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Polish Law on Historical Memory Widens Divisions at Home and Abroad

Note by the LeftEast editors: this article has been reprinted from the blog of Gavin Rae, Beyond the Transition, with the author’s permission. The Amended Act on the Institute of National Remembrance, passed by the Polish parliament on 26 January, has caused a huge political domestic and international storm (the full English language text of […]

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Temporary Agency Work as a Form and Channel of Labour Migration

                  Among industrial relation specialists it is a common statement that in our times, atypical employment arrangements are becoming typical, or even the norm, and standard employment contracts the exception. This description fits well the recent rebound of employment via temporary agencies in Central Eastern Europe, and […]

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Russian Presidential elections 2018: predicable results with unpredictable aftermath 

Translated from the original Russian by Joseph Livesey According to forecasts, the upcoming March 18 presidential elections in Russia will proceed without any surprises, as just the latest legitimization of another presidential term for Vladimir Putin. However, this foreseeable ‘victory,’ gained via massive pressure on the electorate and the Kremlin’s tight control over the political […]

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Politics of the Left beyond Resistance: Reflections and Visions from our 2017 encounter in Skopje

Report by: Mary N. Taylor, Mariya Ivancheva, Adela Gjorgjioska, Veda Popovici  Over the last seven years, members of the LeftEast collective have co-organised  encounters in collaboration with other collectives and comrades in the Eastern and Southern peripheries of Europe. This year, our late summer encounter took place in the Macedonian capital Skopje, hosted by Social […]

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From historical affinities to effective solidarities: Israel and Eastern Europe

  In a column in Ha’aretz last year, historian and journalist Ofri Ilany pointed out to his Israeli audience a number of affinities between Israel and Eastern Europe, ranging from the culinary to the political (Hebrew). As an antidote to the Western-oriented provincialism of the Israeli liberal sphere, Ilany’s intervention was welcome, but building effective […]

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The Red and the Black: the Riddle of post-Soviet Racism

This text was originally published in Russian in the web-journal ReLevant: a Journal of Current Analysis. We are much obliged to Maria Brock for its English translation. Anyone who has crossed paths with Soviet immigrants in the West will have noticed the strange phenomenon of post-Soviet racism, which is all the stranger because the overwhelming majority of […]

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Contradictions in Russian Cultural Politics: Conservatism as an Instrument of Neoliberalism

Note from the editors: The following piece is scheduled to appear in the edited collection The Art of Civil Action, edited by Philipp Dietachmair and Pascal Gielen and published through Valiz in November 2017. Today, it is common to contrast the statism of today’s Russia with the Western neoliberal order, which is based on the […]

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Race to the Bottom: The Battle over Minimum Wage in Bulgaria

Ten years after Bulgaria joined the European Union as its poorest member, its economy works at two speeds, deepening the income gap between poor low-skilled workers and a handful of well payed employees working in the country’s booming areas such as IT and auto parts. The following article was originally published in Serbo-Croatian by the online platform, […]

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“Flipping a Coin: Heads—No One Is Illegal; Tails—Everyone Must Be,” Pt. 1

Images, Notes, and Quotes on and around the NO BORDER encampment in Thessaloniki, July 2016. This three-part series was first published in E-flux conversations. We publish it with E-flux’s permission.          graffiti on window of abandoned store in Thessaloniki, July 2016 Flipping a Coin is less an essay than a narrative construction, an indeterminate, deliberately ramshackle […]

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The Art of Empathy: An Interview with Russian Graphic Artist Victoria Lomasko

Victoria Lomasko is a fixture at Moscow’s trials and protests, documenting the tumultuous processes that shape today’s Russia. Not content to limit herself to the political life of the country’s capital, Lomasko travels around the country and through the former Soviet republics, exploring the domestic, psychological, and spiritual condition of its diverse marginalized groups. Sex […]