"October 1, 2001
Statement of the Russian Indymedia Collective on changing the editor of
Russian Indymedia, Vladimir Videmann in connection with his ultra-right
views and actions.
In Dec. 2000 the Russian Indymedia site was set up as the Russian branch
of the international anti-corporate independent media centers. The site was
founded and was edited by Vladimir Videmann (Guzman) who lives in Berlin
and works as a BBC correspondent. The creation of this site wasn't done with
the coordination of activists in Russia and other countries where Russian is
actively used but was rather the private initiative of the editor. Despite
this, many people used this site including activists from the anarchist,
ecological, human rights and other social movements in Russia, Ukraine and
other former Soviet countries.In summer 2001, nationalist texts started to appear on Indymedia, material
from "Zavtra", including texts from the editor of this paper, the famous
national patriot Alexander Prokhanov as well as texts by the famous
Russian ideologue of the new right, Alexander Dugin, etc. Activists from
Indymedia Russia tried to explain to the editor that such texts are not in the
spirit of the Indymedia project but these comments fell on deaf ears. In
response, Videmann started a discussion on "censorship" which served to confuse
the real purpose of he arguments and which was used to make people out to be
against free speech. As we recently learned, in the spring of 2001,
Videmann invited new right activists on Dugin's site (www.arctogaia.com) to
take part in Russian Indymedia.
In September 2001 we got irrefutable evidence of ideological and
organization ties between Videmann and Russian and European new right
organizations, in part material from the Russian fascist journal
"Naslediye Predkov" and from Videmann's own journal "Imperativ". ( See the
text, Russian Indymedia in the hands of the new right on Sept. 28, 2001.)
Taking all this into account, we feel it is impossible to work with the
current editor of Russian Indymedia.
We hope that the international Indymedia community will find some way to
remove Videmann from this responsibility and to hand over editorship to a
new editorial collective, made up, in part, by people from Russian
Indymedia in Kasimov, Kiev, St. Petersburg, Moscow and other cities.
We are very concerned about the fact that new right activists have
infiltrated was the journalists have labeled "the anti-globalization
movement" and we would like to prevent such inflitration. On most
Indymedia sites around the world they use the principle of open posting where
any person can post on the site. We respect this principle but we feel we must
stress that this works well in countries where there are well-developed
grassroots movements, which can't be said of Russia and other Soviet
countries. Unfortunately political movements here are dominated by
conservative, nationalist and fascist forces which we feel it is necessary
to fight against. Many of us came into the antiglobalization movement in
part to fight such forces.
We also feel that history shows us that totalitarians are very intolerant
towards people with other points of view and that if fascists gain more
influence in Indymedia, all would be lost. Instead of being Independent
Media, it wold become an ideologically limited resource.
We would like to point out that in some countries with strong right
movements (like Germany, Quebec or Columbia), the editorial collectives of
Indymedia can decide to oversee open posting and block certain posts.
Taking into account the position of the right in Russia and other former
Soviet countries, we feel it is necessary to impose some editorial control
on the contents of Indymedia after the current editor is removed from his
responsibilities. We would work out the mechanism for this control working
in conjunction with other Indymedia sites.
Signed:
Maxim Butkevich, Kiev
Ute Weinmann, Moscow
Pavel Golubovski, Kiev
Alexei Kozlov, Voronezh
Lyolik Kutsenko, Kiev
Julia Kutsenko, Kiev
Sergei Lushakov, Kiev
Sergei Nedosekov, Kiev
Nastya Osipova, Kiev
Pavel Skurenevski, Kiev
Andrei Tvardievich, Kiev
Yulia Tikhomirova, St. Petersburg
Vlad Tupikin, Moscow
Yevgeni Faizullin, St.Petersburg
Grigory Feldman, Moscow
Tuuli Hakulinen, St. Petersburg
Mikhail Tsovma, Moscow
"
