by Petro Pustota The recent massive social unrests in Ukrainian cities and among the Ukrainian diaspora are structurally comparable to the 2004 “Orange Revolution”. The protests at the dawn of the millennium were due to political elites’ rotation. At that time both presidential candidates clearly adhered to certain foreign-policy orientations in their pre-election statements. Due […]
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Our colleagues Jana Tsoneva and Georgi Medarov with a piece in The Guardian about the Bulgarian protests. Bulgaria is undergoing a deep political crisis. A mass social mobilisation against austerity, poverty and electricity price rises took place in February, toppling the centre-right government. After elections in May, the independent Plamen Oresharski became prime minister, backed […]
Young people with posters declaring, ‘I want to stay in Bulgaria’. Young people who complain that state policies force them to leave the county and threaten to emigrate as part of their protest tactics. This is one of the persistent tropes that Bulgarian civil society has been producing over the last two decades: that the flight of young, educated […]
I accepted an invitation to write an introduction to a small collection of Trotsky’s articles and speeches translated from the Russian original into Ukrainian (see details of the publication below). These articles and speeches are related to Trotsky’s engagement with Ukraine from the time of the 1917 revolution, through the civil war when he commanded […]
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Gavrilo Princip, a hero?
It is less than a year before the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, the bloodiest war in human history thereto. As 28th June 2014 approaches, it is more certain that the German government will take part in the organization of the celebration of the centennial in Sarajevo, where […]
On the 10th of November of 2013, the movement of the Early Rising Students embarked on a “March for Justice” in the capital of Bulgaria, Sofia. Since the 24th of October the students of Sofia University occupied first the main auditorium and gradually the entire school. A few days before November 10th, they decided that […]
The conservative and sometimes reactionary tendencies of the Orthodox Church in post-socialist countries are not news, but recently the Georgian church has gone so far as to target civil society actors doing charity work. As the cold winter approaches, civil society actors, particularly a group of independent feminists held a small rally a month ago […]
A couple of weeks ago, my mind was on recent student struggles at CUNY, where I work (http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/socialistvoice/cuny79.html). I was reading a Chris Hedges’ article that someone had sent via the #strikedebt email list. There, he mentioned the existence of popular resistance (http://www.popularresistance.org/ ) as an example of “the articulation of a viable socialism as […]
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Don Kalb in Bucharest
A discussion with Don Kalb moderated by Stefan Guga and Florin Poenaru.
Over the last few days Bulgaria has witnessed opposing waves of mobilization that divide the country across ethnic and class lines. Since the 23rd of October, a student strike and sustained occupation has spread across six universities in the capital and other cities. The strike is the latest in a series of protests in the […]