My Captivity 2015

My Captivity
What is the difference between captivity and arrest? Now I know it. That is, when you are arrested, you have the right for a lawyer, for a call to your family, for law observance. But when you are captured – you disappear for everybody. You are nowhere. You have the right only for cold, torture and disappearance to nowhere if you refuse to testify to military men. There is complete anonymousness and impunity. And that is done by the state of Ukraine, not a criminal gang.
I was captured on December, 26, 2014 when I drove my car to an Ukrainian checkpoint near Gorlovka by mistake. I was driving from Donetsk to Gorlovka to my friend, an anarcho-communist Egor. On December, 4 I had arrived to the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) for assistance to our comrades – communists and socialists – and for work at Donetsk plants. I am a worker, a gunmaker by profession. My experience was necessary for arming our comrades and helping the Republic in its struggle for independence. I am a Russian revolutionary, a communist. I have been taking part in political struggle since 1996. I was four times sentenced to imprisonment for radical politics and for weapons manufacturing. I am 36 years old and I have spent 9 of them in prisons. I could not ignore the DPR comrades' request and refuse to come to them.
Here, in the DPR, the political situation is complicated: there are both conservators and social state supporters. I want to help Ukrainian left forces. Our aim is to turn the war between peoples into the war between rich and poor. Both in the DPR and here, under captivity, I see only soldiers from poor – they are workers, peasants, unemployed youth. There are no rich at the front line. The rich have money and business, they buy off military draft.
But I have also seen nationalists, the "Right Sector" who had acquired weapons from the state and now they are at war. When the war is over, they will not choose to disarm, even now they begin to come into power, into law-enforcement agencies. Even common police or the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) officers are dissatisfied with it. When nationalists come to power in a multinational country like Ukraine, it results to its dismemberment and bloodshed. "European integration" was only a cover for it.
Only on December, 29 I was officially arrested and driven to the SSU of the Mariupol city. Before I had been hidden in "basements" – those are secret military prisons in the anti-terrorist operation zone. Any room may become such a prison: a metal container inside which it is dark even under daylight and cold like outside; a deserted caf; basement with self-made cages for persons; an anonymous single cell in a police department. There is only one thing in common among all those places – you are alone, you know neither where you are nor what would happen to you; any movement is made with tied hands and in a mask with holes on its back side – you cannot see anything. I have seen something like this only in films about kidnapping. All military men wear masks, too. A ski mask became the symbol of anonymousness and war.
I had passed through a lot in my life. I had also been tortured in police. But in "basements" torture is systemic, everybody is forced to speak there. Because those who refuse to speak – they never come back. They disappear. When I was detained at the checkpoint, I had pieces of evidence with me – my passport of a Russian citizen, a St. George Ribbon at my car antenna, my work papers. So I didn't keep silence, I confirmed what was apparent – I had helped the DPR. Just in the beginning they demonstrated me what would lie ahead if I keep silence – tying up, rack, electric shock device, gas mask, etc. Now I am being accused of terrorism – on the Article 258 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, as long as the authorities consider Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics as "terrorist organizations". Thousands of doctors, teachers, state employees work in the DPR, they are also consider "terrorists". What a nonsense!
I am waiting for exchange. My comrades have included me into the list of prisoners exchange between Ukraine and the DPR. Now I am a political prisoner. There are more than a hundred of us here in the prison: militia men, opposition activists, "accomplices". All are charged on the Article 258. I can hear artillery sounds from my cell window, the prison is near the front line. I don't know what may lie ahead us: a prison term, or exchange, or a stray shell, or shooting like hostages.
I enclose my great gratitude to all who have expressed solidarity with my destiny.
Long live socialist Novorossia!
Freedom to all prisoners!
Andrey =Che=, January, 30, 2015
Mariupol city prison, DPR