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International Workers’ Day: resounding struggles from Greece to Russia

“For more than twenty years have the wage workers of this country begged and prayed their masters, the factory lords, to reduce their burdens. It has been in vain.” – this proclamation could easily have come from a 1st of May rally in 2015, as it remains equally relevant today. But it dates back to […]

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International Workers’ Day: Ivan Ovsiannikov

Ivan Ovsiannikov is a member of the St. Petersburg Interregional Union: “Workers Association” “As far as anti-workers laws are concerned, the main one is the de facto ban on striking in labor law. In practice, it is impossible to conduct strikes because of the bureaucratic procedure involved. Or rather, to strike, one must work outside […]

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Interviews

Where is the line between us: evolving East/West positions in a post-socialist world. Interview with Rastko Močnik

Note from the LeftEast editors: “Where is the line between us?: cautionary tales from now” was the title of the 3rd Garage international conference which brought to Moscow practitioners and thinkers from the fields of art, history, and sociology to examine the evolving positions toward the East/West axis in a post-socialist world. The speakers revisited […]

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“We should recognize that there are other imperialisms”: A Marxist dissident explains what the left gets wrong about Russia. An interview with Ilya Budraitskis.

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 […]

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The UK election in 2015 and the British Left. An interview with Luke March.

Note from the LeftEast editors: this interview with political analyst Luke March (University of Edinburgh) was made by Artem Koretsky and Rouslan Kostiouk. It has originally been published by RabKor collective in Russian.  RK: In May there will be parliamentary elections in the UK. After the last general elections in 2010, your country has faced an […]

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Putin’s enemies within

This piece, by Ben Neal, was originally published on the British socialist website, Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century. At least 50,000 people marched in Moscow last Sunday in memory of the slain liberal opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, who was shot dead two days previously on a bridge just steps away from the Kremlin. The […]

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The Murder of Boris Nemtsov

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 […]

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Syriza’s victory stirs the Left’s political imagination across Central, Eastern and South East Europe

Three weeks ago the Left celebrated Syriza’s victory. The plot has thickened since, and it will surely intensify further by the 28th of February when the EU-IMF bailout is due to expire. As the Greek drama unravels, it is those who are most supportive of Syriza that will judge it most critically. Asked by LeftEast’s […]

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Toward Universal Happiness

Note from the LeftEast editors: There was once a time when utopias were a significant cultural form of the left. Nowadays, our political imaginaries have run dry. The societies we can conceive of, even the changes we consider possible to our present state pale in comparison to what the socialists of the early 20th C […]

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Ilya Budraitskis: The Perpetual “Trotskyist” Conspiracy

Who Is Behind the Trotskyist Conspiracy? Ilya Budraitskis, a historian, researcher and writer November 21, 2014 Russian original on OpenLeft.ru/ Translated by TheRussianReader Speaking at a meeting of his All-Russia People’s Front a couple days ago, Vladimir Putin said, “Trotsky had this [saying]: the movement is everything, the ultimate aim is nothing. We need an ultimate […]