Lefteast
Note from LeftEast: Recently, we ran across Alexander Nogovishchev’s very impressive MA thesis entitled “Political Communication in the USSR in the early 1960s: Discussing the CPSU Program,” which proposes to examine the Soviet Union of that period (and as a whole, really) as a socialist project and to take seriously its Marxism. In the process, […]
Translation of a column published in DOXA in Russian. «The woman behind the wheel is the driver,» says the propaganda of the Moscow region transport. From the poster, a stern, old-fashioned cold wave-laden woman behind the wheel looks into the distance. The nostalgic font, heavily associated with the USSR, Rodchenko’s iconography, the tone of voice […]
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 […]
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 […]
Professor of Russian history at the University of Budapest, Tamás Krausz is the author of an intellectual biography of Lenin. In this interview, Krausz draws a portrait of the October Revolution and the beginning of the Soviet experience, rigorously showing the contemporary relevance of Lenin’s analyses, as well as their limits, without yielding to the […]
Note from the LeftEast editors: Interview conducted by Vasile Ernu for Criticatac.ro, introduced by Giuliano Vivaldi and translated from the Russian by Joseph Livesey. One would have hoped that the occasion of the centenary of the Russian Revolution would have lead to a serious reimagination of both the event in itself as well as the […]
Note from the LeftEast editors: On October 1 the former finance minister of Greece Yanis Varofakis gave his keynote speech at the 6th Moscow Biennale. Ilya Budraitskis briefly interviewed him for their website. This is a reprint of the interview from the Moscow Biennale’s website. Earlier you spoke about the window of opportunity to change […]
(source: WdW Review) In January 2014 the world held its breath and observed the opening of the Winter Olympics in Sochi. The spectacular opening ceremony, “Dreams of Russia,” was not simply a technical triumph but also a marvel of national history building. The depicted historical events acquired connections and a certain mutual continuity, building a […]
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 […]
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 […]