Tag Archives: Russia

October 14, 2019

The road to the East. Ukrainian workers in Russia after 2014

by Aleksandra Renoire Alekseeva  

As a 45-year-old woman scoops up another spoonful of cereal for the three year old child she has professionally taken care of during the past couple of years, she tells me: ‘I’m not a migrant, I’m a gastarbaiter [a derogatory word for a guest worker]. And so I’m underground (podpolnij).’. Ljuba first came to Russia a long time ago – before her place of birth in the Donbass became a ‘non-controlled territory’. Her story, like many others, is fairly standard: she couldn’t sustain herself economically or help other relatives that she had to look after at home. And so, she packed her belongings and ..

August 15, 2019

Russian Socialists and the Struggle for Democracy

by Sean Guillory  

For the past few weeks, protests for fair elections in upcoming municipal polls have become weekly in Moscow and St. Petersburg as thousands have defied authorities to attend unsanctioned rallies. The police crackdown has been particularly harsh in Moscow. Protests on July 27 and August 3 resulted in over 2000 detentions. Images of police in riot gear wrestling citizens to the ground and beating peaceful protesters were reminiscent of the mass protests against election fraud in 2011-2012. LeftEast is happy to share this interview Sean Guillory (of Sean’s Russia Blog fame) conducted with members of the Russi ..

June 25, 2019

On the brink: why Russia’s healthcare workers are organising

by Andrey Konoval  

What would happen if Russia’s healthcare system went on strike? Read this OpenDemocracy-Russia interview with healthcare union leader Andrey Konoval to find out. Russia’s public healthcare system is facing significant problems, and staff are coming out as a result. Ambulance teams in Penza region, central Russia, recently called a work-to-rule action, bringing out more than 100 people in support of better wages and conditions, on the heels of asimilar action by Novgorod region ambulance teams. This wave of mobilisation is connected to serious overwork, staff cutbacks and shortages – which have arisen as ..

June 10, 2019

Austerity Economics Russian Style: “The state never asked you to be born”

by Ilya Budraitskis  

Translated by Joseph Livesey For two decades steadily rising living standards and high rates of economic growth have served as the standard explanations for Vladimir Putin’s overwhelming support among Russian voters while a key theme of Russian state propaganda has been the championing of Putin-style “stability” (as opposed to the chaos and poverty of the 1990s) and the unfettered consumption that has been made possible in Russia today. The effectiveness of such propaganda never really depended on the extent to which its depictions of reality were true, as much as it did on confidence in its promise for the ..

April 25, 2019

A Comedian in a Drama

by Volodymyr Ishchenko  

This article was first published in Jacobin. In Sunday’s election Ukrainian voters dealt a decisive rebuttal to the post-Maidan establishment. Yet well-organized nationalist forces represent a time bomb under the new president-elect. American readers won’t be too surprised by a tale of an inexperienced candidate winning against the establishment’s pick. But in the case of Ukraine’s new leader Volodymyr Zelenskiy, this widely made comparison is even something of an understatement. Imagine that Donald Trump was thirty years younger and had never written any books or participated in any (even allegedly) seri ..

April 19, 2019

Russia: The Protest Movement is Younger, Poorer, and More Left Wing

by Ivan Ovsyannikov  

Translated by Sean Guillory A version of this article was published in Russian at Eurasianet.org As conspiracy theories about Trump-Russian “collusion” and fatuous claims about Putin’s iron grip have dominated American headlines for the past two years, the politics of the Russian street have undergone a noticeable transformation. Despite the authorities’ best efforts, mass street protests have become a fact of Russian life. The mass protests for fair elections in December 2011 aroused intellectuals’ interest in opposition politics in the large cities. Seven years later, the aesthetics of protest have ch ..

January 24, 2019

The Protests against Russia’s Pension Reform and the Reasons for Their Defeat

by Ilya Budraitskis  

Note from LeftEast editors: The main political event of 2018 on Russia’s domestic scene was probably the pension reform and the unsuccessful resistance against it. In this piece published in Russian in Sotsiologia vlasti 30(4)2018 co-translated for LeftEast by Kate Seidel, Ana Gurau, and Dasha Vodchic, Ilya Budraitskis takes this episode as a lens on the government modus operandi and on the logic driving the different segments of the opposition. The Russian authorities’ actions in as they were preparing to raise the retirement age in summer 2018 involved both a thought-out strategy and a relatively weak propa ..

January 18, 2019

The Living Front of Stanislav Markelov

by Kirill Medvedev  

This article by Kirill Medvedev, a Moscow-based poet, translator, and activist of the Russian Socialist Movement, originally appeared in an English translation by Tom Rowley and Guiliano Vivaldi in Open Democracy–Russia and Beyond. Ten years ago, Stanislav Markelov was murdered in Moscow. He defended anti-fascists and ecologists, mothers trying to defend their sons serving in the army and citizens of Blagoveshchensk brutalised at the hands of the riot police, the relatives of Elza Kungayeva (murdered by a Russian soldier in Chechnya) and journalist Mikhail Beketov, who was brutally assaulted for coveri ..

October 12, 2018

Russia’s Electoral Circus

by Anna Nizhnik and Konstantin Kharitonov  

September 9, 2018 saw regional elections on a massive scale in Russia, with 4,000 representative seats, at various levels of government, at stake: special elections for 7 deputies in the lower house of Russia’s parliament, the State Duma; 26 of the 85 heads of regional governments across Russia; as well as elections to regional parliaments and representative organs of administrative centers. Elections in Russia long ago ceased to generate any hopes of real, practical potential for change. The results, as a rule, are known in advance – and in the unlikely chance of an authentic “struggle,” it’s i ..

July 28, 2018

Can Russia’s opposition come together to fight the Kremlin’s pension reform?

by Ilya Budraitskis  

The article originally appeared in OpenDemocracy-Russia & Beyond. While popular opinion is dead against the Russian government’s continued neoliberal line in social policy, opposition groups are competing for influence and electorate. Translated from the original Russian by Thomas Campbell. Now that the State Duma has passed the first reading of draft legislation reforming Russia’s pension system, we can speak confidently of a serious turn in state-society relations in Russia. For the first time in 15 years, the Russian government is risking a large-scale, unpopular reform. The government proposes radica ..