Intervention at Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery

The dead ask the dead:

Do you support the war? Will you support it, or do you already support it? Speak plainly: yes or no. Is the world of the dead a colony of the world of the living? Do you acknowledge this?

And the dead reply: we do not acknowledge it, because everything is exactly the opposite. The dead are against the war, against the aggression of the living disguised as the defence of peace. As the saying goes, the dead do not need this; the living need it: Putin and his friends, the FSB officers, members of United Russia and others who want to rattle their weapons around the gas pipeline.

The living populations of Ukraine and Russia have in fact become hostages to a small group of vampires who believe they will never die. These deranged old bloodsuckers must be stopped: these seventy-year-old hooligans who have sat in power and stolen so much that they seem to have lost all connection with reality.

This lying monster-state must be stopped.

St Petersburg, 22.02.2022

About the Party of the Dead

The Party of the Dead was founded in 2017 in St Petersburg as an art-political project reacting to the cultural necrophilia and necropolitics of the Russian state. The party’s response to state necropolitics is necroactivism: emphasising the political agency of the dead and the political character of death and loss. The party protests various kinds of abuse of the dead by the living and defines its goal as a “necrorevolution”. It acts as an affinity group mimicking a political party, but has never actually been a party and never had any party-like organisation.

Since February 2022, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Party of the Dead has become one of the most visible anti-war art initiatives from Russia, but now exists mostly in exile. A criminal case was opened against the party’s founder, Maxim Evstropov, who was accused of “insulting the feelings of believers” and arrested in absentia by a Russian court. The most active “branches” of the party are now in Georgia and Germany.