On November 8, a gas pipeline in Moscow was blown up by means of an intricate explosive device. Ten days later, comrades from the Russian Maoist Party (RMP) discovered the following fallacious message circulating on the Internet.
"The responsibility for setting on fire and exploding the gas in 2nd Setunsky Pereulok is taken upon itself by the RMP (Russian Maoist Party).
"Down with the bloody occupation regime of Yeltsin-Putin! The victory of the world proletarian revolution will surely come about! ROT FRONT!"
This message was sent via an anonymous mail server. Several bourgeois media sources in Russia reported on the false message, taking it as fact.
The real RMP strongly disowns any responsibility for this bombing.
According to one RMP member, "I must state it in the most emphatic terms that neither myself, nor anybody else in the RMP has anything to do with that gas explosion case. None of us ever distributed that fake statement. That's positive.
"The RMP demarcated ourselves from this sort of thing from the outset. One of our first political documents was the statement 'Regarding the Possibility and Expediency of Armed Struggle Now in Russia,' where we bitterly denounced the slogan of 'armed struggle now' in the current Russian conditions. In the context of an incipient (maybe no longer incipient) fascist dictatorship, the real issues are defending bourgeois democracy here in Russia and supporting national liberation struggles in the non-ethnic-Russian periphery (such as Chechnya). That is the primary goal and any prancing about with explosive devices and trying to prove how tough you are by blowing things up (when the very existence of any dissident -- even bourgeois-democratic -- opinion is at stake now) is at best immature and at worst outright playing into the hands of the security services.
"I'm afraid to surmise the worst, but I believe we are being framed up by the FSB [ex-KGB, Russian version of the FBI] -- to form part of that larger 'terrorist conspiracy' and to discredit the name of Maoism in Russia forever."
The Russian secret services are planning -- and partially executing -- a large-scale crackdown against activists in Russia. Some six persons (Andrei Sokolov, Dmitry Biryukov, Nadezhda Raks, Tatayana Nekhorosheva, Larissa Shiptsova and Olga Nevskaya) are currently sitting in Moscow prisons facing charges of terrorism -- involvement in blowing up several Czarist monuments, as well as an FSB reception room. All these people are either members or close cohorts of the notorious RYCL(b) -- an allegedly Marxist-Leninist organization, which actually contains a large number of anarchists sympathetic to the "armed struggle now" line.
Several of the RMP founders formerly belonged to the RYCL(b). One of the reasons they quit was their rejection of "armed struggle now."
The Maoist Internationalist Movement calls on all to distribute this article, or otherwise defeat the attempt to pin this bombing on the RMP.
On the Web: Russian Maoist Party.
Contact MIM by writing mim@mim.org