With this statement, we mark the closure of LeftEast. After more than a decade of collective work, we are bringing this project to an end. We do so with mixed emotions (sorrow, relief, gratitude, and pride) but also with the conviction that what LeftEast was able to accomplish, despite its limits, will remain a resource for the future.
What LeftEast Was
LeftEast was born in the early 2010s, when the organized left in Eastern Europe was small, scattered, and struggling for visibility. In a context where historical and geopolitical power dynamics entrenched divides between formerly state socialist countries, we set out to build something modest but necessary: a space where progressive voices across the region could speak to each other and to the world, beyond the confines of borders and languages.
From the beginning, LeftEast was a political act. We defined ourselves as explicitly left of classical social democracy, with an agenda to critically examine old and discover new ways of building critical discourse and real-life progressive alternatives in a region where the socialist project was seen by many as dead. In this, we sought to remain critical, reflective, open, and inclusive – bringing together different strands of the contemporary left without erasing our differences. We aimed to provide analysis that was local without being parochial, accessible without being simplistic, and grounded in solidarity rather than detached observation.
Over the years, LeftEast became a home for hundreds of original contributions. We published analytical essays, interviews, editorial statements, podcasts, reports, travelogues, graphic reportages, and cultural commentaries. We covered labor strikes, student sit-ins, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-military and feminist organizing, LGBTQ+ struggles, and housing movements; we examined anti-communism and its politics of memory that paved the way to free market fundamentalism, austerity, and authoritarianism, that corroded labor and living conditions and sent millions from across the region into mass migration. We debated the wars and geopolitical conflicts that have marked our region, from Donbas to Gaza. We amplified voices from local movements in Belgrade, Bucharest, Budapest, Chișinău, Kyiv, Moscow, Sofia, Skopje, Tbilisi, and beyond, while also forging connections among them as well as with comrades in Latin America, the Middle East, and elsewhere. In doing so, we challenged not only how the region is represented globally, but also the forms of intellectual production traditionally associated with it.
What We Achieved
We take pride in having sustained this work for so long, almost entirely through volunteer efforts, without external financial resources or institutional backing, while managing the precarity of our (mostly) academic professional lives and the demands of political / activist organizing in and outside the region. In a landscape where projects like ours are hard to reproduce, the fact that LeftEast persisted for more than a decade is itself an achievement.
Beyond publications, LE co-organized several in-person meetings—convergences—of leftist activists in Budapest, Sofia, Kaunas, Istanbul, Skopje, and Tbilisi, which became spaces for collaboration, debate, and friendship, and participated in many more. We built a network of comrades and collaborators, strengthened cross-border connections, and created resources that will continue to be valuable to future researchers and organizers.
Despite our visibility as a group and work as a collective, we were never a directive political organ, nor a movement organization. We put in a lot of effort to maintain a “broad church” on the Left project, despite its contradictions. Our task was always to gather, edit, and share the intellectual and political work of others, to make struggles visible and to foster exchange across boundaries. The archive that remains testifies to the richness of those efforts.
What We Struggled With
But LeftEast was not without its contradictions. Our collective was diverse in background, geography, and leftist politics. This was our strength, but also our weakness. Under the historical circumstances we experienced, differences deepened and hardened: between those who had joined earlier and those who came later; between comrades differently embedded in postsocialist and post-Soviet contexts, including direct engagement in movement organizing on the ground; between those seeking a looser forum and those wanting clearer structures. These lines were never absolute, but they shaped tensions that became increasingly difficult to bridge.
Overcoming these divisions required, first and foremost, time. Between often precarious academic jobs, demanding schedules, carework responsibilities, and work devoted to other activist endeavors many were involved in on the ground, we always struggled to find and nurture the time necessary to work together closely and carefully, and to envision the place of LeftEast in the future of leftist organizing in the region and beyond. While several of us have contributed significantly to bringing various progressive media platforms in the region closer together through the Eastern European Left Media Outlet – ELMO, we never took calculated steps towards a long-term plan for our own platform. Mostly, we put laborious, caring effort into commissioning, editing, translating, and publishing work as best as we could, under circumstances that, more often than not, were marked by stress, fatigue, and burnout.
The broader crises of our time—Covid-19, Russia’s war on Ukraine, the genocide in Palestine, the ever-intensifying economic and climate crisis, the sharpening of global geopolitical divides, and the rise of the far-right, which came with renewed attacks on the left, curtailing of reproductive rights and the rights of immigrants and asylum-seekers—condensed and magnified the internal tensions. What might once have been healthy disagreements hardened into dividing lines. At times, it felt as if there were “teams” within the collective, with the editors who had been here longer feeling that their experience, expertise, and connections on the ground were not being valued, and the new editors struggling to find recognition, trust, and renewal. Instead of evolving together, we often found ourselves growing apart and away from each other.
It was becoming obvious that the enthusiasm for keeping the project going was no match for the lack of clear structure and organizational principles. We struggled with decision-making and grievance resolution. Expectations of editors were never fully clarified; onboarding was inconsistent; guidance for new members was limited. Despite the introduction of the distinction between acting and contributing editors, volunteer labor remained unequally distributed among acting editors, including in gendered ways, a recurring issue for which we found no collective solution. Commitments were often made but not carried through, leading to declining trust and weakened communication. We failed to turn the decisions and procedures we documented into sustainable, recognizable agreements and protocols that would sustain continuity.
We also learned that working in the collective—like in any relationship, really—requires doing work on oneself. Much writing has been done recently on how to show up in collective work, addressing issues ranging from personal space and trauma to microaggressions and accountability. Yes, the personal is political. When “the personal” is left to simmer into resentment, without any responsibility taken for personal hurt, reactions, difficulty to self-regulate, and interpersonal relations brought into the political space, it can be very destructive to the collective. We learned that knowing how to work through disagreement and to decenter one’s own ego and past triggers (personal and political, and legitimate!) is as difficult a task as any.
Unable to resolve the crisis within the collective, we turned to mediation, a process that offered a framework for expressing our individual grievances, our needs for rebuilding trust and security, and our vision and hopes for the collective. It also ultimately allowed us to decide to close LeftEast and to carry through with the long process of parting ways in good faith and with consideration for the project’s legacy.
What Remains, What Is Being Built
LeftEast’s closure is not our erasure. Our archive remains, and you will be able to access and use it as a static archived website at this same web address (here are some guidelines on how to search LeftEast for best results). We hope this archive will serve as a resource for understanding the trajectory of the left in the region during the turbulent period from 2013–2025, and as a tool for those who continue the struggles that animated us.
Apart from the archive here, and ELMO’s ongoing work (follow ELMO on Facebook or Instagram or sign up for our newsletter to follow our developments and stay abreast of our upcoming formats), at the beginning of 2026, several members of the former collective will launch Red Threads (read our announcement and subscribe for updates). More than a media project, less than a party, Red Threads builds upon the work that LeftEast has collectively produced, taking on new formats and branching into new directions.
Looking Back, Looking Forward
LeftEast was a generational project of its time. When we began, the left in Eastern Europe was tiny, and a broad, inclusive project like ours made sense. As the left has grown, so too have its internal disagreements, and sustaining a shared platform has become harder. However, in the years since we began, a new ecology of left media and organizations has emerged in the region, offering perspectives and resources that were previously lacking.
Our time at LeftEast continually reminded us that being comrades—a term that had been removed from post-socialist vocabularies and which we had struggled so much to reintroduce in our work together—means more than shared ideology or participation in projects. It is a commitment to care for one another, to listen, and to engage in good faith even when disagreements arise. Being comrades means navigating the tensions among personal, political, and collective needs and striving to support the work and well-being of those around us.
The need that gave rise to LeftEast has not disappeared; in fact, the task of building a strong left is more urgent than ever. Such a left, to which we are all committed to contributing through our ongoing militancy and future projects, requires spaces where principled political discussion can occur, where differences can be debated in good faith, and where collective responsibility matches collective critique. Such spaces cannot be sustained on goodwill alone: they require structures, resources, and ongoing labor. They require time, empathy, humility, friendship, and cunning, but hopeful and joyous plans for what comes next.
We close LeftEast with gratitude to all of our contributors, readers, comrades, and critics, who have shaped this project. LeftEast is ending, but we hope that it will remain a source of inspiration for all who fight against capitalism, authoritarianism, patriarchy, racism, war, and exploitation, and a reminder that the work of struggle has to be collective, critical, and caring. We hope that what we leave behind will, in some small way, contribute to building better ways to fight for a better world together.
With solidarity, gratitude, and comradely love,
The LeftEast Collective