2+2 Practicing Godard / 2+2 История семинара "Общежития" from chto delat on Vimeo.

A film by Chto Delat /// Что Делать фильм, 2009

I was inspired to make this film after the police forced me to delete video footage of the OMON raid on our seminar in Nizhny Novgorod. I was struck by their brazen confidence that they could erase things from people’s memory as easily as you can delete a video image.
This film is meant as a response to their challenge. It shows that we can not only document the crimes of the authorities for posterity, but also shape our own space of interpretation. We can recreate our own histories, in which the deeds of the police will be remembered as shameful acts against society. —Dmitry Vilensky

materials for the screeenplay

Editorial

In these pages, we (artists, researchers, activists) try to rethink the experience of collective creative living here and now. Living for the sake of knowledge, art, and action.

Here we describe and elaborate a method for working with reality. The general method applied here, in this newspaper, was first tried out in kitchens, in blogs, and on the streets.

Most of the texts and drawings in this issue were not only created collectively. They were also lived collectively—for nights and days on end, together. These include:

• The collective hunger strike of our Petersburg comrades, inscribed in the historical moment by their radical interpretation of this experience.
• The production of a new activist film. It re-enacts and ponders the thrilling events of the collective experiencing and socialization of leftist knowledge in our communal seminar in progress.
• The wave of protest actions in support of a Novosibirsk artist.
• The resolution to write a collective political communiqué.
• Engagement instead of escapism.

This method is applied by merging all these elements into a single juncture in a particular place, into a concrete historical moment that we have collectively experienced and acknowledged, and by analyzing this moment in medias res.

This chronicle attempts to place several events that impacted our coalition of activists, artists, and thinkers during May 2009 within the broader context that generated and shaped them. We might have begun our chronicle of this “merry month” much earlier—for example, in July 2002, when the first version of the Russian federal law on “extremism” took effect. We should at least return to the equally “merry” autumn of 2008, when the Interior Ministry’s organized crime unit was reformed as the Department for Extremism Prevention, the so-called Center “E” whose operatives have played a key role in many of the events we mention here. This reform took place amidst public avowals by high state officials that they would not allow “extremists” and other malevolent forces to take advantage of the growing world economic crisis to “destabilize” the country. The past autumn and early winter were also marked by a wave of attacks on Russian social activists (e.g., Carine Clément, Alexei Etmanov, Mikhail Beketov) that culminated in the murder of human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov, in January of this year. Meanwhile, in what might be seen as another salvo in Russia’s “history wars,” the Investigative Committee of the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office raided the Memorial Society’s Research and Information Center in Petersburg on December 4, making off with hard drives containing archives on the history of state terror in the Soviet Union. While that case ended, in the spring, with a court victory for Memorial, other episodes of police and prosecutorial abuse did not. Anti-fascist Alexei Olesinov was convicted by a Moscow court of “group hooliganism” (for a minor incident outside a night club) after a trial his defenders denounced as a farce of justice. In echoes of the Loskutov case, Yakutia trade union organizer Valentin Urusov saw his conviction for drugs possession first overturned and then reinstated. A senior Moscow police official’s supermarket shooting spree, in late April, provoked the rudiments of a public debate on the urgent need for reform of Russia’s law enforcement agencies and belated revelations that such violence and abuse (albeit sometimes “milder” in form) were standard police “procedure.” Events since May, however, have suggested that this reform could be a long time in coming. Center “E” and other police agencies have continued to intimidate, arrest, and prosecute activists and bloggers, “monitor” potential “youth extremists” (whose ranks, in Petersburg’s Primorsky District, were revealed to include fans of the defunct pop band Kino), raid anti-fascist concerts, and disperse public protests. Finally, continued violence in Russia’s North Caucus region—typified by the suicide bomb attack on Ingushetia president Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, in June, and the kidnapping and murder of Chechen human rights activist Natalia Estemirova, in July—remind us that the “state of exception” now engulfing the rest of the country has been inspired to a great extent by Moscow’s own long-running “war on terror” (against separatists and so-called Wahabist fundamentalists) there.
Here are some facts that drasticly interfere into our life and provoke the composition of these issue of newspaper:

When we peruse the timeline of the “merry month of May” 2009 in Russia—a laconic chronicle of arrests, detentions of activists, intellectuals and artists, but also of protests against these actions of the authorities—many difficult questions arise. Of course, the fragmentary and brief comments given below do not claim to be a definitive diagnosis. The incomplete and sketchy quality of these comments is rather a part of the problem itself. A fuller analysis will be possible when there is a systematic understanding of the post-Soviet political experience, which for now is a thing of the future.