Lefteast
Note from LeftEast editors: This review is simultaneously published on Jacobin. Toward the Abyss is an important corrective to the predominantly ethnicity- and personality-centered analyses of Ukraine. Ishchenko advances a class analysis of both Putinism and Ukrainian society. Based on his sociological research, he points out that a class divide is more important in understanding the […]
Note from LeftEast editors. Our readers are probably familiar with the story of Boris Kagarlitsky, the best-known post-Soviet Marxist, a leftist dissident under Brezhnev and occasional political prisoner under Yeltsin and Putin, who was arrested in July 2023 on charges of “justifying terrorism,” aka opposing Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on his leftist media platform […]
Note from LeftEast editors: The following manifesto was released on March 3 in anticipation of the upcoming Russian election on March 17th. It is the product of a number of Russian leftist academics, politicians, bloggers, and activists. Because true opposition candidates have been kept off the ballot, this manifesto calls on Russian voters to spoil […]
In the run-up to the upcoming presidential election in Russia, the Western media have focused on the capitalist contenders such as Vladimir Putin and the more West-friendly Boris Nadezhdin and Yekaterina Duntsova while unsurprisingly failing to acknowledge the absence of a genuine left candidate from the picture. After touching briefly upon the thwarted liberal contenders, […]
Note from LeftEast editors: this text was originally published in Czech on SOK-Socialistický kruh. Lenin and the Revolution: nothing is closed The contemporary view of Lenin and the October revolution is predominated by their historical images as provoking the impression that they are nothing more than pieces of history with no relation to the present […]
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 Editorial Note: On Nov. 1st, 2023, NYU’s Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia hosted a panel on post-invasion Russian political economy and popular opinion with LeftEast editors or frequent contributors Volodya Ishchenko, Ilya Matveev, Oleg Zhuravlev. Yekaterina Oziashvilli, a professor of Politics at Sarah Lawrence College, moderated the event. LeftEast is delighted to share […]
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 […]
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 […]
Note from LeftEast Editors: We are delighted to present the English translation of September.media’s interview with Mikhail Lobanov, published in the original Russian on July 28th. The interview is about Lobanov’s “foreign agent” status and dismissal from university, the ways of anti-war political organising among the left in Russia and beyond, and finally, Mikhail’s plans […]