Show more
karenm boosted
Turkish president maintains threat, as Russia again warns against an anti-YPG ground offensive.
Turkey’s Erdogan: New ground offensive in Syria ‘when convenient’
karenm boosted
karenm boosted

Olga Taratuta

A Grandmother for Russian Anarchism

Tireless member of the Anarchist Black Cross
Born 1876 in Ekaterinoslav, known today as Dnipro, Ukraine
Murdered by the Cheka in 1938

In 1901 she fled Tsarist repression to live in Geneva. In 1904 she returned to Odessa to join the Union of the Irreconcilables, an anarchist-communist group, along with her sister Kahyla and Kahyla's husband Kopel. After a trip to Bialystok, she helped to form a Black Banner group.

In 1905 her group carried out an attack on the Libman Cafe, one of the most significant motiveless terror acts of its time, for which she was sentenced to life in prison. She escaped a year later to live in Switzerland, organizing with the Buntar group.

In Odessa, the anarchists continued to agitate. Helping to establish over 50 peasants orgs and joining in labour organizing. When a shipping company tried to break a strike using the hyper nationalist pogramist Black Hundreds, anarchists simply blew up a whole steamer

In 1907 Olga returned to Odessa. She was arrested in 1908 in Yekaterinoslav holding a bag of 21 bombs in front of the Lukyanovskaya prison. She had planned to blow up a wing of the prison to aid in a prison escape.

For this she was sentenced to hard labour in the Tsarist prisons until she was released in 1917. She took months to herself and to reconnect with her son, but was soon called back as a result of the brutality of Hetman Skoropadsky in Ukraine.

Olga worked tirelessly with the Anarchist Red Cross, which had formed from the Political RC in either 1905 or 1907 when it was discovered that funds weren't reaching ALL prisoners, but only select tendencies. She aided many bolsheviks who would become her future jailers.

In June of 1920 she was elected to the secretariat of the Nabat and received 5 million rubles from the Makhnovists to organize the now Anarchist Black Cross in Ukraine. The Ukrainian ABC engaged in self defense and medical assistance in addition to prisoner support.

She was arrested in the Cheka raid at the Brotherhood Bookstore in Kharkov. Black Cross centers countrywide were targeted and destroyed. Headquarters for the Makhnovists and the publishing houses of Golos Truda were also destroyed.

On Febuary 13th 1921, she joined Fanya and Aron Baron, David Kogan, Mark Mrachny, Aleksey Olonetsky, and Aleksandr Guevsky to carry Kropotkin's casket.

In 1922, she and Anna Stepanova, her comrade from the Black Cross, were deported to Voldoga in exile and released in 1924 where they moved to Kiev. Olga and Anna travelled and lived together, until Anna's death in 1925.

Olga moved to Odessa again in 1927 where she aided in the international campaign to secure the freedom of Sacco and Vanzetti. For this, she and others experienced repression and raids from the Cheka, and many of her co-organizers were arrested.
During this time, Olga had been busy organizing a smuggling corrider of anarchist thought. Letters and literature moved along the illegal corridor from Ukraine, Moscow, Leningrad, Kursk, the Volga region and more. One of the few lifelines under Bolshevik repression.

In 1929 she was arrested for helping to organize rail workers.
She moved to Moscow upon her release 2 years later.

She was arrested again, on February 8th, 1938. The charge for "anti-soviet activities."
She was sentenced and shot the next day.

I would just say this is but a cliff notes version of the life of one of the most compassionate and defiant women I have ever encountered. Her life and writing along with the events she participated in are far much richer and I wish it was easier to capture that in a little thread.

karenm boosted
karenm boosted

Every WikiLeaks subdomain seems to be replaced with a wildcard redirect to the main domain, killing access to more datasets, the Cryptome mirror and the "research wiki"

The Courage sites still seem to be hosted by Courage board member and Wau Holland VP Andy Müller-Maguhn

Show thread
karenm boosted
karenm boosted
karenm boosted

Lol turns out watching a multi-billion dollar company get spiked into the ground is really really funny. We should do this more often.

karenm boosted
karenm boosted
karenm boosted

"LiBeRaL PrOpAgAnDa" newscorp CBC reporting on the killing of a master gunsmith 

karenm boosted
Librem Social

Librem Social is an opt-in public network. Messages are shared under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license terms. Policy.

Stay safe. Please abide by our code of conduct.

(Source code)

image/svg+xml Librem Chat image/svg+xml