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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 […]

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“What is playing itself out in Ukraine now is the clash of two opposed imperial agendas”. An interview with Gonzalo Pozo.

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 […]

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“We need to support forms of liberation struggle unconditionally”. An interview on Syria with Joseph Daher.

Note from the LeftEast editors: The following interview was conducted with the Syrian revolutionary Joseph Daher by Italian journalist and activist Mattia Gallo. It provides an important perspective on the current Western intervention in Iraq and Syria that has been excluded from much of the mainstream media reporting of this conflict. We acknowledge that the […]

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Ukraine’s Fractures. An interview with Volodymyr Ishchenko for New Left Review.

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 […]

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“The revolutionary process in Ukraine is not over yet”. An interview with Neil Davidson.

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 […]

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“We are witnessing an alarming revival of old-fashioned geopolitics”. An interview with Madina Tlostanova.

Madina Tlostanova is an internationally known scholar whose writing critically examines questions of epistemology, history, geography, power and identity. She has published widely and in multiple languages. She presently is a full professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. Her book Gender Epistemologies and Eurasian […]

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Political mobilization and the world system: the case of Ukraine and Russia. An interview with Don Kalb.

In an interview for Ukrainian journal “Commons” and Eurozine (original here), conducted before Euromaidan commenced, Don Kalb discusses the future of capitalism in eastern Europe. Given the rise of China and India, and economic stagnation in the West, Kalb emphasizes the importance of political mobilization in both Ukraine and Russia. Volodymyr Ishchenko: How would you […]

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If the Left Movements Don’t Unite, Only the Far-Right Will Benefit From the Social Anger. An interview with Volodymyr Ishchenko.

By Maxime Benatouil – 04 Mar 14 Interview with Volodymyr Ishchenko, Deputy Director of the Center for Society Research in Kiev (28 February) What root causes explain that such large parts of the population joined the protests, on Maidan and elsewhere? Volodymyr Ishchenko: First, let me tell you that the protests weren’t exclusively initiated by […]

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“The Bolotnaya Case is an attempt to destroy the Left opposition in Russia”. An interview with Vladimir Akimenkov.

Interviewed by Aleksandra Markova – activist and journalist. Half of the people arrested in the Bolotnaya Case are leftist activists. Open Left spoke with one of them after he was freed in the recent amnesty.  I went with Vladimir Akimenkov to a self-service restaurant. He found it difficult to distinguish the food on display and […]