|
| Victor Bourenkov |
On the 16th of January 2002, the regional court in the city of Lipetsk had sentenced two young communists, Oleg Parshchikov and Igor Marinovskii, to 9 and 6 months in jail respectively. They were convicted of violating Article 329 of the Russian law code by the alleged "desecration of the National Flag of the Russian Federation."
The public burning of the three-color-striped flag, which has become somewhat traditional for communist youth groups, took place during the demonstration on the 7th of November last year.
The regime is thus trying to impose the respect and love the symbols of the present Russian bourgeois system. It should be borne in mind that just a few years back, those occupying key positions in today's power structure had not just ignored but encouraged the violence against the Red Flag, the symbol of the State that defeated fascism.
In position of an assistant to Sobchak – the leading counter-revolutionary in Leningrad, often regarded as Yeltsin's second-in-command at the time – Putin personally directed the procedure to cut off the mast with the Red Flag on top of the building where RCWP CC headquarters were situated. With a crowd giggling and with authorities taking part, scores of monuments of Soviet leaders and of communist thinkers were demolished.
Today, although even the bourgeois constitution guarantees the freedom of political beliefs and prohibits insulting others on the basis of political views or forcing one to abandon certain views, the State-owned and so-called independent media produce streams of lies and slanders against the Soviet past and the ideals of socialism on a daily basis. This way they insult tens of millions of citizens. They bear a direct responsibility for the level of population decline in Russia, which currently stands at 700 thousand per year. People's hearts cannot withstand this sophisticated mockery.
For the Soviet people, the three-color flag is the symbol of fascism, the symbol of treason not just by Hitlerites' servant Vlasov, but also by the traitors of all times, including the present ones.
Having shot up parliament and falsified the results of elections that were held on blood [in October 1993], Yeltsin's regime imposed, illegally and forcibly, its anti-popular constitution that defends the rights of the propertied minority. And his successor Putin opted not to adhere even to that constitution, according to which "the only source of power in the Russian Federation are the people" and their power is exercised in its highest form by means of a referendum, which is supposed to be held over the principal questions.
Putin was too scared to put the question of the State symbols to public resolution, because through expressing the feeling towards them, the people would have had a chance to speak out for socialism. Using pressure and bribery, with the help of the conciliatory opposition in the Duma, Russia is assigned the flag of Vlasovites, who fought, alongside with Hitler, against the Soviet Union and against the Russian people. And now the powers are reverting to repressive measures in order to ban the expression of the popular attitude towards the flag that signifies fascism. How should this be interpreted?
Initially the court came up with a minor punishment: Parshchikov and Marinovskii were sentenced to pay an administrative fine. However, the regional prosecutor Nikolai Savchenko regarded this measure as too humane and the Justice authorities found it necessary to charge the young fighters against the State symbols. Moreover, the authorities were at first trying to find the elements of causing national strife and humiliation of the national dignity of Russian citizens in their case, but this totally absurd wording was later declined by the court.
We regard the aforementioned actions of Lipetsk communists as completely justified. The flag that became the banner of fascist Vlasov and of the bourgeois dictators in contemporary Russia, Yeltsin, Putin and the propertied elite, the banner of the national bourgeoisie that humiliates people, objectively does not deserve any better treatment.
Hence we demand that Parshchikov and Marinovskii be cleared of all charges.
We also declare that this disgraceful action by the Russian bourgeois court is just another sequential step of political persecution against communists, an attempt to compel the population to be loyal to the symbols of the bourgeois power that is hated by the working class of Russia.
The event is even more alarming considering that the juridical organs are now using minor, purely formal grounds as a pretext to start the repressive actions.
We demand the right to a free expression of one's attitude to ideological questions, to the politics conducted by the class of exploiters, to the bourgeois State and to its symbols!
Russian Communist Workers' Party – Revolutionary Party of
Communists
CC-Chairman, Viktor Tiulkin, Anatoli Kriuchkov
CC Secretaries, Yuri Terentiev, Boris Yachmenev
Click here to return to NSC March 2002 index.