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During the Russian Civil War, the ARC’s name changed to the Anarchist Black Cross to avoid confusion with the International Red Cross, also organizing relief in the country. It was also during this period that the organization organized self-defense units against political raids by the Cossack and Red armies.
During the next 7 decades, the group would continue under various different names but has always considered itself part of the Anarchist Red Cross/Anarchist Black Cross formation. ABC’s support for Political Prisoners spread to the four corners of the globe. What was once a typically Russian-Jewish organization, now had many faces and ethnicities.
In the ’80s, the ABC began to grow and new ABC groups began to emerge in North America. In the United States, the ABC name had been kept alive by a number of completely autonomous groups scattered throughout the country and had grown to support a wide variety of prison issues.
The 1990s and 2000s brought several ABC formations in North America (ABCC*, ABCN, ABCF). The relationship between these formations has always been considered strenuous. The Break the Chains conference in August 2003, along with sidebar discussions between collectives, brought about a better working relationship between the ABCF and ABCN formations.
*The ABCC was a short-lived formation, dying off in the early 1990s.
What is the ABCF?
In May of 1995, a small group of ABC collectives merged into a Federation whose aim was to focus on the overall support and defense of PP/POWs.
Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War are not in prison for committing social “crimes,” nor are they criminals. Different PP/POWs participated in progressive and revolutionary movements at varying levels. Some in educational and community organizing, others in clandestine armed and offensive people’s armies. All are in prison as a result of conscious political action, for building resistance, building, and leading movements and revolution… for making change.
Many of us in some way or another are part of these very movements, part of that resistance that PP/POWs helped to build. As people continuing to struggle for change, we are obligated and it is our duty to support those people who are in prison as a result of struggling to make change.
Though some have a wider definition of Political Prisoners, we maintain that even if the definition of a Political Prisoner was expanded and widely accepted to include social prisoners of conscience, it needs to be clear that those who went to prison as a result of political action taken on the street would still demand our priority support. For movements to support other prisoners before we support the people who have gone to prison for building the very movements we now participate in is backward.