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Lately I've been reading Orwell's collected work from 1945–1950, which was being deaccessioned from the library. It opens with a short but fascinating essay on , published 19 October 1945. It seems clear that Orwell's thinking about this development led directly to his novel , which was written in late 1948.“You and the Atom Bomb”Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell's initial focus is: This is important, he says, because: Obviously, the atom bomb is in the first category. Then we come to the part that is clearly the road to : Nineteen Eighty-Four By 1945 the three super-states were taking shape. Orwell writes about how in 1941 it had appeared that the Axis powers would win the war (he mentions James Burnham's ) so that Germany (not Russia) might control Europe and Asia, while Japan (not China) might control East Asia, but he said this was just a “miscalculation”:The Managerial Revolution The frozen and oppressive political milieu of is clearly laid out:Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949, and Orwell died the following year after a long battle with tuberculosis. His essay on courtesy of the Orwell Foundation and Orwell's estate.Nineteen Eighty-Four“You and the Atom Bomb” is available online The question that is of most urgent interest to all of us, namely: “How difficult are these things to manufacture?” Ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. … A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak. We have before us the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them. It has been rather hastily assumed that this means bigger and bloodier wars, and perhaps an actual end to the machine civilisation. But suppose — and really this is the likeliest development — that the surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to retaliate? In that case we are back where we were before, the only difference being that power is concentrated in still fewer hands and that the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more hopeless. More and more obviously the surface of the earth is being parcelled off into three great empires …. The haggling as to where the frontiers are to be drawn is still going on, and will continue for some years, and the third of the three super-states — East Asia, dominated by China — is still potential rather than actual. Mr H.G. Wells and others have been warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons…. Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. … The kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once and in a permanent state of “cold war” with its neighbours.unconquerable
This post is going to be about what infinite ordinal numbers are, and about is in particular. I had a brainwave a while back (18 months now, wow, I have definitely not been blogging enough) and suddenly understood much better than I did before. I have several related ideas here and I am going to try to write one blog post about each of them, instead of one gigantic blog post about all of them together that I never finish. I really like the ordinal numbers. For some reason I was repeatedly exposed to the infinite cardinals as a child and, while they are pleasingly mysterious, they're also somewhat uninteresting because they have no internal structure, they are just bignesses. It's super cool that there is more than one possible bigness of an infinite set, of course, but sets can have all sorts of interesting structure, and looking just at the bigness ignores all that. The ordinals are much more satisfying, and also I feel that they are more like numbers. This post explains how they work and introduces the interesting ordinal . (I wrote an article a while back about how, when your twelve-year-old asks “what is infinity” you should answer as if they had asked “what is ”. Later I found out that Joel Hamkins recommended the same strategy, and I still stand by it.) What we're doing The idea behind the ordinals is that we want to define something like the “natural” numbers , where each number has a successor and there is a less-than relation. But we want to do it in the context of elementary set theory, which is simpler. Extremely simple, in fact. What is set theory? I don't know how intelligible this article will be if you don't already know, but I am going to try to explain it as briefly as possible. People who already know what means can skip to the next section. In set theory, the only kind of object is a “set”, which is like a featureless bag of things, which are called elements. What kind of things? We don't care, that's not part of the model. The only properties a set has are which things are in the bag. It doesn't make sense to ask what color a set is or whather it is a citizen of Belgium; sets don't have colors, they aren't citizens of anywhere, and they don't have any other extrinsic properties. The only kind of question you can ask is about a set is: Is this thing in that set ? When it is, we write , and when it isn't we write . When a set contains the things and , and nothing else, we write it as $$ \{ p, q, r\} $$ so for example but There is one special set called the “empty set” that has nothing in it at all; it's written . The one other piece of set theory you need to know for this article is that if you have two or more sets, you can combine them into a single set that contains everything that the original sets did. This is called the union of the sets. When combining two sets and , we write for their union. For example: $$ \{\text{tea}, \text{coffee}\} \cup \{\text{mango}, \text{octopus}\} = \{ \text{tea}, \text{coffee}, \text{mango}, \text{octopus} \} $$ There is a lot more than that to set theory but that is the basic idea and I think it's enough to get pretty far in this article. To define numbers in the context of elementary set theory means that we want to find sets that we can interpret as numbers, and a way to interpret arithmetic and such as being operations on these sets. We want to show that those sets can be made to behave the way we expect numbers to behave, and that we can prove that the arithmetic operations have the properties that we expect numbers to have. For numbers, it's true that , and we want to be sure that, whatever we decide that means for sets, and whatever sets we've chosen to stand in for and , we should still have . Understanding when we can model a complicated system in terms of a simpler one, and how to do that, is one of the main concerns of mathematics. Set theory is just about the simplest system there is, so mathematics spends a lot of time trying to interpret various complicated systems in terms of set theory. Less-than Numbers have a less-than relation , and elementary set theory has only one relation, , so it makes sense to try to use that for less-than, and see if it works. We’ll say that if and are sets that represent numbers, then means the same as . We want to be transitive. That is if and then we should also have . If we're taking to be synonymous with , then this means that if and are sets that represent numbers, and if and , then we should also have . This is kind of a weird situation. It means that is not a set of fish or carrots, it means that is a set of sets. And it means any element of any of ’s sets is also an element of itself. When this happens we say that the set is transitive, using the word “transitive” analogously to the way we do what we say that is transitive. Transitivity puts fairly strict constraints on what a set can be like. There are lots of sets, but relatively few of them are transitive. Here are some examples of transitive sets, and the numbers they represent: $$ \begin{align*} 0 &= \{\}\\ 1&=\{0\} \\ \end{align*} $$ Since we are using here as just another way to write the empty set , we could have written instead of . They mean exactly the same. But I feel that the nested curly braces quickly get confusing and don't really contribute to understanding. Still, remember that when we write the symbols , and so on, we're not using them in their usual sense of numbers. Rather, we are talking about these particular transitive sets. The next one is: $$ \begin{align*} 2 & = \{0, 1\} \\ \end{align*} $$ Since and the is an abbreviation for the set $$ \{\{\}, \{\{\}\} \}. $$ I hope you can see why I want to avoid the raw curly-brace notation. Continuing, we have: $$ \begin{align*} 3 & = \{0, 1, 2\}\\ 4 & = \{0, 1, 2, 3\}\\ \vdots\\ 9 & = \{0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8\},\\ \vdots\\ 53 &= \{0, 1, 2, \dots, 52\}\\ \vdots \end{align*} $$ And so on. These sets are all transitive. For example, and and sure enough, also. This isn’t trivial: Not every set of numbers is transitive. For example is not a transitive set because and but . We'll say that an ordinal number is a set that is transitive, and whose elements are also all transitive. All the sets in the list above are examples. There are transitive sets that aren't ordinals, but we're not interested in them in this article, because they aren't number-like in the same way. This identification of numbers as theser particular sets does also make behave like the less-than relation in the way we wanted. For example, we have because , but not vice versa, it's not true that because . Technically this definition has a lot to recommend it. It’s extremely simple, which makes it easy to work with, and many natural theorems are easily proved. For example, when dealing with familiar numbers, it’s always false that , for any . We'd like to able to prove the analogous thing for our synthetic sets-as-numbers. If we can’t (or worse, if we can prove the opposite) then our model is missing something important (or worse, it’s just wrong). Well, by our definition of less-than, simply means , which is false because has no elements, and that's the proof that is false. Successorship Another thing we need from numbers is a successor operation: each number should be followed by another, different one, and it should be possible to calculate which one. This has been recognized since the 19th century as the most important organizing principle that the natural numbers have. It’s is one of the few foundational things that almost every mathematician not only accepts but is happy with. If is some transitive set, we should be able to identify another, different transitive set that we can designate as the successor of , the number that follows in the sequence of numbers. It’s not hard to show that if is transitive then so is $$ T\cup \{T\} $$ See how it works when : the successor of is $$ 2\cup\{2\} = \{0, 1\}\cup\{2\} = \{0,1,2\} = 3 $$ as we would hope. Limits This gets us the numbers, as we wanted, and we could go on from here to explain how and work and so on, but today we are going a different direction. It turns out that if we add one more ingredient we get a lot more than just familiar numbers. There’s one other way of making an ordinal number out of smaller ordinal numbers. If is any family of transitive sets, then their union, the set that contains everything that is in any of them, is an ordinal also. When the family has a largest element , (typically because it’s a finite family) then the union is not anything new, it’s just again. For example . But if the family of transitive sets has no largest element, we do get something new. In particular, the union $$ \omega = 0\cup 1\cup 2\cup\dots $$ is an ordinal number. By constructing the numbers as transitive sets, we got what we wanted: the finite ordinals behave just like numbers. But if we also consider infinite ordinals, we get infinite numbers like that behave, in some ways, like bigger siblings of the numbers. participates very nicely in less-than comparisons and minimum and maximum operations, and somewhat nicely in addition and multiplication. is an ordinal number but not a familiar one. Under our definition of as a synonym for , every finite number is less than ; there's no familiar number that behaves that way. It’s different from finite numbers in another way also: except for , each finite number is a successor of some other finite number and so has a predecessor, whereas is not a successor of anything and has no predecessor. Ordinals like that are not successors are called limit ordinals. Every ordinal has a successor, and is an ordinal set, so it has one, usually written as , which is the next ordinal after . Then there follow , and the union of all of these is the set $$ \{0, 1, 2, \dots, \omega, \omega+1, \omega+2,\dots\} $$ which is called —still an ordinal. After these come , and eventually . Then after a long series of things like $$\omega^2·17 + \omega·39+117$$ comes , then including an infinite ordinal for every polynomial involving , and then the union of all those, . The series continues — it continues forever, we can always find a bigger transitive set — with things like $$ \omega^{\omega^{\omega^{53}·3+11}·2+\omega·19+1}·7 + \omega^{\omega^{17}·143+53}·12 + \omega^{99938}·12712781 + \omega^{99936}·12712781 +\omega+ 2 $$ where it’s like a polynomial in , except that the exponents don’t have to be finite numbers, they can be other super-polynomials in whose exponents don’t have to be finite. And then, after all of these, the limit of this mind-boggling sequence, is the ordinal called $$ \epsilon_0 $$ It’s just gotten too complicated to express with regular mathematical expressions involving . It transpires that this is the smallest ordinal satisfying the property that $$ x = \omega^x $$ This is the thing I have finally been able to get my head around, a little. The next article will explain how.
The ancient Egyptians had a terrible notation for fractions. They had notations for for each , for , but everything else was written as a sum of these, with repeats forbidden, so that for example had to be written as . (Wikipedia) In an older article about Egyptian fractions and the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, I said: Getting the table of good-quality representations of is not trivial, and requires searching, number theory, and some trial and error. It's not at all clear that . I think I see now where this comes from. , so two of the summands must have denominators divisible by and by respectively. The first thing you should do is consider $$\u5 + \u7 = \frac{12}{35} = \frac{36}{105}.$$ But you don't want , you want , so you multiply by : $$\u{18}\left(\u5 + \u7\right) = \u{90}+\u{126} = \frac 2{105}$$ and there it is. Why pick and rather than, say, and ? I suspect the answer is probably: Ahmes (or someone earlier) tried it both ways and picked the result they liked best. Remember Ahmes compiling a reference table here, so he does these calculations once, writes down the best result, and throws the others away. If you do the same trick with and instead you get . Then you multiply everything by producing $$\u{84} + \u{140} = \frac2{105}$$ which seems a little worse than the other one. Using the and the produces $$\u{75} + \u{175} = \frac2{105}$$ which seems much worse. Of course this only works when the denominator is composite. Here's another approach, which doesn't work too well in this case but might be useful for other examples. Consider that . We want . So $$ \begin{align} \frac2{105} & = \u{35}\cdot\frac23 \\ & = \u{35}\left(\u2+\u6\right) \\ & = \u{70} + \u{210} \end{align} $$ The denominators here are a lot bigger than the first expansion, but they do at least have the advantage of being multiples of . The Egyptians like this because they, like us, often need to multiply numbers by , and whereas a fraction like is hard for them to multiply by , it's trivial to multiply by .
Bo Diddley's cover of "Sixteen Tons" sounds very much like one of my favorites, "Can't Judge A Book By Its Cover". It's interesting to compare. Thinking on that it suddenly occured to me that his name might have been a play on “diddley bow”, which is a sort of homemade one-stringed zither. The player uses a bottle as a bridge for the string, and changes the pitch by sliding the bottle up and down. When you hear about blues artists whose first guitars were homemade, this is often what was meant: it wasn't a six-string guitar, it was a diddley bow. But it's not clear that Bo Diddley play his name on the diddley bow. "Diddly" also means something insignificant or of little value, and might have been a disparaging nickname he received in his youth. (It also appears in the phrase "diddly squat"). Maybe that's also the source of the name of the diddley bow.did
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Have you ever heard of Ulanqab prefecture, a small (by China’s standards) jurisdiction of 1.5 million people lost in the middle of the Inner Mongolian steppe?
Lately I've been reading Orwell's collected work from 1945–1950, which was being deaccessioned from the library. It opens with a short but fascinating essay on , published 19 October 1945. It seems clear that Orwell's thinking about this development led directly to his novel , which was written in late 1948.“You and the Atom Bomb”Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell's initial focus is: This is important, he says, because: Obviously, the atom bomb is in the first category. Then we come to the part that is clearly the road to : Nineteen Eighty-Four By 1945 the three super-states were taking shape. Orwell writes about how in 1941 it had appeared that the Axis powers would win the war (he mentions James Burnham's ) so that Germany (not Russia) might control Europe and Asia, while Japan (not China) might control East Asia, but he said this was just a “miscalculation”:The Managerial Revolution The frozen and oppressive political milieu of is clearly laid out:Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949, and Orwell died the following year after a long battle with tuberculosis. His essay on courtesy of the Orwell Foundation and Orwell's estate.Nineteen Eighty-Four“You and the Atom Bomb” is available online The question that is of most urgent interest to all of us, namely: “How difficult are these things to manufacture?” Ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. … A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak. We have before us the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds, dividing the world between them. It has been rather hastily assumed that this means bigger and bloodier wars, and perhaps an actual end to the machine civilisation. But suppose — and really this is the likeliest development — that the surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic bomb against one another? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it, against people who are unable to retaliate? In that case we are back where we were before, the only difference being that power is concentrated in still fewer hands and that the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more hopeless. More and more obviously the surface of the earth is being parcelled off into three great empires …. The haggling as to where the frontiers are to be drawn is still going on, and will continue for some years, and the third of the three super-states — East Asia, dominated by China — is still potential rather than actual. Mr H.G. Wells and others have been warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons…. Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. … The kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once and in a permanent state of “cold war” with its neighbours.unconquerable
Across three decades, Russia has been at the forefront of the worldwide descent into authoritarianism. Vladimir Putin’s government has suppressed opposition in ways that aspiring autocrats like Donald Trump are still striving to emulate. Yet despite widespread repression, there is still resistance in Russia, and as Putin’s model proliferates, people everywhere around the world stand to benefit from learning about it. Likewise, we should support Russian anarchist and anti-war prisoners, both because resistance within Russia offers hope for the eventual end of war and totalitarianism and because, should autocrats consolidate power where we live, we will wish for people to support us, as well. The following text is based on a presentation Antti Rautiainen offered at the Baltic Anarchist Book Fair in Tartu on May 30, 2026. You can watch a video of the presentation here or listen to it via Spotify. In Russia, street protests against the war were crushed in 2022, the first year following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. According to the human rights organization OVD Info, 18,901 arrests for anti-war protests in year 2022 were followed by 274 arrests in 2023, 41 arrests in 2022, and just 13 arrests in first half of the year 2025. The reason for this sharp decline was the “Ilya Dadin” law of 2014, according to which “repeated offenses in following the established organization of protests” across a period of 180 days can result a prison sentence of up to 5 years. Thousands of people were arrested once or twice for taking part in anti-war street activities in 2022 and received either a fine or a prison sentence of a few days—but few risked being arrested for a third time. Detentions for anti-war actions by year, first half of 2025, according to OVD-Info. Russian polls have been unreliable since spring 2022. After the criminalization of anti-war opinions, some polling companies reported that up to 60% of people queried refused to give answers. Before the polls became unreliable, 58-71% of Russians indicated a pro-war sentiment in various polls. However, opinions were intensely polarized between different groups. People in major cities were more anti-war than those in other locations; younger people were more anti-war, as were women. The greatest division was between people who watch television, the chief propaganda tool of the state, and people who do not watch it. Among people less than 30 years old who do not watch television, 80% were anti-war. The general impression among critical Russians is that the majority of those in Russia still share a pro-war sentiment. However, a shift is visible even in officially tolerated opinion polls. According to polls by the Levada Center, over the past two years, the share of Russians supporting the continuation of the war effort has dropped from around 41% to around 28%, and share of those who support peace talks has grown from 51% to 62%. At the same time, the number of those who support making concessions to Ukraine is at 24%: people want peace, but on terms favorable to Russia. Of course, this may simply reflect what people are willing to say to anonymous pollsters. Another difference is that now, people in small cities and rural localities are expressing more anti-war sentiment than those in major urban centers. Moscow is the most pro-war city. The likely explanation is that most of the frontline casualties are from small, peripheral communities. Factors Undermining the Anti-War Movement Why, after more than four years of war, with more than a million Russian soldiers wounded or dead, is anti-war sentiment still confined to a minority? As the saying goes, “It’s the economy, stupid.” During the first years of the war, salaries were growing even with high inflation rate. Starting in 2004, the Russian ruling class hoarded huge profits of the oil and gas trade in a fund currently known as the “National Wealth Fund.” Instead of raising the standard of living by investing in healthcare, social benefits and services, and the like, the money was stashed to be spent on wars and militarization. Now these billions are finally flowing into the economy in the form of wartime investment. The unemployment rate is negligible; in some cases, salaries have multiplied at factories in regions that were previously economically depressed. Generous monthly payments for contract soldiers are up to five times the average salary in poorer regions. At the same time, payments to widows and orphans are shifting the economy in the most destitute areas of the Russian federation, from which most of the enlisted soldiers come. During the first months of 2026, the Russian economy contracted for the first time since the beginning of the war; but now, once again, it is on a growth trajectory, due to the oil price hike following the war in Iran. The Russian state budget is running on a deficit due to the costs of the war, but there are plenty of ways to solve that issue, such as tax increases, using what remains of the National Wealth Fund, cutting social spending and education, and forcing oligarchs to buy state obligations. The Russian economy will likely be able to sustain the war for several years yet, although the standard of living is stagnating now and drone strikes are causing increasing inconvenience. Another factor explaining Russian support for the war is the situation on the frontline. Russia’s advances have been very slow for years, but most weeks, Russia is still gaining more territory than it is losing. The traditional dream of socialists of all stripes is that soldiers will turn their rifles against the ruling class and finish the war. But throughout world history, this usually takes place in a situation in which a war has already been lost, as in Russia in February 1917 and Germany in November 1918. It is not certain that Russia will win this war, but as long as the chances are high, many people would like to be on the winning side. The third factor is that for a random person, the risk of ending up in the war remains low. The independent media project Mediazona, originally established by members of Pussy Riot, has been tracking Russian losses by monitoring social media and other sources, and they have been able dig up information about 239,000 dead at the front. Of these casualties, the service branch of 22.5% of the casualties is unknown. 36.7% are volunteers, 11% are inmates, 21.5% are contract soldiers, and only 8.3% are mobilized soldiers. Some of the volunteers, inmates, and contract soldiers have not signed their contracts voluntarily; inmates and conscripts are pressured to sign contracts. But the vast majority of them had a choice, and even those mobilized often had the option of not appearing in the enlistment office and leaving the country or dodging the draft by other means. Few people who have died in the front have genuinely used every means at their disposal to avoid this. Also, many of those who would otherwise have opposed the war have left Russia. The exodus that took place in 2022 involved up to 700,000 people. Many of them have returned due to the difficulties of life in emigration, but emigration is continuing. At the same time, the intensity of the repression targeting anti-war opinion is without precedent since the beginning of Perestroika in 1986. From Protests to Direct Action Yet there are still protests and social movements. Activatica is a project monitoring protests in Russia, and they are tracking several hundred protests and direct actions every month. The most popular topics are environmental issues; anti-repression events, such as letter writing events for political prisoners, are still tolerated. Activatica lists much fewer anti-war protests, and those are usually direct actions. In a few cities, lone pickets of stubborn pensioners are still occasionally tolerated without a resulting prison sentence, such as the pickets by Viktor Gilin in Perm. Protests and direct actions by type, monthly, year 2025, according to Activatica. The number of anti-war direct actions actually appears to be growing. In 2024, Activatica recorded 145 actions; in 2025, 233 actions. Activatica tries not to count actions provoked by Ukrainian internet scammers, who hack the bank accounts of (usually elderly) persons, then blackmail them into carrying direct actions, which often result in severe sentences. The internet scamming industry is widespread in Ukraine, and it is contributing to the war effort in this dubious way, perhaps also as a consequence of its links to Ukrainian security services. Direct actions by region, 2024, according to Activatica. Direct actions by Russian region, 2025, according to Activatica. However, Activatica does not attempt to differentiate between actions carried out by activists and Ukrainian secret services—which is challenging in any case, because the secret services occasionally masquerade as activists. One may assume that actions involving explosives that occur not far from the Ukrainian border, or professional-level assassinations of Russian officers in major cities, are unlikely to be the efforts of activists, whereas small-scale Molotov cocktail attacks far from the frontline are probably the work of activists. Often, it is difficult to be sure who is behind what. Moreover, it is possible that people who genuinely oppose the war are contacting Ukrainian secret services in order to solve their own financial problems, or in order to combine their financial and a political interests. The model of Ukrainian secret service hiring civilians for money might be described as “Sabotage as Service”—the same model that is widely used by the Russian secret services in Ukraine and around Europe. Oil storage facilities burned in Kandry, Bashkokorstan, in an action claimed by Rospartisan on May 26, 2026. Rospartisan has a big-tent policy of covering any anti-war direct actions, from anarchists to the far-right. The vast majority of small-scale sabotage actions are not claimed by any group. During the first years of the war, the Combat Organization of Anarcho-Communists (BOAK) succeeded in conducting several major sabotage actions. BOAK was established before the 2022 invasion; it represents the direct continuation of the wave of insurrectionary anarchism that occurred in Russia from 2008-2013, inspired by the uprising in Greece in December 2008 after the police murdered Alexandros Grigoropoulos. Among the founders of the organization was Dmitry Petrov, an anarchist from Moscow who was killed by Russian forces while defending Ukraine in 2023. The logo of the Combat Organization of Anarcho-Communists. No one that the authorities have caught has been proven to be a BOAK activist. In one case, the authorities claimed that they had arrested a BOAK member for carrying out direct action, but an anarchist political prisoner who was held in the same prison confirmed that the activist had nothing to do with BOAK or anarchism. The case of another person who was arrested last year and accused of being a BOAK member still awaits confirmation or refutation, due to the secrecy of the court materials. BOAK cannot confirm or refute such claims because it does not preserve the personal details of its contacts. A photograph from a BOAK action. A photograph from a BOAK action. But although BOAK members have been able to evade the Russian authorities, several have been forced to flee Russia or to tone down their activities. This has largely reduced BOAK to a propaganda organization promoting direct action and anarchism. Organizations Supporting Anarchist and Direct-Action Prisoners Anarchists have established several organizations to support anarchists facing repression. Currently, the oldest is the Anarchist Black Cross of Moscow, established in 2003. For more than two decades, ABC Moscow has supported repressed anarchists, anti-fascists, anti-authoritarians and their supporters. As of now, ABC Moscow lists 23 anarchist and anti-fascist political prisoners in Russia, of whom 14 are in prison for alleged actions against industry or the military. Most of the rest were imprisoned prior to the full-scale invasion in 2022. During the first years of the war, ABC Moscow spread information about and supported diverse anti-war direct-action prisoners, but lately, their efforts have been confined to supporting anarchist and anti-authoritarian prisoners, due to the sheer number of anti-war prisoners. In 2025, ABC Moscow (and all the other ABC groups) were declared “undesirable” in Russia, which means that donating to them can result in a three-year prison sentence. Eventually, ABC Moscow moved all of its activities and members abroad; today, it focuses on spreading information and raising funds outside Russia. News about ABC Moscow activity appears regularly on the Avtonom website and via the group’s own Telegram channel. ABC Moscow can receive donations via Paypal and cryptocurrencies. As ABC Moscow’s activities inside Russia have become impossible, another organization has emerged to support anarchist and anti-authoritarian prisoners, named Fires of Freedom. You can follow its Russian-language Telegram channel here. Fires of Freedom. Solidarity Zone is another initiative started by anti-authoritarians to support anti-war direct action prisoners of various political convictions (excluding the far right). It was established in 2022, at a time when mainstream human rights organizations were not willing to support those sentenced for arsons and “terrorist” charges. Since then, the situation has changed; now, Russian opposition and human rights organizations have a more positive attitude towards direct action. However, Solidarity Zone is still providing support for 15 prisoners serving lengthy sentences for allegedly carrying out direct action, and the organization is following the cases of many more. Solidarity Zone. Although the mainstream democratic opposition has become more supportive of prisoners accused of direct action, in practice, the sheer number of prisoners has overwhelmed all prisoner support structures. The most significant Russian human rights organization, Memorial, has declared 1715 prisoners to be political, of whom 674 are anti-war prisoners. It has also listed 5608 people with “politically motivated charges.” Their process of identifying political prisoners has been slowed down severely by the number of cases. For example, Memorial designated the anarchist Alexandr Snezhkov as a political prisoner only two years after his case was submitted to them. In reality, the number of political prisoners in Russia is probably twice as many as they list. The growth of the number of political prisoners in Russia from 2012-2025, according to Memorial. Graph by Riddle. In the first half of 2026, 1234 people were sentenced for “terrorism” (including incitement)—an increase of 38% compared with the first half of 2025. The median prison sentence was 13 years. By the end of 2025, there were 5412 prisoners in Russia with “terrorism” charges, an annual growth of 40.9%. This number includes Ukrainian prisoners of war, who are routinely charged with ”terrorism,” sabotage as a service, provocateur victims etc. Motivations may also overlap. Altogether, 21,600 people are listed as “terrorists and extremists” on the blacklist of the Rosfinmonitoring, the Russian Federal Service of Financial Monitoring. In addition to prisoners, this list includes people whose sentences expired long ago, and people who have emigrated. Ending up on this list means a lifetime ban on receiving almost any bank services. In practice, those on the list can only earn a living in cash. Although supporting political prisoners has been a top priority for the Russian opposition, the avalanche of cases has caused prisoner support structures to collapse, and political prisoners have been reduced to statistics. More and more political prisoners have to face court without any financial support or lawyers. At this point, it is also worth asking what the point of such support even is, as no charges against political prisoners have been thrown out as a consequence of the efforts of lawyers, no matter how skillful. The outcome of every case has been decided long before they make it to the court. Nonetheless, lawyers provide a critical—albeit expensive—means of communicating with prisoners during the periods of investigation. Often, the authorities have stopped torturing prisoners after lawyers have become involved in their cases. Legal work sometimes secures some minor victories. For example, in summer 2023, Ivan Kudryashov, who was supported by Solidarity Zone while imprisoned for putting up anti-war posters in his hometown of Tver, won a hunger strike after 40 days, gaining the promise that he would have access to vegan food and vitamins sent to him in parcels. Viktor Filinkov, who was arrested in January 2018 and sentenced to seven years in prison on the accusation of being a member of a supposed underground anarchist “Network,” was repeatedly placed in solitary confinement in his prison colony. But with help of lawyers, he managed to challenge these policies and spent last years of his imprisonment in general population. Ivan Kurdyashov. An Incomplete List of Anarchists and Anti-Authoritarians in Russian Prisons and Prisoner Camps for Opposing the War Dmitri Syutkin is a young anarchist, and as many of the younger anarchists, encountered with anarchist ideas online and was rather isolated from the anarchist movement. He is from a small city in the Sverdlovsk region, and he maintained a small telegram channel advocating anarchism and independent Ural region. Three years ago, at the age of 17, he was entrapped by the FSB, who deceived him, claiming to represent Russian volunteers fighting in Ukraine. Anarchist prisoner support groups only became aware of him this year. Accused of terrorism and other charges, he may face up to 10 years in prison. Dmitri Syutkin. Another anarchist prisoner who was discovered relatively recently is Alexey Grigorev from Novotroitsk in the Orenburg region. Accused of planning to burn an FSB building and military recruiting center and of having contact with the Ukrainian authorities, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison in February 2025, before any prisoner support group learned of his case. Alexey Grigorev. Perhaps the most successful of the lone anarchist partisans is Ruslan Sidiki, who, unlike the prisoners listed above, had connection with the anarchist movement, having been active in a small and longstanding anarchist rural commune in the Leningrad area, close to St. Petersburg. He attempted to use drones to destroy strategic bombers, but failed as a consequence of electronic jammers. A second action against freight train was more successful, completely derailing a train transporting chemical ingredients. However, due to a small mistake, Ruslan was caught following a massive manhunt and sentenced to 29 years in prison in May 2025. This year, Ruslan’s lawyer was arrested, but Fires of Freedom managed to raise funds to pay for new lawyer to file his appeal. Ruslan Sidiki visiting the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in better times. Alexey Rozhkov, another lone anarchist partisan, was one of the first people to attack military enlistment offices. He attempted an attack with Molotov cocktails on March 11, 2022, just two weeks after the war began. He was soon arrested, but because minor sabotage did not yet result in automatic terrorist charges during the first months of the war, he was released pending court and escaped to Kyrgysztan. Unfortunately, he was kidnapped there, brought back to Russia, tortured, and charged with terrorism. In May 2026, he received a sentence of 16 years in prison. Alexey Rozhkov Eventually, this and other actions against enlistment offices inspired a massive wave of arson attacks. Mediazone listed 94 such attacks during the first year and a half of the war. During that early phase of the war, many enlistment offices did not have their files digitized, so burning an office could protect everyone from an urban neighbourhood or rural region from being sent to war for several months. Eventually, the authorities began a hurried effort to digitize all the conscript files; although actions against enlistment offices still occasionally take place, the value of the target is now doubtful. Currently, most anti-war sabotage is targeted against transport and energy infrastructure such as railroads. Alexey Rozhkov with Molotov Cocktail. CCTV camera footage, scan from print of the court documents. Arson attacks against military enlistment offices and other administrative buildings during the first year of the war, according to Mediazona. Blue signifies before the August mobilization, orange signifies after. Currently, the most significant case against anarchists is the Tyumen case, which is still in court. Six anarchists from Yekaterinburg in the Ural region and Tyumen and Surgut of Siberia are accused of establishing a clandestine anarchist organization. In August 2022, Kirill Brik and Deniz Aydin were arrested in a forest in Tyumen, allegedly while attempting to test explosives. Arrests followed in Yekaterinburg and Surgut. All of the arrestees were brutally tortured; they confessed, but eventually all of them except Kirill Brik recanted their testimony. Still, with a cooperating witness, the situation of the others accused is dire. Nikita Oleynik, the founder of the anarchist library Burevestnik (“Storm Petrel”) in Surgut, is accused of being “a leader of a terrorist group” and is in a danger of receiving a life sentence. The life sentence was introduced in Russia in 1992 as a replacement for the death penalty. For 34 years, no one with a life sentence has ever been released in Russia. The other defendants in the Tyumen case face up to 25 years in prison each. Deniz Aidyn. Yuri Neznamov. Danil Chertykov. Nikita Oleynik. Roman Paklin. Aleksandr Snezhkov and Lyubov Lizunova were arrested in Chita in the far east of Russia in October 2022, while only 19 and 16 years old. Allegedly, they painted graffiti reading ”Death to the regime.” They were also suspected of administering a Telegram channel with anarchist and anti-war messages. Snezhkov was sentenced to six years in prison and Lizunova to three and a half years in April 2024. This year, Aleksandr received an additional sentence for “incitement” because he allegedly read his legal papers to other prisoners; he has been sent to a stricter prison for the remaining two years of his sentence. Lyubov Lizunova and Aleksandr Snezhkov. Solidarity Zone tracked down the anarchist Roman Shvedov in the court system in autumn 2024. He was accused of anti-war arson. However, he refused the support that Solidarity Zone offered, insisting that there was nothing that could be done for him and emphasizing that he would prefer for the resources to be directed to other victims of repression. After being sentenced to 16 years in prison, he committed suicide in a Rostov jail in December 2024. The face of this fallen anarchist comrade remains unknown to us. Solidarity groups do not even have a proper photograph of him, only a pixelated face from Russian mainstream media. Roman Shvedov. What Can Those Abroad Do for Russian Anarchist Prisoners? The most straightforward way to act in solidarity with Russian prisoners is by spreading information—for example, translating news and carrying out banner drops, graffiti, and other forms of direct actions. A great deal of news about Russian anarchist prisoners is available on the English section of the website of Autonomous Action, the former Russian Libertarian Communist federation, which is now working as a media project. The logo of Autonomous Action. With automatic translation tools available for free online, it is easy to write letters even when the prison censors only allow prisoners to receive letters in Russian. It is possible to write to a number of anarchist prisoners via the prisonmail.online service at a small cost; the service also provides the opportunity to receive replies. It is possible to write other prisoners via snail mail. A full list of addresses is available via the ABC Moscow website. Prisoner solidarity groups are in constant need of funds to pay for lawyers and other costs of imprisonment. You can donate to fundraising campaigns and projects that support prisoners—Anarchist Black Cross of Moscow, Fires of Freedom, and Solidarity Zone. It is also possible to donate to direct action initiatives such as BOAK using cryptocurrency. Last but not least, you cansupport the anarchists of Belarus (such as the Anarchist Black Cross of Belarus and Pramen) and Ukraine (such as Solidarity Collectives). All three countries are now locked in a common struggle against war and Russian authoritarian imperialism.
