Lefteast
Sasha Yaropolskaya and Philippe Alcoy interviewed LeftEast editor Volodymyr Ishchenko, a Ukrainian sociologist who was an activist and participant in several left-wing initiatives in Ukraine before moving to Germany in 2019. Ishchenko currently works at Berlin’s Freie Universität, continuing his research into the Ukrainian revolutions, the left, and the political violence of the far right, […]
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 […]
Today’s program of the Socialism 2024 conference, an annual event that takes place in Chicago, will feature an award ceremony of the Daniel Singer Prize for the best article devoted to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. LeftEast is proud that two of the awardees, the runners-up Volodymyr Ischenko and Olena Lyubchenko, are our editors. If you […]
Who chooses wars for us? What does it mean that somewhere is peace and somewhere is war? Is this still peace? What kind of peace? Whose peace? Is there really peace until there are wars? So what if wars no longer exist? How can we reach worlds without wars? Can we get there? We have to. Once upon a time there was a world of wars. There was.
After the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it is now time to ask what happens when the fragile social relations that were able to handle the arrival of millions of displaced people start to break down. Many commentators have argued extensively that grassroots solidarity networks consisting of individual actors and local organisations […]
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, […]
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 […]
In the social tapestry of post-Soviet nations, an enigmatic phenomenon has quietly taken root that might be called the “neo-Soviet renaissance.” Western commentators typically represent this movement as a misguided and inaccurate “Soviet nostalgia,” one conveniently harnessed by savvy politicians like Vladimir Putin for their own agendas, but this phenomenon is both deeper and more […]
Note from LeftEast editors. Boris Yulyevich Kagarlitsky, a leftist dissident under Brezhnev and occasional political prisoner under Yeltsin and Putin, has been arrested on charges of “justifying terrorism”. Еven though the Putin regime had already declared him a “foreign agent” and otherwise pushed him to leave the country, Kagarlitsky had chosen to remain in Russia […]