Lefteast
I am writing this letter as news continues to reach me of relatives, neighbours, and friends being killed in Gaza by Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment. Dear Europeans, I, like millions of Palestinians, am living through the worst nightmare of yet another round of mass death and destruction unleashed on our people – something you would often […]
On the 19th of September at 8:00, a group of students marched into the main building of the University of Helsinki and announced that it was now occupied. We, “Students Against Cuts,” are behind this occupation, through which we have made noise about the rights of all students. In occupying the main building of the University of Helsinki, we wished to draw attention to the precarious past, present, and unknown future faced by students, which is being exacerbated by the government’s plans to cut housing allowance and affordable housing and to pursue racist immigration policy.
Although as of October 21, the widespread ban on protests has been deemed unconstitutional, it remains the case that since October 7, the French government has voluntarily conflated any expression of Palestine solidarity with supporting terrorism: this is a new step in an escalation of repression premised on an attempt at silencing any voice that is not in line with the government and its positions.
In solidarity with the global strike for Palestine we publish this statement from the Free Palestine Collective at Central European University (CEU) in Austria – an institution that remains connected to our region’s post-1989 history. In Europe, those who are mobilizing against the ongoing genocide in Gaza are being met with state repression. In these […]
Many of us at LeftEast became aware of the leftist Kyrgyz organization KyrgSoc from its webpage, where you post original content as well as repost pieces by others. What is KyrgSoc? What do you do? Who was it founded by and when? The idea of creating KYRGSOC matured with us in 2018/2019. The name of […]
Can you tell us a bit more about Karmína? What is your origin story? What do you do? How do you define yourself as a platform/collective? Karmína was established in 2017 as an informal group that runs a collective blog. Some of us have previously worked together, since the mid-2000s, in other initiatives on the […]
I first started working on this article on September 17. I was supposed to turn in a draft article about the high risk of Azerbaijan launching an offensive at Nagorno-Karabakh and next invading Armenia within a week. I told my editor we needed to publish the article as soon as possible because war could break […]
In the social tapestry of post-Soviet nations, an enigmatic phenomenon has quietly taken root that might be called the “neo-Soviet renaissance.” Western commentators typically represent this movement as a misguided and inaccurate “Soviet nostalgia,” one conveniently harnessed by savvy politicians like Vladimir Putin for their own agendas, but this phenomenon is both deeper and more […]
Note from LeftEast editors: This article was first published on Jacobin on April 23, 2023, and is reprinted here with permission. “The demographic doom loop has not, it appears, diminished Mr Putin’s craving for conquest. But it is rapidly making Russia a smaller, worse-educated and poorer country, from which young people flee and where men […]
Note from LeftEast Editors: The English original of this interview, which first appeared in Hungarian, is published in English on LeftEast, thanks to our cooperation with Hungarian portal Mérce within the framework of the East European Left Media Outlet (ELMO). Early parliamentary elections will be held in Slovakia on Saturday 30th September. Former Prime Minister […]