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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 […]

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Left perspectives on the protests in Russia and Navalny – Ilya Budraitskis

Ilya Budraitskis, Moscow-based historian, political writer, and co-author of the Political Diary podcast Alexei Navalny’s arrest at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport on January 17, minutes after his return to Russia, was not only the expected, but also the only possible reaction of the Russian authorities. At the beginning of this year, after the summer Constitutional amendments opened […]

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Interview with Ilya Budraitskis: Why doesn’t official Russian historical politics need the real Lenin and how is his method relevant at a time of crisis

“The (Russian) state needs a Lenin shorn of his political ideas and real biographies, a Lenin-monument. Whenever he becomes a true Lenin, a rebel and destroyer of the old order, the authorities automatically begin to regard him as a monster.”—says the historian and political theorist Ilya Budraitskis. In this comprehensive interview, conducted in Russian by […]

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Dissidents among Dissidents: Interview with Ilya Budraitskis about his recent book

Note from the LeftEast editors: Interview conducted by Vasile Ernu for Criticatac.ro, introduced by Giuliano Vivaldi and translated from the Russian by Joseph Livesey. One would have hoped that the occasion of the centenary of the Russian Revolution would have lead to a serious reimagination of both the event in itself as well as the […]

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“The Putinist Majority Could Fast Become Anti-Putinist”: an Interview with Ilya Budraitskis

This interview was originally published in Russian on www.yuga.ru and translated for LeftEast by Adam Leeds. How would you describe the ideology of the ruling regime in contemporary Russia? On what values rests that which some call “Putinism”? What is behind the facade of all this speech about ‘spiritual bonds’ and ‘our glorious past’? The conventional idea […]

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“We should recognize that there are other imperialisms”: A Marxist dissident explains what the left gets wrong about Russia. An interview with Ilya Budraitskis.

Charles Davis talks to Ilya Budraitkis on Salon.Com . Here we present the interview. The whole lengthy material can be accessed on the Salon website. Obviously the biggest story in Russia and here in the United State is the recent assassination of Boris Nemstov. Here in the West, Russia right now is portrayed as sort of a police […]

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Syriza’s victory and what comes next: Ilya Budraitskis, Russian Federation

“It’s important to stress that Kremlin welcomed Syriza’s victory exactly in the moment when inside Russia it provides its own version of “austerity politics” in conditions of a deepening economic catastrophe. We in the left are trying to present support to Syriza as an impressive example of popular mobilisation against anti-social logic of elites, which for the […]

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Ilya Budraitskis: The Perpetual “Trotskyist” Conspiracy

Who Is Behind the Trotskyist Conspiracy? Ilya Budraitskis, a historian, researcher and writer November 21, 2014 Russian original on OpenLeft.ru/ Translated by TheRussianReader Speaking at a meeting of his All-Russia People’s Front a couple days ago, Vladimir Putin said, “Trotsky had this [saying]: the movement is everything, the ultimate aim is nothing. We need an ultimate […]

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Seeing Soldiers Work: Ukrainian Cinema and the Future of Labor

The Ukrainian premier of Reflection, the latest film from director Valentyn Vasyanovych, was held at Kyiv Critics’ Week in October 2022, more than a year after its theatrical premiere at the 78th Venice International Film Festival. The war in Ukraine has limited the film’s domestic distribution, though Vasyanovych has indicated his primary audience is an […]

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Common Labor Struggles? The Eco-Social And Decolonial Question Of Climate Crisis

The means of production have become the means of climate production, so how can we – all kinds of exploited workers around the world – seize these very means and address both the eco-social and decolonial question of the climate crisis? “Allied Grounds,” the Berliner Gazette project 2023, will explore this bundle of issues, as […]