Lefteast
Note from LeftEast editors: In November 2022, Verso will publish an English-language translation of Dmitrii Furman’s Imitation Democracy: the Development of Russia’s Post-Soviet Political System (forward by Keith Gessen; afterword by Tony Wood), one of the most insightful and prophetic texts written at the end of Putin’s first decade in power. LeftEast is delighted to […]
On September 21, Putin announced “partial” mobilisation. What does it mean? Who are the most vulnerable to mobilisation? How does it affect civic infrastructures and women’s status? We asked a group of left activists, journalists, and sociologists from Russia, who have been running the anti-war media “Nevoina” (“Notowar”) since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. […]
LeftEast: What is your situation? How do you feel? Anna: I have been living in Tbilisi for several years, but had to return to Russia for family reasons. Of course, I was anxious and scared about what would happen next, whether I would be able to return to Tbilisi and what the situation would be […]
This August’s Kombinatas festival brought dozens of leftist researchers and activists from the region to its camp in Saugus Atstumas (Lithuania). Predictably, Russia’s war on Ukraine was the most discussed topic and the festival’s organizers shared with us videos of two related panels. Oppositional movements and anti-war resistance in Russia Why did Putin start a […]
Public protest has always been a risky affair in Russia, but it has become even riskier as of late. As anti-war demonstrations swept the country earlier this year, the repressive state apparatus intensified, and the protest has been cast underground. Nevertheless, the most committed activists have remained defiant in the face of suppression, coming up […]
The return of the awarded title of “Mother Heroine” is another attempt by Russia to dress up the invasion of Ukraine in the uniform of the Great Patriotic War. What does its recovery say today? Gender studies researcher Sasha Talaver analyzes the history and relevance of the award for Posle.media
Imagine you are a Russian-speaker in some bombed-out Eastern Ukrainian city, waiting to be liberated. Some of the “liberators” will be first checking your closets for young men to mobilize and use as a Z-branded canon fodder. The other liberators make it clear that they see you аs nothing more than a “vatnik,” a Homo […]
LeftEast reprints this piece from the Turkish gender, art, and politics platform 5Harfliler.com. In one of the first days of the ongoing invasion of Russia in Ukraine, the Russian troops burnt down the historical museum in Ivankiv, a town near Kyiv. The museum holdings included a collection of early-medieval archeological artifacts, rare Polissia (North Ukrainian […]
Russia’s political capitalists waged war in order to survive as a class, to continue accumulating wealth through the exploitation of the state – says Volodymyr Ishchenko, a research associate at the Institute of East European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. – However, this war, depending on what happens on the battlefield, may equally bring about a fall or a radical transformation of the whole post-Soviet order. Interview by Małgorzata Kulbaczewska-Figat.
Volodymyr Artiukh presented this text at the conference ‘New Times? Confronting the Escalating Crises of Capitalism’ in Budapest 26-27 May, organized by the Karl Polanyi Research Center for Global Social Studies and the Commission of Global Transformations and Marxian Anthropology-IUAES in cooperation with the Working Group for Public Sociology ‘Helyzet’, ‘Capitalism Nature Socialism’, ‘Focaal – Journal […]