Wolf Down Pooped Their Pants This Time

Germany’s vegan straight edge band Wolf Down’s desire to always be radical in their political messages has this time proven their extensive lack of education. The band’s newly released merch features a hammer and sickle next to the circled A—anarchist symbol, probably in a poor attempt to express anarcho-communism. Too bad the band didn’t go to school or read enough books to know that the hammer and sickle certainly have nothing to do with it, but were invented by people whose regime led to the deaths of millions upon millions of people, a regime that actually murdered thousands of anarchists worldwide.

The suppression of the Makhnovists, the Kronstadt uprising, etc., are just a few historical examples of how the Bolshevik regime has always been opposed to any attempts at social revolution in a truly libertarian sense. Here in Bulgaria, thousands of anarchists and (non-communist) anti-fascists were murdered, imprisoned, sent to labor camps, disappeared, and their families repressed by the Bolshevik regime after 1945. The same fate befell countless anti-authoritarian anarchists, writers, teachers, fighters, etc. in the Soviet Union itself and in all the other countries of the Eastern Bloc.

Shortly after the Bolshevik coup in 1945, the Federation of Anarchist Communists of Bulgaria (FAKB) held a congress in the capital, Sofia, but communist militia arrested all 90 delegates and sent them to forced labor camps. The next annual congress of the FAKB in 1946 had to be held in secret. In 1948, the last mass roundup of anarchists netted 600 militants, who were sent to concentration camps such as Cuciyan (near Pernik, called “Caresses of Death” by its inmates), Bogdanovol (called “Camp of Shadows”), Nojarevo, Tadorovo and Bosna. By this time, hundreds had been executed and about 1,000 FAKB members had been sent to concentration camps, where torture, maltreatment and starvation of veteran (but non-communist) anti-fascists—some of whom had been fighting fascism for almost three decades—was almost routine.

Anarchist prisoners were singled out and worked to death, forced to work 36-hour shifts compared to the 12-16-hour shifts of other inmates. A partial list of 33 imprisoned anarchists, published that year by those working underground in Bulgaria, is revealing in its class composition: eleven school and university students; four urban anarcho-syndicalist workers, including one technician; four teachers, including one school inspector; four rural workers (remnants of the Vlassovden syndicalist movement); three printing workers; two journalists, including Georgi Kurtov, the oft-imprisoned editor of the anarchist newspaper Rabotnicheska Misal; one librarian; and several others whose occupations are not given. The youngest whose age was given was 21, presumably politicized under fascism, and the oldest was 49, tobacco worker Manol Nicolov, who had initiated the 1930 Vlassovden syndicalist uprising. Most had been imprisoned or even sentenced to death by the fascists, three were former guerrilla fighters, and one had been involved in a military conspiracy against the fascists.

The Bolshevik regime has nothing to do with Kropotkin’s anarchist communism. The Soviet Union and its symbols are as totalitarian as Nazi Germany. As the famous Bulgarian anarchist Jacque Grancharoff put it:

The dark veil of communism used to entomb anarchism was also the same that buried … genuine communism and all revolutionary hopes for the emancipation and liberation of the downtrodden.

Dear Wolf Down, please go and hide somewhere and tell your fanbase this was a huge mistake and you’re canceling your future tours so you can go back to school. Otherwise we’ll be eagerly looking forward to you putting out a USSR (CCCP) t-shirt, or maybe a one with swastika? It’ll suit your radical politics, yes.