Russia Country Report - 2000

by Sergei Nikitin 9/2000

After I participated in the 6th CPTI conference I felt it was important to let people in Russia know about the idea of Peace Tax legislation and refusal to pay war taxes.

I translated some basic materials from that conference into Russian and passed them to Friends House Moscow so they would have that information. Later, when I started to work at FHM, I discussed it with my American friend who has been living in Moscow and who refuses to pay any taxes in the USA. We thought it would be a good idea to write and publish an article about peace tax to invite people to discuss the problem.

We wrote an article and tried to make a contact with any central newspaper in Moscow, to persuade them to publish it. However, the newspapers were not excited about the article and answered something like, We are a daily newspaper. We need news, but this is not news.

Eventually the article, “Thou Shall Not Kill. Do We Want To Pay For Murder and Violence?” was published by an NGO in the Saint Petersburg region in a small newspaper, with 10,000 copies. The newspaper is distributed by volunteers in a small area. We did not receive any response so far.

Last weekend there was an Annual Gathering of Moscow Monthly Meeting. I gave a talk on the subject of peace tax. I talked about the 8th conference on war tax resistance and peace tax campaigns and Raffi helped me by sharing his experience as a war tax resister.

It is still in my plans to do some translations from the materials I got at the conference and to spread information to people about this concern.