We need an international campaign for UN peacekeepers to enter Ukraine
In the future, historians will write books about what really happened during the current escalation. The archives will open, sources will talk. And the books will address what was discussed at diplomatic negotiations, what the Kremlin actually wanted as it made its unfulfillable demands, and why sources in the Western media ramped up the threat […]
The Marxist-Humanism of Raya Dunayevskaya
The overblown expectations of many pundits in the 1990s that the collapse of the “communist” regimes heralded a “neoliberal era” defined by unincumbered free markets, continuous economic growth, and expansive political liberty has clearly proven hollow. The economic, racial, and gendered inequities that have historically characterized capitalism has only become exacerbated in recent decades, as […]
Armed Blackmail Will Never Bring Peace to Eastern Ukraine
Last month, Russia began to amass troops close to its border with Ukraine. Kremlin top brass’s media interventions seeking to explain the buildup of around one hundred thousand troops were ambiguous: from reassurances that these were simple military exercises to effective threats of a full-fledged war if Ukraine should join NATO. The demonstrative character of these actions […]
Ilya Budraitskis: Left-Wing Dissidents Were the Link between the Pre-Soviet Socialist Tradition and the Post-Soviet One
A few years ago, your collection of essays Dissidenty sredi dissidentov (Dissidents among dissidents) was published. The central issue in it was the history of left-wing dissidents in the USSR. The book will be published by Verso in 2022. How did you become interested in this topic? I found this topic interesting back at the […]
Why is the world divided into poor and rich countries?
This essay will explain why it is that despite historically unprecedented globalization of free trade, the rich countries remain rich, while the poor countries remain poor. Beginning here, and more closely in future article,we will use a theoretical perspective derived from the work of the Marxist economist Arghiri Emmanuel to analyze the history and present […]
Between Drahomanov and Marx: The Political Life of Lesya Ukrainka
At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, socialist views were more the norm than the exception among the younger generation of Ukrainian cultural and political figures. Many Ukrainian activists of the first half of the 20th century gained their first experiences in political participation, journalistic writing, and encounters with police repression within the […]
The time of displacement
We left with mom for three months, or maybe a month. We did not take our things because we thought it’s just, well, a small mess, something that will pass soon. We could not wrap our minds around the idea that something like this could happen in a civilised country. If we are already going […]
Partisans or Workers? Figures of Belarusian Protest and Their Prospects
These week’s protests in Belarus have clearly overcome their initial electoral focus and morphed into an expanding dissident movement of urban middle class and workers. In a recent (August 4) article for Open Democracy platform on the presidential campaign in Belarus, I tried to explain why the opposition candidates from the ruling elite and the “creative class” […]
More contagious than coronavirus: electoral unrest under Lukashenka’s tired rule in Belarus
Volodymyr Artiukh At the onset of Covid-19, everyone in Belarus, including president Lukashenka, expected that the elections planned for 9 August would be at the very least boring. The country’s previous presidential campaign in 2015 was bleak and predictable, characterised by a cold truce which had set in between Belarus’ opposition, terrified by Russia’s activity in […]
Zelensky team’s passing chance to end the war in Donbas
After the election of the sixth President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, a “window of opportunity” opened for speeding up the peace process in the East of the country. Zelensky often called himself “the president of peace”, promised to end the conflict in Donbas during his tenure, and emphasized the need for dialogue with all parties. […]
