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Ukraine: Days of Decisions, Days of Struggle

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 […]

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A Conservative Counterrevolution in Croatia

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 […]

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*IN SOLIDARITY* Polish queer activists beaten by the police at Poznań Economic University

On the 5th of December catholic priest Professor Paweł Bortkiewicz delivered a talk at the Economic University of Poznań entitled “Does gender devastate life and family?” (after an immense pressure from academic community changed from the initial affirmative “Gender – devastation of life and family”). The lecture, blaming gender (it’s never clear what exactly is […]

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Zhanaozen: worker organisation and repression

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 […]

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A call for days of international solidarity with Russian political prisoners (18-26 January)

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 […]

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Euromaidan: The play with EU integration

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 […]

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Exposed: Globally Renowned Activist Collaborated With Intelligence Firm Stratfor

Serbia’s Srdja Popovic is known by many as a leading architect of regime changes in Eastern Europe and elsewhere since the late-1990s, and as one of the co-founders of Otpor!, the U.S.-funded Serbian activist group which overthrew Slobodan Milošević in 2000. Lesser known, an exclusive Occupy.com investigation reveals that Popovic and the Otpor! offshoot CANVAS (Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies) have […]

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Terms of Ukraine’s EU-Dependency

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 […]

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Artists’ Safety and Freedom of Expression at Risk in Poland, or How Nationalists Stopped a Theatre Production

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 […]

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Reasons behind EuroMaidan Protests in Ukraine

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 […]