Lefteast
Published this month by Verso, Towards the Abyss offers a Gramscian account of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, alongside a personal perspective from its author, Volodymyr Ishchenko. Verso’s and LeftEast’s readership, likely familiar with Ishchenko’s polemical articles and his theoretical framework, is now offered an edited collection of texts composed and published across […]
LeftEast gratefully acknowledges Zanovo-media, where this article was originally published in Russian. Today all post-Soviet mass-media and TV channels are riveted to the protests that suddenly engulfed Kazakhstan. To some they arouse hope, to others – horror and rejection. There are contradictions and different interpretations of what is happening: righteous people’s protest, clan wrangling, conspiracy […]
Note from LeftEast editors: This is a slightly edited version of an earlier published text in German: Ishchenko, V. (October 15, 2021). Die Ukraine im Teufelkreis der post-sowjetischen Hegemonie-Krise. Ukraine-Analysen, 256, 8-10. After the 30 years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ukraine may give a unique perspective on the post-Soviet condition in general […]
A statement of the emerging left-wing Social Movement party in Ukraine. (source: Social Movement Party website) Throughout 2014-5 the conduct and decisions of various bodies of Ukraine’s executive and legislative branches of power have grossly violated Ukrainians’ citizens’ rights guaranteed by the Constitution, the ECHR, and fundamental rights 1. Free speech and freedom of expression […]
Volodymyr Ishchenko is a sociologist studying social protests in Ukraine. He is the deputy director of the Center for Social and Labor Research, a member of the editorial board of Commons: Journal for Social Criticism and LeftEast web-magazine, and a lecturer at the Department of Sociology in the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Interview by Javier Morales. Javier Morales (JM): How do […]
Charles Davis talks to Ilya Budraitkis on Salon.Com . Here we present the interview. The whole lengthy material can be accessed on the Salon website. Obviously the biggest story in Russia and here in the United State is the recent assassination of Boris Nemstov. Here in the West, Russia right now is portrayed as sort of a police […]
Note from editors: The following editorial was published on the Russian leftist website Open Left in response to the murder of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov on Friday 27 February 2015. We demand a transparent investigation and an immediate end to propaganda that incites hatred. It’s difficult to say just yet how the Friday-night murder of […]
Source: Interview by Yuriy Dergunov, Commons: Journal of Social Criticism In the post-Soviet space the very notion of geopolitics is associated with ultra-conservative, right-wing political discourses (Aleksandr Dugin’s example is prominent here), so in our progressive circles geopolitics is widely regarded as a pseudo-science. Your idea of Marxist geopolitics would probably seem paradoxical to majority […]
Since the start of the Maidan protests six months ago, Ukraine has been at the centre of a crisis which has exposed and deepened the fault-lines—geopolitical, historical, linguistic, cultural—that traverse the country. These divisions have grown through the entwinement of opposed political camps with the strategic ambitions of Russia and the West, the former bidding […]
Note from the LeftEast editors: this interview is published in cooperation with the Ukrainian journal Спільне/Commons: Journal of Social Criticism. Questions were asked by Yuriy Dergunov. They were sent on February 28 and replies were received on May 2, 2014. Neil Davidson is a Scottish historian and sociologist, a lecturer at the School of Social […]