The partisan movement is slowly but surely engulfing Russia. This is the only possible policy for the Russian opposition. The time for discussions, ballots, and peaceful rallies has long passed. Only muscular energy, hard objects, and high temperatures are effective against the Putin regime. An armed struggle is underway against the nomenklatura empire. And this is organic to Russian history, if you will, tracing back to Russian spirituality.
Our Resistance is not a borrowed import, but Russia’s traditional values. Genuine ones, not gilded officialdom. The national call of Slavic freebooters. From the ushkuiniks and Cossack bands, from the Razin and Pugachev rebellions. It was not out of nowhere that “Our Everything – Alexander Sergeevich” created the image of Dubrovsky. Officials shuddered at the great poet’s name: in those very 1830s, a retired soldier named Alexander Pushkin became famous in the Nizhny Novgorod forests. He crushed punitive detachments, broke into noblemen’s barns, and administered swift peasant justice to tormentors. And there were hundreds of such detachments from the Moscow region and the Volga to the Urals and Siberia.
Runaway soldiers and rebellious serfs joined the resistance. It was they who achieved the abolition of serfdom when Nicholas I’s reign ended after the defeat in the Crimean War. And in the next, post-reform era, the deep Russian people knew: there was a “forest king” in the Moscow region named Vasily Churkin. Churkin’s Guslitskaya volost remained a free land. Daring men created their own world of free hideouts – without official supervision and serfdom. Where it was dangerous to be in uniform… The authorities suppressed it in one province – it flared up in another.
Through hardship and bloodshed, the masters were forced into historical retreats. It is no different anywhere else.
The great succession worked in the 1920s when monstrous Bolshevik totalitarianism replaced tsarist despotism. The Green Movement became the voice of the Russian land. Alexander Antonov founded a partisan republic in Tambov with a fifty-thousand-strong army. Peasants and non-commissioned officers Vasily Zheltovsky, Semyon Serkov, Vladimir Rodin, Stepan Danilov led anti-communist partisans across the Siberian taiga expanses. Against Lenin-the-Tsar.
A decade later, Stalin declared a collectivization war on the people; partisan fronts cut across the country from the Moscow region to Transbaikalia, from Voronezh to Altai. Rebel leaders Kondakov and Cherkesov, Fomin and Zimin, Bashurov and Losev. Forest battles and fleeting skirmishes with punitive detachments. Youth groups at urban construction sites and factories, armed with brass knuckles and Nagant revolvers, gave Komsomol members and militiamen a hard time. The Stalinists had to retreat then – the planned Pol Pot-style collectivization did not materialize.
Not all of this great historical experience is applicable now. The Putin regime possesses the resources of a digital Gulag, Chemezov’s equipment, and total convoy. Modern cities have turned into transparent cages. But even in this leviathan machine, there are breaches of uncontrolled territories. Backyard outskirts, labyrinths of semi-abandoned industrial zones, endless corridors of dormitories – these are the new jungles of urban freebooters. Mobile cells are born here. A lightning strike and instant dissolution. Russian nature has preserved Siberia, the Urals, Transbaikalia, where the harsh geography is stronger than any satellite.
Creating partisan strongholds in the urban social underground and hard-to-reach wilderness is a strategic task. Difficult, but achievable.
And here we come to the main point. The partisan movement must realize its social base. To know whom we are addressing in the masses. It is hardly the “creative class,” the prosperous urban dwellers, on whom the white-ribbon opposition of the 2010s naively relied. Coworking can become an intellectual resource. But the army of liberation will not emerge from there. We will find our comrades where our heroic predecessors did. The enraged laborer, the tough kid, the runaway soldier… Even a retired officer who has preserved his conscience and skill.
This is the historically natural environment for our work. Freedom is taken – by the right of Razin and Pushkin, Churkin and Antonov, Serkov and Cherkesov. By our will, we reclaim our history – the weapon of our tomorrow.
