Dmitry Petrov

On April 19, 2023, three anarchists were killed in battle near Bakhmut: an American named Cooper Andrews, an Irishman named Finbar Cafferkey, and a Russian named Dmitry Petrov, known to us until then as Ilya Leshy. People in our networks have shared undertakings with all three of these comrades over the years.

A few weeks before the war began, Dmitry participated in an interview that we included in our coverage of the unfolding situation. On the first day of the Russian invasion, under what must have been challenging conditions, Dmitry took time to speak with us about how anarchists were responding. Throughout our exchanges over the following year, we were impressed by his humility, the earnestness with which he approached his efforts, and his sincere desire for critique.¹

When Dmitry was killed, his comrades revealed that he had been involved in some of the most significant anarchist initiatives in 21st-century Russia, including co-founding the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization. Here, we will provide an overview of his efforts as a snapshot of the past two decades of struggle in the post-Soviet world, concluding with translations of two of his texts, “To Be a Revolutionary” and “The Mission of Anarchism in the Modern World,” and another text about him from the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization.

One of our contacts in the Russian anarchist movement recalls that Dmitry was an active participant in anarchist activities in Moscow starting when he was a teenager, as early as 2004. According to a eulogy in Novaya Gazeta, Dmitry

became interested in anarchism at school. Together with comrades, they published the anarchist newspaper “Heretic.”

As a child, he was strongly influenced by his father’s stories about the Makhnovist movement during the civil war in Russia. For the first time, his father brought him to the Falanster store (the oldest independent bookstore in Moscow), where Dmitry discovered the [Russian anarchist] magazine Avtonom. “My first acquaintance with the movement was participation in the Bespartshkol, a rather interesting circle of lectures and discussions that took place many years ago in the Moscow Jerry Rubin Club. From the age of fifteen, he began to actively interact with the organization of “revolutionary anarcho-syndicalists” and to “write articles for their samizdat.”

Dmitry became known to other comrades as Ekolog (“ecologist”) on account of his environmentalism, organizing against the construction of incinerators and for the defense of Bitsevski Park in Moscow. He also participated in Food Not Bombs, the anarchist MPST union (“Interprofessional Workers’ Union”), and a variety of other initiatives.

Like many Russian anarchists, he participated in the anti-fascist movement, fighting Nazis on the streets of Moscow and defending concerts and lectures against Nazi attacks. According to the Novaya Gazeta eulogy, Dmitry was a member of the affinity group of Ivan “Kostolom” Khutorsky, a well-known anti-fascist who was later murdered in his stairwell by a member of a neo-Nazi gang.

Indeed, while Dmitri was becoming more active in the anarchist movement, fascists and police were escalating their violence against it. They had begun maiming and killing activists and journalists and even their lawyers; Fedor Filatov, Ilya Borodayenko, Timur Kacharava, and Anna Politkovskaya were only a few of the many casualties. In January 2009, the lawyer Stanislav Markelov and the journalist and anarchist eco-activist Anastasia Baburova were murdered in downtown Moscow. The previous summer, Dmitry had fought alongside Anastasia Baburova to defend Georgian refugees from Abkhazia who were staying in Yasnyi proezd in Moscow.

The following month, Dmitry took part in a clandestine action claimed under the name People’s Retribution. According to one account, this was a landmark event in Russia:

The first anti-cop arson of a new generation of anarchist rebels took place on the night of February 19-20, 2009. The next day, a video was published on the internet on behalf of the group People’s Retribution, showing anonymous people throwing Molotov cocktails at police cars. “People’s Retribution” announced the destruction of two cars and called on “every self-respecting person… to stand up against the arbitrariness and despotism of the police, secret services, and bureaucracy.”

Afterwards, Dmitry participated in establishing an anonymous platform for reporting such clandestine actions, the Black Blog, which began publishing in May 2010. When the anonymous editors announced the end of the Black Blog in March 2019, they alluded to the burning of the police cars on February 19, 2009: “More than ten years have passed since we threw our first Molotov cocktail at the police.”

One of the flashpoints of conflict around Moscow at that time was the Khimki forest, which anarchists and ecological activists were defending against corrupt officials and loggers and the fascists in their employ. On July 28, 2010, the fight over Khimki came to a head when hundreds of anarchists and anti-fascists marched on the local municipal offices in response to a fascist attack. We don’t know what Dmitry’s precise involvement in these events was. The anonymous report we received from Russian anarchists seems to bear the work of a familiar hand; but in an interview, an anonymous representative of Black Blog denied that they had participated in the demonstration at the municipal offices.

According to the Novaya Gazeta eulogy, Dmitry distinguished himself as a particularly considerate comrade in the course of his participation in ecological sabotage around this time.

“Once, we wandered through the autumn forest at night, disabling construction equipment,” recalled Svyatoslav Rechkalov, a political refugee in the case of the anarchist organization Narodnaya Self-Defense. “And one girl lost her sneaker. She just stepped on the ground and it swallowed her leg. She pulled her leg out, but the shoe remained somewhere underground. Well, Dima took off his shoes, gave her his sneakers, put bags on his feet, and went on like that.

“People asked him, are you not cold? Do you want to change eventually? He said: if it becomes unbearable, then we will change. But he ended up walking around in the bags all night. That’s who he was.”

Over the months following the march on the municipal offices of Khimki, the authorities detained and tortured over 500 anarchists and anti-fascists. Several were forced to flee the country. Nonetheless, this was not enough to suppress what was at that time a powerful movement. According to the aforementioned account of the movement of that time,

“2009-2012 was the peak of anarchist resistance in the history of the post-Soviet region of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. Something happened almost every day, especially in the Moscow region, day and night.”

By summer 2012, over a hundred arson attacks had taken place targeting police stations and vehicles, military enlistment offices, cars belonging to state officials, and construction equipment intended to destroy forests. The Black Blog reported many of these actions, including some claimed by additional groups that Dmitry reportedly participated in, such as Anti-Nashist Action (countering the pro-Putin youth group, Nashi) and ZaNurgaliyeva (likely an ironic reference to then-Minister of Interior Rashid Nurgaliyev, a former KGB functionary).

On June 7, 2011, for example, an improvised device exploded beside a traffic police post at kilometer 22 of the Moscow Ring Road. The Anarchist Guerilla group claimed responsibility with a video of the explosion on the Black Blog. According to the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization, Dmitry participated in this action.

In a subsequent interview, pseudonymous participants in the burning of the police post described the action in detail.

According to a post by the Anarcho-Communist Combat Organization, the one who returned to try again with one more match—the one called Denis in the above account, if it is to be credited—was Dmitry.

From CrimethInc.