Imprisoned Antifascist's Appeal Rejected by Court
By Sergey Chernov
Staff Writer
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Sergey Chernov / The St. Petersburg Times
A banner and hanged dummy policeman are shown in the city center on Monday.
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The St. Petersburg City Court’s judicial division for criminal cases ruled to uphold the conviction of Alexei Bychin on Tuesday, in an appeal hearing that only lasted ten minutes, according to the imprisoned antifascist’s lawyer. “They didn’t listen to any of our arguments,” lawyer Olga Tseitlina said by phone after the hearing. She said they would perhaps appeal to the Supreme Court, the highest legal body in Russia. Bychin was sentenced to five years in a maximum-security penal colony by a local court on May 8 for stabbing two men in the city center last year, while he insisted that he acted in self-defense as they attacked him. One of the men, who had allegedly been marching down Nevsky Prospekt shouting “Sieg Heil” and making Nazi salutes, turned out to be an OMON special-task police trainee. The defense had asked for the conviction to be changed from “conscious bodily injury, dangerous to a person’s life” (Article 111 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) to “excess of self-defense” (Article 114). The latter is punishable by “restraint of liberty” for a term of up to two years or one year in custody, which means that if the conviction had been altered, Bychin, who was arrested on July 16, 2008, could have been released immediately, as he has already spent more than 12 months in prison. At the time of his arrest Bychin was 22. One of the defense’s arguments was that an expert analysis showed that Bychin had a cut on his arm from a broken bottle that one of the plaintiffs — the alleged attackers — had been holding, according to Tseitlina. “After they pushed Bychin against the wall, one of them hit him on the head with a broken bottle and Bychin covered his head with his arms, hence the scar,” she said. “It was disregarded by the court as irrelevant.” The defense also presented a witness who said he saw Bychin being assaulted by two men, but the appeal court dismissed his testimony, because he saw the fight from a distance and could not clearly see the faces of the people involved. “It could have been another fight, one of the judges said,” Tseitlina said. A testimony that the alleged attackers made Nazi salutes and shouted German Nazi slogans was also ignored by the court, according to Tseitlina. She said that she did not expect anything from the appeal court and had warned her defendant of her expectations. Bychin’s supporters claim the whole trial is biased and aimed at giving the harshest sentence to the activist. Over the past three years, numerous incidents of the police arresting and beating antifascists and anarchists during rallies have been reported. Bychin carried a knife for self-defense, as many antifascists have done since 20-year-old anti-fascist punk musician Timur Kacharava was stabbed to death by a dozen Nazi skinheads in the city center on Nov. 13, 2005. His fellow activist Maxim Zgibai, who sustained multiple knife wounds and severe brain damage, survived the attack. Since Bychin’s arrest last year, anti-Nazi activists have held protests in several Russian cities. Activists claim that the police are saturated with nationalist ideas, with a number of policemen being former Nazi skinheads or sympathetic to them. In the latest event in support of Bychin on Monday, a group of anarchists and antifascists displayed a banner saying “Freedom for Bychin” and a human-sized doll representing a Russian policeman hanged by a rope around his neck on the embankment of the Griboyedova Canal in the city center. “In this figurative way, the anarchists showed what kind of police reform they want,” the activists said on Indymedia.org, a web site on which anarchists, left-wing activists and antifascists exchange information.
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