Categories
All posts

Corbyn in Budapest: “We Have to Be Organized on an International Basis”

Note from LeftEast editors: The following interview with Jeremy Corbyn was conducted by Levente Szadai and Csaba Tóth for Mérce on May 7, 2023, in Budapest, and published in Hungarian translation on May 9. We republish the lightly edited transcript as part of a collaboration within ELMO – The Eastern European Left Media Outlet. When […]

Categories
All posts

The class conflict behind Russia’s war

Note from LeftEast editors: In this mini-series we reprint two essays first published in Alameda Institute’s Dossier, The War in Ukraine and the Question of Internationalism. We provide the table of contents for reference and further reading. Since Russian forces invaded Ukraine earlier this year, analysts across the political spectrum have struggled to identify exactly […]

Categories
All posts

Russian capitalism is both political and normal: On expropriation and social reproduction

Note from LeftEast editors: In this mini-series we reprint two essays first published in Alameda Institute’s Dossier, The War in Ukraine and the Question of Internationalism. We provide the table of contents for reference and further reading. In 2006, in his book The Development of Capitalism in Russia, the late sociologist Simon Clarke wrote that, “a […]

Categories
Interviews

‘This regime is not subject to evolution’ an interview with Ilya Budraitskis

Note from LeftEast editors: This interview was initially published by Meduza and translated by Anna Razumnaya. Political writer Ilya Budraitskis explains the left’s vision of decentralized governance and why Russia’s Communist Party must exit together with Putin. The invasion of Ukraine confronted Russian society with the consequences of a decades-long transformation that began, among other […]

Categories
All posts

Russian colonialism, Eastern Europe and global anti-colonial struggles

In recent years, there has been a growing tendency among scholars and activists in Eastern Europe to draw parallels and links between the “postcolonial” and the “postsocialist”. In its extreme, as Adem Ferizaj argues in his recent review, the use of postcolonial approaches in the context of postsocialism “leads to the false analogy that postsocialism […]

Categories
All posts

Sovereignty, foreign influence, and the search for the Georgian dream

In an effort to regulate foreign influence in Georgia, the Georgian parliament, People’s Power, as it is called, introduced two bills in late February, “On the registration of foreign agents” and “On the transparency of foreign influence.” People’s Power broke away from the ruling party, Georgian Dream (GD) so it could be more open about […]

Categories
All posts

The US military has used illegal spy balloons for decades

On Feb. 4th the United States shot down a Chinese high-altitude balloon after it sailed over the United States over the course of several days. The Biden administration claimed it was a surveillance balloon, while the Chinese government called it an “unmanned civilian airship used mainly for meteorological research purposes” that had strayed off course […]

Categories
FeminEasts

The Eighth of March in Russia: USSR, war and women’s rights

Translation of a column published in DOXA in Russian. «The woman behind the wheel is the driver,» says the propaganda of the Moscow region transport. From the poster, a stern, old-fashioned cold wave-laden woman behind the wheel looks into the distance. The nostalgic font, heavily associated with the USSR, Rodchenko’s iconography, the tone of voice […]

Categories
All posts

It is always darkest before the dawn: how Russian anarchists today struggle for revolution 

While it might seem that the neoliberal consensus has broken in some Western countries, in the post-socialist space discourses of privatization and individualization are so strong that we can hardly speak about a crisis of the neoliberal order. It is even harder to imagine some radical change in the West and almost impossible to speak […]

Categories
Solidarity Call

Call for Solidarity Actions with Anti-War Activists in Russia

Photo of January 19th demonstration. By Maria Rakhmaninova. For over a decade, Russian antifascists have commemorated January 19 as their day of solidarity. This is the date when in 2009, in the center of Moscow, the human rights and leftist activist Stanislav Markelov and the journalist and anarchist Anastasia Baburova were gunned down by neo-Nazis. […]