The Moscow police celebrated International Women’s Day in style yesterday. First, they arrested our comrade, journalist and activist Vlad Tupikin, for the criminal act of distributing a special Eighth of March/feminist issue of the newspaper Volya (Liberty) at a permitted IWD rally. Then, when other activists and rally attendees tried to demand Vlad’s release, the police went after them as well. All in all, a couple dozen people were arrested for the apparently insane attempt, in Putin’s ultra-reactionary Russia, to bring some of its original meaning back into what has just become a commercialized, chauvinist “celebration of the weaker sex.”
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Budour Hassan
Arabic version (by Walid Daou)
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way–in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
There were foreign soldiers firing tear gas, rubber bullets, and live ammunition at unarmed protesters in Palestine.
There were local soldiers firing live bullets and…
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Bees are important
March 8 marks the hundredth anniversary of International Women’s Day celebrations in Russia. This is the second in a series of posts focusing on the work and plight of several different women involved in political and social activism in Russia today.
In August 2012, Taisiya Osipova, an activist in The Other Russia opposition party, was sentenced to eight years in prison on drugs charges. She and her supporters have always maintained her innocence, claiming that police planted the drugs found in her apartment in Smolensk during a search in order to pressure her into cooperating with them and testifying against her husband, Sergei Fomchenkov, a senior party activist.
In sentencing her to eight years in prison, the court not only failed to take into account the evidence of her innocence, but also ignored the fact that Osipova is the mother of a young child and suffers from several chronic…
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GM free gardening
Victoria Lomasko’s Pussy Riot Drawings Censored from Feminist Exhibition “International Women’s Day” (Moscow, Russia)
Shameful but no surprise…
via Victoria Lomasko
Four of Victoria Lomasko’s drawings were removed from the exhibition “International Women’s Day. Feminism: From the Avant-Garde to the Present,” curated by Manezh director Marina Loshak, the State Russian Museum’s Olesya Turkina, and Natalia Kamenetskaya, which opened on March 7th, 2013 at the Manezh Museum and Exhibition Center “Worker and Kolkhoz Woman” in Moscow. In recent years, Lomasko has been in the middle of the most radical social and political events in Russia, depicting the trials of members of the contemporary art community and activists, mass protests, as well as life in the Russian provinces.
As the artist herself related the incident:
The organizers took down a drawing depicting the [LGBTQ] rainbow rally column, one with the nationalists shouting “Pussy Riot – in the trash!”, and a portrait of a pensioner who wants to participate in the punk prayer [The woman holds a placard…
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March 8 marks the hundredth anniversary of International Women’s Day celebrations in Russia. This is the first in a series of posts focusing on the work and plight of several different women involved in political and social activism in Russia today.
Journalist and LGBT activist Elena Kostyuchenko was interviewed by Filipp and Tikhon Dzyadko on January 24, 2013, for the TV Rain program The Dzyadko Three. The following day, January 25, the Russian State Duma passed in its first reading a law bill banning the “promotion of homosexuality” among minors. The bill will have to undergo two more readings, and then by ratified by the Federation Council and signed by the Russian president before it becomes law.
Dzyadko Three: Our guest is the LGBT activist and outstanding Novaya Gazeta journalist Elena Kostyuchenko. Today, we would like to discuss the latest incredible decision our legislators are about to…
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Seeing, hearing and reading about women’s destiny around the world creates turmoil within my mind. I get sick in the stomach hearing about rape, abuse, circumcision, slavery, child prostitution. then i get proud in my guts reading about the woman who have taken their destiny into their hands and shaped it like they have planned to, forgetting conventions, rules, what one can do and can’t. they were strong in their guts and wanted something and went after it, not holding back because of her husband, father og other manly figure in her immediate family.
Today I see foreign women working 12 hours a day in our homes, cleaning and doing the dirty job, sending their entire wages to their husband in their home land, who uses it all up on other women or booze.
I see women tangled in 20 years long marriage, being mentally and physically abused by their…
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