LefteastIlya Budraitskis(1981) is a historian, cultural and political activist. Since 2009
he is Ph.D. student at the Institute for World History, Russian Academy of
Science, Moscow. In 2001-2004 he organized Russian activists in
mobilizations against the G8, in European and World Social Forums. Since
2011 he has been an activist and spokesperson for Russian Socialist
Movement.
Member of Editorial board of "Moscow Art Magazine". Regular contributor to
the number of political and cultural websites.
We can say with confidence that the tragedy of Boeing 777, which took the lives of 298 people, has brought the conflict in Eastern Ukraine to a principally new level. Now the main centers of power—Russia, the US, and the EU—must make themselves known and must take the responsibility for stopping the war or conversely—for […]
A comment, published in Russian on the Open Left web site in Russia. Translated into English and published by PeopleAndNature. In the two days that have passed since the tragic events in Odessa, we have heard dozens of versions of what happened. And all of these versions have been, one way or another, linked to the […]
Political analysis from Ilya Budraitskis written as he visited Kiev in the midst of revolution. Back in mid-December, our estimate of Ukraine’s political crisis as a “revolutionary situation” resulted in a lot of critical reviews. Further, the use of the word “revolution” in the context of Ukraine was condemned as a kind of sacrilege, because […]
The political face of the Kiev protests causes grave pessimism. But a revolution is a revolution and the left has no right to stay on the side, says Ilya Budraitskis. Originally published in Russian in http://openleft.ru/?p=682 What is happening in Ukraine right now increasingly corresponds to the classical definition of a revolutionary situation. The mass […]
On October 13th, in Biriuliovo, a district in the south of Moscow, a series of events took place that are still the talk of most Russian media. Several thousand local residents and radical right activists held a spontaneous rally demanding “an end to illegal immigration and ethnic crime.” Soon afterwards, hundreds of the rally’s participants […]
The several days spent in the atmosphere of the Sofia political protests predictably led me to compare them to the Russian experience of 2011-2012. Despite the significant contextual differences, these two movements could be seen as part of а single—but to an even greater degree—a potential East European protest wave. As such, its analysis and […]