After Stalin Box

first published in Red & Black Revolution No 2 1996

A group of people from the History Department of Moscow State University began to gather in 1957 and discuss different ideas, among them the ideas of workers' councils and of Bakunin. They formed a clandestine group in Oct. '58 and wrote a program. The group's activities ended in Jan. 1959 when one of its founders, Anatoly Mikhailovich Ivanov, was arrested in the History Library for writing anti-Soviet literature and sent to a psychiatric hospital. He was released in 1960 and people began to gather again. (Some people were poets and some political people so there were two tendencies in their loose group.) Then in 1961, before the Party Congress, three of them, Osipov, Ivanov and Kuznetsov, were arrested for plotting to kill Kruschev. Apparently they had seriously entertained this idea as they believed he would start a large-scale war. None of the three resumed anarchist activities afterwards.

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