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Post-Invasion Russia: A Stable New Order Or A Collapse Waiting To Happen?

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 […]

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“The Most Important Battlefield Is the Ideological Battlefield”: An Interview with the Workers’ Front of Ukraine

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 […]

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A blow to self-organisation. What is the logic behind Boris Kagarlitsky’s persecution?

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 […]

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Corbyn in Budapest: “We Have to Be Organized on an International Basis”

Note from LeftEast editors: The following interview with Jeremy Corbyn was conducted by Levente Szadai and Csaba Tóth for Mérce on May 7, 2023, in Budapest, and published in Hungarian translation on May 9. We republish the lightly edited transcript as part of a collaboration within ELMO – The Eastern European Left Media Outlet. When […]

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The class conflict behind Russia’s war

Note from LeftEast editors: In this mini-series we reprint two essays first published in Alameda Institute’s Dossier, The War in Ukraine and the Question of Internationalism. We provide the table of contents for reference and further reading. Since Russian forces invaded Ukraine earlier this year, analysts across the political spectrum have struggled to identify exactly […]

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Russian capitalism is both political and normal: On expropriation and social reproduction

Note from LeftEast editors: In this mini-series we reprint two essays first published in Alameda Institute’s Dossier, The War in Ukraine and the Question of Internationalism. We provide the table of contents for reference and further reading. In 2006, in his book The Development of Capitalism in Russia, the late sociologist Simon Clarke wrote that, “a […]

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Russian colonialism, Eastern Europe and global anti-colonial struggles

In recent years, there has been a growing tendency among scholars and activists in Eastern Europe to draw parallels and links between the “postcolonial” and the “postsocialist”. In its extreme, as Adem Ferizaj argues in his recent review, the use of postcolonial approaches in the context of postsocialism “leads to the false analogy that postsocialism […]

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Notes on a City in Darkness: Odesa After the Russian Infrastructure Attacks

As the one-year mark of the Russia-Ukraine War approaches, the Western political climate increasingly polarizes public attitudes towards Russian aggression and Ukrainian suffering. The rising politicization of the war for various ideological interests occupies more space in discourse than that of the Ukrainians who endure the brutality of Russia’s terrorism against civilians. Meanwhile, American media […]

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Seeing Soldiers Work: Ukrainian Cinema and the Future of Labor

The Ukrainian premier of Reflection, the latest film from director Valentyn Vasyanovych, was held at Kyiv Critics’ Week in October 2022, more than a year after its theatrical premiere at the 78th Venice International Film Festival. The war in Ukraine has limited the film’s domestic distribution, though Vasyanovych has indicated his primary audience is an […]

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It is always darkest before the dawn: how Russian anarchists today struggle for revolution 

While it might seem that the neoliberal consensus has broken in some Western countries, in the post-socialist space discourses of privatization and individualization are so strong that we can hardly speak about a crisis of the neoliberal order. It is even harder to imagine some radical change in the West and almost impossible to speak […]