Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
ON APRIL 26, 1986, one of the reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine exploded, scattering highly radioactive materials into the surroundings. As the fire ignited by the explosion in the reactor core burned, more radioactive effluent was expelled and swept by the winds from the (...)
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 (...)
Events in Ukraine during World War Two have come to feature greatly in analysis and commentary since the Russo-Ukraine war began in 2014. The Kremlin has revived Stalinist narratives of branding virtually any expression of Ukraine’s desire for greater freedom and independence as associated with (...)
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 (...)
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 (...)
Amid all this celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago, I’m left wondering whether I was the only one to have jumped the other way at the time. It turned me into a Marxist. All my adult life before then I had thought that Marx had been wrong, for example in predicting that (...)
PARIS, Nov (IPS) It’s been twenty years since the Berlin Wall came down, on November 9, 1989. Today, as capitalism staggers beneath the blows of a historic crisis, what can we say about the intervening two decades? Why have other equally offensive and unacceptable walls not fallen?
Symbolically (...)
November 21 2008 marked the fortieth anniversary of the end of the student strike in Czechoslovakia against the occupation of the country by Russian troops the preceding August.
The strike began in Prague and spread throughout Bohemia and Moravia, following the most dramatic year of post-war (...)
THE OCTOBER REVOLUTION of 1917 in Russia was the most influential political event of the 20th century. But since history is written by the victors, it is not well known that October was the opening shot of a vast and powerful challenge to capitalism that swept the industrial world and had (...)
At dawn on November 4, Russian tanks, which had withdrawn from Budapest after the first round of fighting, returned. Six thousand guns opened fire on the city, raining phosphorous shells on combatants and non-combatants alike. Knowing that the attack was coming, “reform Communist” Prime Minister (...)
The insurrectional uprising in the Polish town of Poznan in June 1956 shone a searchlight on the crisis of Stalinism. Preceded by a similar event in East Berlin (in 1953) and followed four months later by the Hungarian Revolution (October 1956), the Poznan insurrection opened the great cycle of (...)
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