From the Autonomous Workers Union’s statement on Russian intervention:
“The war can be averted only if proletarians of all countries, first and foremost Ukrainian and Russian, together make a stand against the criminal regime of Putin.
AWU statement on Russian intervention
3 03 2014Comments : 3 Comments »
Tags: Crimea
Categories : Left politics, Uncategorized
Ukrainian leftists’ & anarchists’ statement
3 03 2014This statement by the Autonomous Workers Union and the Direct Action Independent Student Union makes clear the rift within the Ukrainian left between those who broadly support the anti-Yanukovych movement, participating in the Maidan to varying degrees, and those — primarily Borot’ba, but also the Progressive Socialist Party and Oplot — who align themselves with pro-Russian and Eurasianist forces.
Comments : 9 Comments »
Categories : Ukrainian Left politics
Wynnyckyj: Deciphering Putin
3 03 2014From Mykhailo Wynnyckyj, a political scientist based at Kyiv Mohyla Academy, who has been posting perceptive on-the-ground analyses of the Maidan and its aftermath:
“most western analysis of the motivations behind Putin’s military excursion into the Crimea (and his massive buildup of personnel and equipment on Ukraine’s eastern border) can be classified into two camps:
Comments : 1 Comment »
Categories : Putin, Uncategorized
Snyder: The haze of propaganda
2 03 2014Historian Timothy Snyder reviews the “haze of propaganda” surrounding the crisis in Ukraine in the New York Review of Books:
“Interestingly, the message from authoritarian regimes in Moscow and Kiev was not so different from some of what was written during the uprising in the English-speaking world, especially in publications of the far left and the far right. From Lyndon LaRouche’s Executive Intelligence Review through Ron Paul’s newsletter through The Nation and The Guardian, the story was essentially the same: little of the factual history of the protests, but instead a play on the idea of a nationalist, fascist, or even Nazi coup d’état.”
Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: Timothy Snyder
Categories : Media war, Russian propaganda
Kurkov: I’m Russian and I demand removal of Russian troops from Ukraine
2 03 2014Andrei Kurkov is the leading Russian-language writer and novelist in Ukraine. He writes:
“I’m a Russian. My ancestors settled in Crimea in 1785. Growing up in Crimea, I was nurtured on Russian culture. I think, I talk, and I write in Russian…
“And I want to say this with every fibre of my being: I don’t need any protection. I demand the immediate removal of Russian troops from Ukraine.”
Comments : 10 Comments »
Categories : Identities, Statements
Ab Imperio statements
1 03 2014Ab Imperio is one of the leading scholarly journals covering the post-Soviet world. Two recent editorial statements concern events in Ukraine. Read them here:
An appeal of the Ukrainian scholars to the international scholarly community (from March 2)
Russian intervention in Ukraine is a disgrace! (from March 1)
Comments : 6 Comments »
Categories : Statements
Onuch & Sasse: Lessons in protest
27 02 2014Oxford University political scientists political scientists Olga Onuch and Gwendolyn Sasse have been analyzing the dynamics of the development of the Ukrainian protest movement, from its first stages through to February 22.
Some of their analysis is reported in this blog in this Washington Post blog article.
Comments : 13 Comments »
Categories : Identities, Uncategorized
Gusev: Russian activists facing danger
26 02 2014Alexei Gusev is a professor of history at Moscow State University and chair of the Praxis Research and Educational Center in Moscow. The following is a letter he sent to Richard Greeman, who asked that I post it online.
Dear Richard,
Comments : 51 Comments »
Tags: Russia
Categories : Left politics, Uncategorized
Greeman: Revolution’s first phase now complete
25 02 2014A friend of mine alerted me to the following unpublished text, which was sent to a network of activists in the international Left. It is by retired scholar and activist Richard Greeman, director of the International Victor Serge Foundation, co-founder of the Praxis Research and Education Center in Moscow (which co-sponsored the first International Congress of Independant Labor Unions last November in Kyiv), and close colleague of political theorists Immanuel Wallerstein and Cornelius Castoriadis.
It is being published here by permission of the author.
Ukraine, Revolution or Coup?
Comments : 16 Comments »
Categories : Left politics, Uncategorized
TAZ is here, TAZ is gone
23 02 2014
The concept of the TAZ, or temporary autonomous zone, comes from “ontological anarchist” writer and poet Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson). It is intended to indicate a space of liberation, a space which is at once physical and real, if temporary, and metaphysical — a space of consciousness outside of the mental frames of social structure, from which a reimagination of the world may proceed.
Comments : 21 Comments »
Categories : Statements