Month: November 2013

by Petro Pustota

The recent massive social unrests in Ukrainian cities and among the Ukrainian diaspora are structurally comparable to the 2004 “Orange Revolution”. The protests at the dawn of the millennium were due to political elites’ rotation. At that time both presidential candidates clearly adhered to certain foreign-policy orientations in their pre-election statements. Due to lasting geopolitical factors there existed a window of opportunity for an external shift, as opposed to old nomenclatura principles. The former bureaucracy was quite moderate in terms of pursuing the vector of Western liberal reforms.

Our colleagues Jana Tsoneva and Georgi Medarov with a piece in The Guardian about the Bulgarian protests.

Bulgaria is undergoing a deep political crisis. A mass social mobilisation against austerity, poverty and electricity price rises took place in February, toppling the centre-right government. After elections in May, the independent Plamen Oresharski became prime minister, backed by a broad coalition of social democrats (BSP) liberals (DPS) and the far right (ATAKA). Oresharski, a technocrat, was best known as one of the architects of the currency board imposed on Bulgaria in 1997 as part of an IMF programme to save the country from currency collapse and hyperinflation.

Young people with posters declaring, ‘I want to stay in Bulgaria’. Young people who complain that state policies force them to leave the county and threaten to emigrate as part of their protest tactics. This is one of the persistent tropes that Bulgarian civil society has been producing over the last two decades: that the flight of young, educated people from Bulgaria serves as an indicator for the failure of state policies. Brain-drain, a common theme for states outside the list of the ‘developed Western countries’, is omnipresent in public space, reappearing in the statements of politicians, statisticians, and analysts.

I accepted an invitation to write an introduction to a small collection of Trotsky’s articles and speeches translated from the Russian original into Ukrainian (see details of the publication below). These articles and speeches are related to Trotsky’s engagement with Ukraine from the time of the 1917 revolution, through the civil war when he commanded the Red Army, into the 1920s when he fought a losing battle with Stalin and up to the outbreak of the Second World War.

A discussion with Don Kalb moderated by Stefan Guga and Florin Poenaru.