Lefteast
There are not many occasions on which the daily news from Croatia can be spotted in the blurred waters of Western media. Unfortunately, last week one of that occasions occurred. Croatian voters decided to prohibit marriage equality, or to be precise – to constitutionally define marriage as a union only between a man and a […]
by Gabriel Levy Oil workers in western Kazakhstan in 2011 mounted one of the largest-scale strike movements in post-Soviet history, and then suffered one of the most brutal massacres in post-Soviet history – in Zhanaozen on 16 December 2011, when security forces killed at least 16 people and wounded at least 64. The workers’ revolt […]
A year and a half has passed since the beginning of the political case that has become synonymous with the police arbitrariness of citizen rightlessness of contemporary Russia. Dozens of people have been or may soon be imprisoned in a country that is now preparing to showcase its prosperity and power against the decorations of […]
A large group of aggressive young men smash windows and fiercely throw bottles and stones. Behind them there’s a huge crowd shouting ‘We want in the EU’. The picture should apparently frighten people in the EU countries. Some comments in the western media suggest, as a joke, that the picture resembles barbarians amassing near the […]
by József Böröcz [ the text was originally published in the authors’s blog Global Social Change, dedicated to his book The European Union and Global Social Change: A Critical Geopolitical-Economic Analysis, Routhledge 2009 , and was reprinted on Lefteast with the kind agreement of the author] The main provisions of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement are […]
The facts. A few weeks into the rehearsal period – and three weeks before the opening, scheduled on December 7th –, a new production of the renowned Narodowy (National) Stary Teatr (NST) in Krakow was attacked by Polish nationalists. The show, called the Undivine Comedy. Remains, explicitly addressed the anti-Semitism of a piece by Zygmunt […]
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 […]
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 […]