pluto, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and many more. Seeing LGBT characters on screen—characters who felt what I felt—was everything to a lost, confused teenager in the Russian countryside.

Over time, my obsession shifted to TV series fandoms like Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Star Trek. And when Sherlock BBC came out, my mom joined me, and we both dove headfirst into fandom life. She also started reading fanfiction, and before long, she was writing it herself. After all, who better to write fanfiction than a middle-aged Russian literature professor who knew everything about storytelling?

Gradually, my fixation shifted from Japan to Great Britain, and my mom was right there with me. Despite not knowing a word of English, we watched everything we could find featuring our favorite British actors. It became our shared dream to visit England someday, but we didn’t have the money. My mom’s salary was $250 a month, and she was supporting me and our elderly grandmother, who had a pension of $80. But that didn’t stop us. I remember surviving on instant noodles and cheap yogurt for an entire year just to save up enough to travel to the West and see it for the first time.

In 2012, we finally made it happen. We signed up for a cheap bus tour that went through Europe—Poland, the Czech Republic, Germany, Belgium, France, and the UK. It was life-changing. We saw a completely different world, cozy old towns that Russian cities had lost in WWII bombings, and we saw freedom. The first time we flew to London on our own, we bought tickets to a theater play featuring Mark Gatiss. Who would’ve guessed that on that very day, David Tennant, Steven Moffat, and his wife, Sue Vertue, would also be there! I awkwardly approached David Tennant and, in broken English, told him, “You are my lovely Doctor” (I meant to say “favorite” but didn’t know the word back then).

We ended up returning to London every year, going to theater plays with Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston, Andrew Scott, Rupert Grint, and others. We stayed in cheap hostels and survived on McDonald’s, but we were living the dream.

As time went on, LGBT rights in Russia only got worse. Books, movies, and TV shows that even mentioned LGBT topics started getting blocked under the guise of protecting children from “LGBT propaganda.” But what these government suits failed to understand was that if I hadn’t discovered all those things as a confused teenager, I might have ended my life. When the repression began affecting fanfiction writers, we had to be cautious. One girl in our town was sentenced under the new law simply for having a photo of two guys kissing in her VK (Russian Facebook) photo album. My mom was a university professor and the sole provider for me, an underage kid. If it was discovered that she wrote slash, she could’ve lost her job, gone to prison, and I could’ve been taken away. It was terrifying. I watched our vibrant community being slowly choked out, and I knew it was now or never. I had to transition while it was still legally possible, and I could only do that if I moved to Moscow, where the only trans center in the country was located.

After graduating, I deliberately skipped one of the mandatory exams, which made it essentially impossible for me to get into any university in Russia. My mom, always understanding, accepted my decision, but the rest of the family was devastated. I was one of the best students in class, scoring 100/100 on my Russian and English final exams—something that seemed like science fiction (well, I learned my English from science fiction, so…). And here I was, with these grades, choosing not to apply to any university but instead to work in a shop.

Transitioning was expensive—around $1,500 for all the tests and evaluations—but I knew that if I stayed in the countryside, I’d be tempted to give up, settle down, and try to “fix” myself. As Dr. Frank-N-Furter taught me, “Don’t dream it, be it.”

As soon as I turned 18, I moved from the countryside to Moscow. To receive the official F64.0 diagnosis—“transsexualism”—I had to endure a grueling year-long process of psychiatric evaluations and tests, just so I could change my documents and flee the country. By then, I was already passing as a guy, which made job hunting infinitely more difficult. I tried toy stores, cosmetic stores, hotel cleaning… but no one wanted to risk being prosecuted for “LGBT propaganda” by hiring someone as gender-ambiguous as me. After endless rejections, I finally found a place that didn’t care whether you were gay, straight, or trans. That’s how I ended up working at a sex shop.

I could write a whole TV show based on that year of my life—armed robberies, kidnapping attempts, constant workplace drama, and a psychotic manager who was stealing from our salaries. None of us were even officially registered as employees. I’d work 24-hour shifts back-to-back, sometimes spending more than 48 hours at the shop, sleeping on the floor during the three-hour break we got at night. There were zero regulations, but despite everything, I made good money, and most importantly, I finally felt like I belonged.

Our team was a ragtag group of rebels—kids fresh out of high school or from poverty, who had come from all over Russia to the Capital, searching for a better life. What united us was a shared desire for freedom in a country that was becoming more and more totalitarian.

While working, I was constantly attending the “Center of Personalized Psychiatry,” where I felt like a guinea pig for doctors who knew nothing about gender identity issues. It seemed they had simply found a vacant spot to make money off devastated and depressed trans people. At the time, there wasn’t even an official document format that could be submitted to the government to allow a legal sex change. So, I had to jump through every hoop they put in front of me—filling out ridiculous questionnaires that asked whether I preferred pink or blue as a kid or if I played with dolls or cars. They explicitly told me to answer “how I thought they wanted me to answer” if I wanted to get approved for hormone therapy. So, for them, I liked blue, played with cars, and watched football and boxing.

When I finally got approved for hormone therapy, I ran into another obstacle: the financial burden of getting a prescription from the center for every testosterone shot. The prescription itself cost almost as much as the medication. Desperate, I turned to sketchy websites from “pharmacies” that constantly changed their URLs. That’s how I started getting testosterone through drop-offs, which we called “bookmarks.” I’d pay for someone to leave it under a bench or behind a tree. It was risky but much cheaper.

After enduring the year of evaluations, I finally received the long-awaited free-form paper from the center stating my diagnosis and the basis for changing my documents. But just as I was preparing to submit it, the government decided to overhaul the process. They introduced an official format for the document—good in theory but disastrous for my timing. Worse still, they added a new requirement: you had to have had top surgery before you could legally change your gender.

I was devastated. Top surgery had always been a dream of mine, but I was sure it would take years to save enough money—it cost $1,200. That’s when my mom stepped in and offered to cover it with her savings. I cried so much. I wanted the surgery, but I knew we didn’t have the money to spare.

At that time, my mom said something that has stuck with me ever since: “We never have money, but at least we have the life we want.”

So, I did it. But my happiness was overshadowed by guilt. I felt guilty for spending so much money, for leaving my job, and for being incapacitated during my recovery—unable to even help my mother around the house. By then, my mother had already started working at a university in Moscow, and after being able to provide for myself at 18, I suddenly felt like a burden. My mother, however, never saw me that way; she was incredibly happy for me. We agreed not to tell the rest of the family about my transition just yet.

Returning to my hometown in the countryside to change my documents was an experience in itself. I fully expected to be treated with hostility, but to my surprise, the civil workers made no comments. I later learned that I was the second person to transition in my town—the first female-to-male—but they acted professionally. The only comment came when I visited the citizen registry center, where old women, who had probably worked there since Soviet times, were running the show. My mother went with me for support. When I silently handed the new-format document to the elderly woman at the desk, she studied it carefully, then looked up at my mother and, smiling, said, “You have a boy now? Congratulations!”

This all happened during the summer. I was jobless, with new documents, and the next step in my plan was to flee to the West. Around that time, a friend sent me a random ad for a filmmaking program at Tallinn University in Estonia. I had never even heard of this tiny Baltic country before, but it was part of the EU, and the tuition was surprisingly affordable. I never pictured myself making films, but I knew I wanted to do something creative, so I applied the day before the deadline, not expecting much. To my shock, I soon received an invitation letter.

But there was still one more step—changing my foreign passport. In Russia, we have a national passport (in Cyrillic) and an international passport (in English), which allows travel abroad. To change the international passport, I needed a paper from the military conscription office, stating that I, as a newly-registered male, didn’t have to serve in the army and was free to leave for studies. Of course, I didn’t have such a paper, since I had never been registered for conscription in the first place.

This led me to our local conscription office. As soon as I explained the situation to the lady at the desk, she told me to stay quiet and led me to her boss. The military commander, sitting in his shabby countryside office under a portrait of Putin hung on a wall with peeling paint, was utterly confused.

“But I can’t issue him this paper because he was never registered as a conscript, which should’ve happened when he turned 15!”

“But he was a she when he was 15, sir…” his young secretary chimed in, causing the commander to spit in frustration and slam his fist on the table.

They were in a real bind. If I had transitioned from male to female, it would’ve been easy—they’d just throw my case out of the archive. But there were no regulations for how to handle female-to-male trans people.

“Okay, I think I have an idea of what we can do. When can you come back to my office?” asked the commander.

“Um, maybe tomorrow…” I hesitated.

“No ‘maybe’!” the commander shot me a stern look. “You’re a man now, so be specific.”

Suddenly feeling like James Bond, the commander deemed my case his secret mission. The next day, I returned to his office and was briefed on his plan: he was going to falsify my conscription record, making it look as if I had been a biological male my entire life, complete with medical exams and military training. He assigned one of his lackeys to follow me through the necessary medical evaluations, ensuring no one asked me to undress. The doctors, who were in on the plan, discreetly noted what they were supposed to.

Eventually, I was invited back to the commander’s office for the final round of evaluations. With the blinds pulled down and the door locked, I stood in the center of the room, surrounded by a circle of white-coated doctors—urologists, proctologists, allergists, you name it.

“Take off all your clothes,” the commander ordered.

“Well, I’ve seen a film or two that started like this…” I thought to myself.

“Now, spin around—slowly,” he continued.

And there I was, with my ass naked, turning in a circle like some Frankenstein’s monster as the doctors scribbled notes in their notebooks.

“Did everybody see everything?” the commander asked, and the doctors nodded quickly. “Okay, dismissed.”

In the end, I was issued a military ticket marking me as category “B”—not suitable for mandatory military service (probably due to having a cunt, according to their reports), but eligible for drafting in case of war or a military operation.

With that, I received my new international passport and was off to Estonia.

I was incredibly happy. Every day, I would go to the old town square just to sit there, gazing at the medieval towers and thinking, “I made it… I finally made it!” It was everything I had dreamed of and more. No one cared how anyone looked, LGBT people had no restrictions, and I saw same-sex couples walking hand in hand on the streets. This was the “Western dream” I had been chasing my whole life. Yet, something seemed off…

Over time, I started to notice a certain level of hostility from the locals when they found out I was Russian. That surprised me, especially given that Estonia had been part of the Soviet Union and still had a population that was about 30% Russian. Slowly, I came to realize the harsh reality—in the history books I studied at school, there was only one mention of Estonia: “1940—Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia join the USSR.” One sentence in a history book, which meant nothing to me at the time, encapsulated this entire country’s national tragedy. They tolerated the remaining Russian population, but the deep-seated resentment was clear. However, they failed to understand one important thing—most of those Russians were also victims of the regime, just like the Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Tatars, and countless others.

I vividly remember a moment when I was having a meeting with my new coworkers. After learning I was from Russia, one Estonian girl said, “My grandfather was repressed by Russians during Soviet times.”

“Mine too,” I replied, dumbfounded. She seemed confused. As I later found out, while our governments had their own agendas, their government had theirs. She was never taught that millions of ethnic Russians were also arrested alongside millions of national minorities.

This was something I had never anticipated. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t discriminated against because of my LGBT status, but because of my nationality.

I learned to live with it. I tried to adapt, not speaking Russian in public. Fortunately, my studies were in English, and my course was international, filled with people from all over the world—the U.S., Egypt, Germany, Nigeria, Latvia, Turkey… Honestly, the three years I spent studying film there were the best years of my life. Our professors were amazing, outgoing, incredibly creative, and they became our friends.

Yet, no one in my course, not even my closest friends, with whom I spent every day, knew that I was trans or the real reason I left Russia. They simply thought I was a biological male. After what I had been through in my own country, I still hesitated to share this part of myself, unsure of how they would react. It took a toll on my mental health, constantly coming up with stories to fill gaps in my history. Eventually, it became too much, and three years into our studies, I told everything to my four closest friends. They were surprised, to say the least, but endlessly supportive. I can’t even begin to describe how much I love them for that.

For my graduation film, I made a documentary—something I never imagined I would be interested in. Initially, I had ambitions to become a fiction director, but once I discovered that documentaries weren’t all just talking heads and British-accented voiceovers, I became captivated by them.

My graduation documentary was about my family—specifically, about my grandmother. My family, aside from my mother, still didn’t know I had transitioned. It had been four years at that point. I had a beard, a deep voice, and yet they still didn’t know. Every time I called them, I would try to make my voice sound more feminine (the story was that I got sick, lost my voice, and it permanently damaged my vocal cords). I love my family, and it’s precisely because I love them that I do this. I don’t want them to be ashamed or ostracized from their community. They live simple, rural lives. When my grandmother was born, Stalin was still alive. She had survived famine, unemployment, and disease, so she would never be able to understand this whole “transgender thing.”

The documentary did really good, with this idea, I got to attend pitching with BBC, Al Jazeera, CBC, Vice and many more industry giants. There were so many promises from big film festivals, so many opportunities. By the time I had graduated and was working a well-paid job, I was hoping to settle down in Estonia after four years of living there. Despite the country’s mixed reception towards me, I loved the place. It finally felt like home. A small, cozy home where I knew everything and everyone, with both personal and professional connections. I was learning Estonian, aiming to get citizenship, and dreaming of the future—the entire European Union would be open to me.

And then, on the 24th of February 2022, the war started. I can’t begin to describe what I felt—fear, grief, confusion. It’s too dark of a topic to delve into.

While I was scared and cried every day for my friends in Ukraine and my family on the Russian border, the war began to affect me directly, as a Russian living in the West. Deals I had with film festivals fell through because they didn’t want to seem like "Russia sympathizers" by screening a documentary directed by a Russian. The fact that my film was about the struggles of LGBT people in Russia, and clearly anti-regime, didn’t matter.

One of my friends was spat on while on the tram for speaking Russian to her mother on the phone. Another was refused entry to a thrift store because she was Russian. A close friend of mine, a well-known Russian-Estonian actor, was assaulted in a café while speaking Russian with his girlfriend. A man approached him, demanding that he kneel and beg for forgiveness for “starting the war in Ukraine.” When my friend, in perfect Estonian (he came from a mixed family with an Estonian father and Russian mother), reminded him of the Estonian constitution and its protection of freedoms, the man scoffed and said, “All Russians should have been deported from the very beginning.”

And it seemed like the government shared his beliefs. First, my residence permit was terminated due to my Russian citizenship. When I applied for a worker visa instead, I was handed a notice saying, “You are denied an Estonian visa for the reason of posing a danger to international relations, inner security, and the health of the Estonian population.” It felt like they thought I was carrying some sort of “Putin virus.” And this happened right after my documentary had been featured in the national competition at a local film festival, where I was representing Estonia...

It was the 27th of December 2022. I was given three days to leave the country—to sort out everything from the past four years, my entire life there.

It was then that I fully realized how fragile safety and belonging can be when they rest on the whims of politics and nationality. The dream I had spent years building crumbled in days. I was lost. I had no idea what to do. I couldn’t return to Russia—especially not after making such a personal documentary. The new laws there equated "LGBT movement" with extremist organizations. It wasn’t even safe for me to visit a doctor as a trans person. If they supported the regime, they could easily report me to the police, and I’d be arrested simply for having the body I have. Worse, I could be sent to the war—ironically, I was still marked as a biological male in Russian military records.

With no options left, I packed a tiny suitcase with essential items, left the rest of my belongings with friends, and bought a one-way ticket to Serbia—one of the few countries that still had visa-free entry for Russians. After the war began and the regime tightened its grip, Serbia had become a haven for hundreds of thousands of young Russians fleeing.

I met the new year of 2023 alone, in a strange country, watching fireworks from the balcony of a tractor driver named Stefan, who had rented me his Airbnb in the Belgrade suburbs.

Serbia turned out to be a completely different world compared to my experience in Estonia. I was still hesitant to reveal that I was Russian, but to my surprise, when I did, people mostly hugged me and invited me for a glass of rakija. Serbia has a long history with Russia—we were “brother nations,” and the Russian Empire had helped Serbia a lot in the past. That sentiment carried into how the locals saw Russians. Now, with so many of us in trouble and seeking refuge, they welcomed us with open arms.

The country itself wasn’t prosperous; it reminded me of the Russia of my childhood—shabby, torn apart, politically charged. I loved the people, and they seemed to love me back, but I knew I couldn’t stay. There were still many conservatives, and when I asked a bartender at a local underground gay bar about the situation for LGBT people, he laughed and said in broken English, “Like Russia, but small better.”

My plan was to apply for a German freelancer visa—I was making some money from video editing and color grading on the side, and I had a solid portfolio. I knew political asylum wasn’t an option. When the war began, I had tried to apply for asylum in Estonia, only to be told, “Have you been stabbed for being trans in Russia? No? Then call us back when you are.”

In Serbia, Russians were allowed a 30-day visa-free entry, so I joined what fellow expats called a “visa-run.” Every 30 days, someone would drive a packed minivan to the Bosnian border. We’d cross, stay in Bosnia for 15 minutes, smoke, and listen to stories of fellow Russians who had escaped. Then we’d return to Serbia, and our stay would reset. The local police knew about it and didn’t care—nothing illegal about it. I remember one time when we arrived during the border patrol’s lunch break. A young lady leaned out of the control booth, sandwich in hand, and asked, “Visa run?” When we nodded, she smiled and said she’d finish her tea before stamping our passports.

I lived like this for a year and a half in Serbia. It was nearly impossible to find a job without knowing Serbian, so I picked up small freelance editing gigs. Meanwhile, I was on a long waiting list for a German visa. Serbia had become a temporary stop for many Russians, especially LGBT people, trying to find a way into the EU.

However, after what I experienced in Estonia, my rose-colored glasses were off. I no longer viewed the West as a utopia. Every country has its problems, and there’s no true freedom anywhere in the world. Sadly, I had to learn this the hard way.

Throughout that year in Serbia, not much happened. I was extremely depressed and isolated, unsure of where my life was headed. So, I turned to what comforted me most—movies. I fell back into Star Trek. There’s something about its retro-futurism that helped me cope—I could lose myself either in the future or the past and forget about the present. I also started drawing again. I used to draw when I was a teenager and active in fandoms, but it had never really worked out for me. I still remember the first time I posted my art online—the first comment I got was a bunch of crying-laughing emojis.

Drawing helped me escape. Even while I was posting K/S smut, there were times when I had no money for food and was late on rent, all while my hometown was being bombed almost daily by Ukrainian forces. Immersing myself in the fandom helped me cope with the harshness of reality.

I had almost resigned myself to the idea that I would never be able to enter the West again. But then, one fateful day, I received the email I’d been waiting for—I was asked to pick up my visa. I cried and laughed; I couldn’t believe it.

The move to Germany was difficult. It’s a huge bureaucratic country, but I made it. My story isn’t finished yet—I’m still waiting for my residence permit, and God, I hope I get it. I know a bit of German, and I feel safe here, so I hope to settle down for good. For now, I work on my small business and draw K/S fan art on the side, finding solace in the creative space I’ve carved for myself. I’ve spent years running, surviving, and rebuilding. Where fate will take me next—I can’t be sure. But I know that whatever comes, I’ll face it as I always have—one step ahead, always moving forward.

[edwad]

edwad what are some books you would recommend to someone who hasn’t read a book about communism besides state & revolution

i made this thing several years ago and i guess i would still stand by most of it, but it's probably a bit demanding for a newer reader of this stuff and very much oriented around marxs capital rather than communism generally etc. the links are still handy (if they still work, idk lmfao) and regardless id probably recommend heinrich's intro along with chambers' no such thing as the economy book. i think that gives you a pretty good baseline as far as marx-interpretation goes, and maybe it could be dialed up another notch by tacking on WCR's marxs inferno (although i don't love the case he makes for republicanism even if it's probably fine as a marxological claim).

depending on how recently you've read s&r, i think following it up with pashukanis' general theory can be really productive (esp when read alongside foucault's discipline & punish) because it is largely in dialogue with lenin and leninist conceptions via the development of marxs categories in capital. if you're feeling capital-averse (understandable, but id encourage you to join my reading group this fall!) then the heinrich can come in handy as a crutch for some of this, perhaps alongside rubin's essays (pashukanis' soviet contemporary).

if you're looking for something else more specific or general or whatever let me know and i can try to help

[communist-ojou-sama]

I mean you are right that extrapolating past onto future is not the sure way to find truth, but also the fact that after the downfall of empires what's left is states that inherit their functions and strive to become empires of their own is literally entire human history across the globe

You should really read Lenin's "Imperialism: the Highest Stage of capitalism" instead of having me explain it to you but by bit anon, but you see, there is not an Imperialism Switch in people's brains that makes them crave an empire once their state reaches a certain size, imperialism is driven, even in precapitalist times, by economic concerns, of social pressures of limited resources within one's own borders relative to the drive to grow the economy and have more wealth circulating around. Now that we live in a global society, there is no where to expand on a global level, and believe it or not non-Western economists and governing bodies are not animals and understand this. Short term, debt-based finance incentives slant toward eternal war and imperial competition, but powers interested in securing long-term prosperity are actually capable of recognizing that their interests lie in global co-operation, especially if they don't engender a social milieu of feverish worship of the market and it's mechanics. Therefore as far as I can see there's no reason to assume that in the 21st century there is no avoiding an immediate descent into inter-imperialist struggle. Hope this helps.