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Putin’s plebiscite, Russia’s “Left” & Russia’s Left

In the run-up to the upcoming presidential election in Russia, the Western media have focused on the capitalist contenders such as Vladimir Putin and the more West-friendly Boris Nadezhdin and Yekaterina Duntsova while unsurprisingly failing to acknowledge the absence of a genuine left candidate from the picture. After touching briefly upon the thwarted liberal contenders, […]

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How the Post-Soviet ‘Crisis of Hegemony’ Explains Class and War in Ukraine: A Review of Volodymyr Ishchenko’s Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War

Published this month by Verso, Towards the Abyss  offers a Gramscian account of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, alongside a personal perspective from its author, Volodymyr Ishchenko. Verso’s and LeftEast’s readership, likely familiar with Ishchenko’s polemical articles and his theoretical framework, is now offered an edited collection of texts composed and published across […]

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Post-Invasion Russia: A Stable New Order Or A Collapse Waiting To Happen?

LeftEast Editorial Note: On Nov. 1st, 2023, NYU’s Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia hosted a panel on post-invasion Russian political economy and popular opinion with LeftEast editors or frequent contributors Volodya Ishchenko, Ilya Matveev, Oleg Zhuravlev. Yekaterina Oziashvilli, a professor of Politics at Sarah Lawrence College, moderated the event. LeftEast is delighted to share […]

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“The Most Important Battlefield Is the Ideological Battlefield”: An Interview with the Workers’ Front of Ukraine

In the social tapestry of post-Soviet nations, an enigmatic phenomenon has quietly taken root that might be called the “neo-Soviet renaissance.” Western commentators typically represent this movement as a misguided and inaccurate “Soviet nostalgia,” one conveniently harnessed by savvy politicians like Vladimir Putin for their own agendas, but this phenomenon is both deeper and more […]

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A blow to self-organisation. What is the logic behind Boris Kagarlitsky’s persecution?

Note from LeftEast editors. Boris Yulyevich Kagarlitsky, a leftist dissident under Brezhnev and occasional political prisoner under Yeltsin and Putin, has been arrested on charges of “justifying terrorism”. Еven though the Putin regime had already declared him a “foreign agent” and otherwise pushed him to leave the country, Kagarlitsky had chosen to remain in Russia […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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Notes on a City in Darkness: Odesa After the Russian Infrastructure Attacks

As the one-year mark of the Russia-Ukraine War approaches, the Western political climate increasingly polarizes public attitudes towards Russian aggression and Ukrainian suffering. The rising politicization of the war for various ideological interests occupies more space in discourse than that of the Ukrainians who endure the brutality of Russia’s terrorism against civilians. Meanwhile, American media […]