Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
Mikhail Gorbachev is remembered in the West as a liberal man of peace, while in Russia he’s blamed for disastrous national decline. Gareth Dale sets Gorbachev in his historical context and rejects both assessments, beginning on a personal note.
In an immediate, personal sense I am grateful that (...)
Every year, an estimated 13 million people go whale-watching around the world, marveling at the sight of the largest animals ever to inhabit Earth. It’s a dramatic reversal from a century ago, when few people ever saw a living whale. The creatures are still recovering from massive (...)
An interview with human rights activist Vyacheslav Bakhmin about the atmosphere of that critical moment and the relevance of parallels with today’s war
The comparisons of the current war in Ukraine with the entry of Soviet troops into Afghanistan forty years ago are currently very popular. And (...)
In this three-part interview, conducted, transcribed and edited by Zoltán Ginelli, history professor James Mark talks about his latest book
James Mark is a British Professor of History at the University of Exeter. His research focuses on the history and memory politics of state-socialism in (...)
The following account of the Moscow-based Communist University for Toilers of the East in Moscow (1921-1938) seeks to counter the prevailing tendency among scholars of the Global South to foreshorten the history of their subject. For a long while, Edward Said’s magisterial Orientalism (1978) was (...)
There was no Maoist plot against the ’socialist’ regime in Hungary. There was however a university student group of 50-70 people, who in the 1960s felt that the country’s Socialism was not good enough. They did not want to overthrow the system, but to repair it. Authorities however did not (...)
The Polish Communists were savagely persecuted by Stalin in the 1930s, before he raised their party to power after 1945. Despite attempts at reform, their regime could never transcend its origins as a Soviet satellite state.
Forty years ago this week, Poland’s independent trade-union movement, (...)
The Civil War of 1917–21 brought the third wave of pogroms in the former Russian Empire, mostly perpetrated by the counterrevolutionary forces. But even some Red Army units committed antisemitic atrocities — and independent Jewish socialists played a decisive role in forcing the Soviet state to (...)
As Putin extends his rule once again, the need for social democracy in Russia has never been clearer.
Russia needs a modern, democratic left-wing political force – this what we increasingly hear from political analysts and the Russian media, which not so long ago viewed slogans about defending (...)
Thirty years ago, on 9 November 1989, a mass movement brought about the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now that insurgent pro-democracy movements are on the rise once again around the world, the anniversary of 1989 reminds us of the potential power of working class people to bring down apparently (...)
East German musician Wolf Biermann took the stage in West Germany in November 1976. His performance unleashed a chain reaction of criticism from both the communist state and its citizens — with historic consequences.
“The barbed wire grows slowly inward / deep into the skin, into the chest and (...)
Karol Modzelewski emerged in the 1960s as a leading dissident against Poland’s state socialist dictatorship — but he remained a socialist until the very end.
A giant of the Polish left, Karol Modzelewski died on April 28 at the age of eighty-one. He is best-known in the West as the co-author (...)
The scenes of thousands of East Germans passing through the Berlin Wall crossing on November 9, 1989 are remembered as the end of the Cold War. But on November 4, almost a million had demonstrated for reform — and they wanted to create democratic socialism on East German soil.
The demonstration (...)
The sprawling system of Soviet camps contained many untold stories. I spoke to one of the few historians researching the experiences of gay men and lesbians in the Gulag to find out more.
The list of publications about Stalin’s Gulag might be long, but what do we know about the lives of queer people in Soviet concentration camps? This interview introduces the work of acclaimed historian Dan Healey, who sheds light on how gay men survived the Soviet Gulag, their life afterwards and (...)
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.
Book cover: Dissidents Among Dissidents, by Ilya Budraitskis (Free Marxist Press)
Introduction
One would have hoped that the (...)
Petr Uhl (born Oct. 8 1941), Czech journalist, longtime prisoner of conscience and former member of the 4th International. Since the 1960s he has been one of the foremost representatives of the radical left in Czechoslovakia. In 1968 he was one of the main organisers of the Intellectual (...)
Ilja Trojanow’s latest documentary‑fiction novel deals with two men, Metodi and Konstantin, who grew up in the Bulgarian countryside, went to school together but have been personal and political opponents ever since Metodi informed on Konstantin. While this secured Metodi a high‑flying career in (...)
Historical information about the repression of gay men in the Soviet Union in the wake of the government’s re-criminalisation of homosexuality in 1933, after its decriminalisation in 1922. Trigger warning for sexual violence.
Anal and genital contact between consenting males became a criminal (...)
Review by John Riddell of ((The Contradictions of “Real Socialism”: The Conductor and the Conducted)), by Michael A. Lebowitz, New York: Monthly Review 2012.
In current discussions of twenty-first century socialism, the work of Michael Lebowitz has a unique merit: it is rooted in the experience (...)
The death of the former Czech president and emblematic figure of the dissident movements in the countries of Eastern Europe is giving rise to a somewhat debatable rewriting of history. Havel is presented today as an “anticommunist resistant”, a combatant “against communism”, the liberator of (...)
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