Northern Kender19 January 2009, two people were shot dead in the center of Moscow. They were Stanislav (Stas) Markelov, a lawyer and human rights activist, and Anastasia (Nastia) Baburova, a journalist and anarchist.
Stas and Nastia were killed by Russian neo-Nazi, for their participation in the anti-fascist movement. This became one of the last high-profile murders of antifascists in Russia, but before that, they occurred systematically. In many cases, it happened by orders of Russian authorities or at least with their acquiescence. But in the end, Kremlin nearly crushed both antifa and Nazi movements - in particular, the killers of Stas and Nastia received life-long sentences in prison (although most of their "curators" still hold top-notch positions within Russian elite).
Since 2009, solidarity actions of memory and solidarity take place every year on January 19, in many countries and cities all over the world. To a large extent, the murder of Stas and Nastia signaled the decisive turn of post-Soviet Russia to the quazi-fascist state it came to now. Removing both left-wing and right-wing political opponents (often by hands of the other opposition fractions) paved the way to establishing the authoritarian rule of Vladimir Putin and his gang. In many ways, the annexation of the Crimea in 2014 and the start of the Ukrainian war in 2022 had their beginning in these gunshots in Moscow on January 19, 2009.
Our movie screening in Oslo will take place on January 19 as well, as a sign of solidarity with Russian antifascists and anarchists who now more often have to resist not Russian Nazis, but the militarized Russian state. And the Kremlin turned out to be a much more dangerous enemy than mobs of sub-culture Nazis on the streets.
See more at
https://avtonom.org/en/news/fights-nazis-split-due-war-story-antifa-russia
and
https://avtonom.org/en/news/day-solidarity-russian-antifascists
