Month: August 2015

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The Russian Revolution in Dreams and Reality

source: catsmob.com

(source: WdW Review)

In January 2014 the world held its breath and observed the opening of the Winter Olympics in Sochi. The spectacular opening ceremony, “Dreams of Russia,” was not simply a technical triumph but also a marvel of national history building. The depicted historical events acquired connections and a certain mutual continuity, building a chain of bright and majestic images told through a vision dreamed by a young girl.

It must have been difficult for the modern Russian state to find a better form to invent its own place in history, one cleansed of any contradictions and conflicts, than the reconstruction of a dream.

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All posts Interviews

The escalation of the refugee crisis and European imperialism. An interview with Vijay Prashad.

Note from the LeftEast editors: This is a publication of two related materials. Below we repost the transcript of an interview of Vijay Prashad with Sharmini Peries from The Real News Network on the current escalation of the migrant crisis. As some of the ideas have been developed in Vijay’s recent work, among which this talk in Dublin kindly hosted by Irish development NGO Comhlamh, we also post the link to the audio recording of the talk. 

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By the side of the road. A Central European elegy

Into the Fortress

Nearly six years ago, at Keleti pu, Budapest’s largest train station, a group of people got on an early morning train headed for Vienna so that my South Korean partner and I could get married in a small town in Burgenland. We had more or less randomly chosen the location because the wedding halls in Vienna had been all booked up. And as I was still living and studying in Budapest during those times, the venue to choose had to be close enough for us to take the train back and forth across the Hungarian border in one day.

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Jobbik agrees with the Migrant Solidarity network? (No, not really.)

source: MigSzol.Com

UPDATE: Since the writing of this article it has been reported that the German state has suspended Dublin deportations of Syrian refugees, even if they have their fingerprints and asylum claims in countries like Hungary. This is a great victory for the rights of refugees in Europe.  This also begs the question of why Syrians are now ‘privileged’ in this absurd system but not Afghans, Iraqis, Somalis and others fleeing brutal wars? Right extreme party Jobbik recently called on the Fidesz Party-led Hungarian govt to suspend the EU’s Dublin III Regulation.
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Against systemic violations of citizens’ rights and assault on political freedom in Ukraine

A statement of the emerging left-wing Social Movement party in Ukraine. (source: Social Movement Party website)

Throughout 2014-5 the conduct and decisions of various bodies of Ukraine’s executive and legislative branches of power have grossly violated Ukrainians’ citizens’ rights guaranteed by the Constitution, the ECHR, and fundamental rights

1. Free speech and freedom of expression are guaranteed by Article 34 of the Constitution of Ukraine (CoU) and Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR); censorship is prohibited under Article 15 of the CoU.

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“Cut up Khrushchev for sausages!” A history lesson for The New York Times

By Simon Pirani

Novocherkassk, June 1962. The workers’ revolt against the Soviet “workers’ state”, put down by the army and the KGB. The revolt for “meat, butter and a pay rise” that ended with tanks shooting into a crowd of unarmed demonstrators (killing at least 26 and wounding many dozens). The revolt against Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet reformer, by workers who wanted real socialism, who questioned the limits of Khrushchev’s “de-Stalinisation” and hoisted placards of Lenin.
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The Refugee Crisis: Hungary, Australia, and Worldwide

Note from the LeftEast editors: this article was originally commissioned by and published in WarScapes. It was reprinted on LeftEast with the permission of the authors. 1. A Train Stopped at Subotica

On June 26, Lisa Rose Steele and Andrew Ryder took a train from Belgrade, Serbia, to Budapest, Hungary. The following is a personal reflection on this experience by Steele.

Running late, we hurried through the streets of Belgrade to the train station and boarded a train headed for Budapest.

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Longing for lost agency – Tanja Petrović

This article is part of the regular assembly “New authoritarian tendencies – a legacy of the past?“ of the Cross-border Committee. It brings four perspectives that zero in on the post-Yugoslav space.

Croatian philosopher Boris Buden speaks about post-socialist subjects as children of communism, warning that it is not a metaphor, but a symptom of an imagination in which transition to democracy as a radical reconstruction starts from scratch: ‘Eastern Europe after 1989 resembles a landscape of historical ruins that is inhabited only by children, immature people unable to organise their lives democratically without guidance from another.’

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Authoritarian tendencies in the region between “then” and “now”: the lacking visibility of materiality of regional authoritarianism- Danijela Majstorović

This article is part of the regular assembly “New authoritarian tendencies – a legacy of the past?“ of the Cross-border Committee. It brings four perspectives that zero in on the post-Yugoslav space.

When thinking about authoritarian tendencies in the Balkans, one inevitably envisages the regional ‘strongmen’, who, despite their intrinsic differences, will here for a moment be thought of as amalgamated. One thinks of them as pandering to the populist temptation, living luxurious lives and doing shady business without being accountable to the public, and some liberal democratic telos, which, if reached, will be a cure for it.

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Forwards to the legacies of ‘post-communism’ in the Balkans – Vladimir Unkovski-Korica

This article is part of the regular assembly “New authoritarian tendencies – a legacy of the past?“ of the Cross-border Committee. It brings four perspectives that zero in on the post-Yugoslav space.

In the years following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the countries of the former Soviet Union, the Soviet bloc and Yugoslavia were subjected to a major experiment. Treated as a tabula rasa, these societies became a laboratory for neoliberalism. The recipe is now familiar to most of us: privatisation, liberal democracy, debt-driven export orientation, European integration… The question was not whether to apply these measures, but how much, at what pace, by which interest groups, using what kind of institutions.