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Science, Crimea and prison bars: persecution of teachers and researchers

Note from the LeftEast editors: this article first appeared on Commons Journal. It has been reprinted on LeftEast with the permission of the authors. by Viktoriia Muliavka and Alona Liasheva Translated from the Ukrainian by Valentyna Kolesnik. The use of science and education for political purposes in Ukraine has become the norm. How has it […]

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Interviews

Interview with “Prasvet” editor Tania Chyzhova

Tania Chyzhova, editor and author of the Belarusian marxist journal of left critique Prasvet (prasvet.com) and resource of wide-left orientation Left.by. Studied philosophy in the Belarusian State University, then was an academic researcher in social philosophy and political science (marxism, theories of social agency, protest actions in Belarus). Mattia Gallo talked to Tania about the regime […]

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Neither Moscow, nor NATO: Notes on the NATO summit and the antiwar counter-summit in Warsaw

The main result from this weekend’s NATO summit in Warsaw was the official proclamation of a “containment” strategy toward Russia. So far, the practical consequence of this declaration is modest in military terms—a total of 3,000 foreign troops will be deployed to Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Far more important are the politics of this […]

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“No significant pressure for a different model existed”: Joachim Becker on the Economy of Former Yugoslavia and its Successor States

Joachim Becker, professor of Economics and Business at Vienna University and deputy head of the Institute for International Economics and Development, was a guest of the conference Social Justice: New Perspectives, New Horizons in Belgrade. Becker’s research interests include development economics, theory of the state, regional integration and disintegration, Mercosur, Turkey, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. […]

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Looking Back at 1917 from the Post-Soviet Period

Simon Pirani is a socialist writer and historian. His books include The Russian Revolution in Retreat 1920-24: Soviet workers and the new communist elite (Routledge 2008). This article is based on a paper he delivered at a conference on “Twenty Five Years After the USSR” at the German Historical Institute, Moscow, 10 June 2016.   […]

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“We were not trying to hide Marxism”: Interview with Bhaskar Sunkara, editor of Jacobin Magazine.

Prepared by Alona Liasheva, this interview was initially published in the journal “Commons”. Jacobin is one of the most successful radical left-wing publications in the contemporary world and, for sure, the most successful one in the United States. Though the project was only started in September 2010, their online audience has reached 700 000 visitors […]

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The Labor Movement in Post-Communist Countries

This article originally appeared on LeftVoice. Philippe Alcoy interviews Mihai Varga, a Romanian specialist on trade unionism in Eastern and Central Europe and author of “Worker Protests in post-communist Romania and Ukraine,” published in August 2015. In this interview, Varga provides his vision on the state of the trade unionism in the region after the dissolution […]

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The Ukrainian Government as the Point of Balance between Domestic and Foreign Capital

This article was written a couple of months ago while the future of Ukrainian government was still unsure. I am happy to report that the ensuing events mostly confirmed my predictions: Groisman did take the seat of Prime Minister, Avakov and Petrenko entered the Cabinet and Yatsenyuk gained one more victory over the Parliament, forcing […]

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Eastern Europe’s Ominous Path to Fascism

Bureaucratic structures literally swallow human lives like brutal, hungry monsters. That is especially the case with military and intelligence structures. The stronger the state bureaucracy, the more damage is done to individual conscience and collective liberty. The Great Powers are the champions of destruction whether they identify themselves as the liberal democratic, or the conservative […]

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Landgrabs and the EU

Note from the LeftEast editors: this article has been published in collaboration with the Serbo-Croat web portal Bilten.Org In the past few years, particularly after the 2007-8 world food price crisis, there has been a lot of attention to the global expansion of large-scale acquisitions of farmland, or what is usually referred to as land […]