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Support Ukrainians but do not legitimize the far-right and discredited politicians!

Recently a number of internationally recognized scholars and public intellectuals signed a letter in full support of Euromaidan protests, backing ‘Ukrainian society’ against ‘Ukrainian government’. Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, Craig Calhoun, Claus Offe, Saskia Sassen, Charles Taylor, Michel Wieviorka, Slavoj Žižek and many others celebrated the ‘legal’ and ‘peaceful’ protests embodying, as they claimed, ‘the […]

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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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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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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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Ukrainian Far-Right Attacks a Book Launch

I accepted an invitation to write an introduction to a small collection of Trotsky’s articles and speeches translated from the Russian original into Ukrainian (see details of the publication below). These articles and speeches are related to Trotsky’s engagement with Ukraine from the time of the 1917 revolution, through the civil war when he commanded […]

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The real life of law: Polish lessons on housing activism in the postcommunist context

Abstract In this paper, I analyze the content and practice of law enforcement in the domain of tenants’ protection in Warsaw to draw lessons from Polish examples on the strategy for housing activism in the postcommunist context. The local public administration is quite weak, as it has limited financial and human resources capacities, which undermines […]

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Talk by Don Kalb: Socialism, Postsocialism, Neoliberalism – Interconnections in CEE

Within the framework of the summer school “Between (post)socialism and (neo)liberalism”, held in Sofia at the fridge & Xaspel, on July 21st Prof. Don Kalb (Central European University, Budapest) gave a talk on the topic “Socialism, Postsocialism, Neoliberalism – Interconnections in CEE”. The talk was held in a dialogue with Volodymyr Ischenko (Ukraine) and Florin […]

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The crisis of the left

(This is the text of the CriticAtac conference delivered in Bucharest, April 18, by Dr. Attila Melegh, senior researcher at Demographic Research Institute in Budapest and associated professor at the Corvinus University) When we look at the East European scene and ask what organized real left we have (not the liberal, cynical opportunistic one) the picture looks […]

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Is there Rock’n’Roll Within the Republic of Moldova?

de Vlad Bolocan Pretty much so, yet in a robinhoodish way. It appears spontaneously, shocks and disappears. When, in 1969, Noroc sells 2,5 million copies of a four-tracks single, everyone starts searching for Moldova on the map – the guys in Siberia and the ones in Berlin. De ce plîng chitarele (Why are the Guitars Crying) reaches the 6th place in […]

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Engineering Moldovan Identity: Moldovan Writers from Stalinism to the Independence

de Petru Negură Identity and Cultural Conflicts One of the main tasks attributed to Soviet Moldovan writers and “creative intellectuals”, from the creation of the first literary organization of the Moldovan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (MASSR) up until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, was to create a system of cultural values (around […]