Eastern Europe

Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko kept himself in power by rigging elections in 2020 and then using mass arrests and terror against the movement which rose up against him. There are now about 1,200 political prisoners in Belarus, including working-class activists from the independent trade union movement which struck in opposition to Lukashenko. Belarus is closely aligned with Vladimir Putin’s Russia and allowed Russia to invade northern Ukraine in February, using Belarus as a staging post and a base. Tens of thousands of Russian troops were deployed from Belarus. The invasion...

Mikhail Fridman is one of the wealthiest men in Russia and a close associate of Vladimir Putin. He was included in the earliest lists of individuals sanctioned by the West for his complicity in the criminal invasion of Ukraine. Among his many investments is a Georgian mineral water company known as “Borjomi” - which is the spa town where the local water has been bottled for more than a century. The sulphurous taste of the water is not to everyone’s liking, but for decades the company has profited from the perception that Borjomi water has certain healing properties. After the collapse of...

The wolf image has been used by fascist groups in Turkey like the Grey Wolves, and the other silhouette is the Turul, a bird from Magyar foundation mythology There are a number of important "cross-overs" between the Eurasianism found on the Russia far right and "Turanism" in and around Hungary. Principally, both have involved a rejection of the west, in favour of looking to the east. At some point in the middle/late nineteenth century (the exact timescale is unclear) certain Hungarians, no doubt dissatisfied with the way their country was being westernised, seeing Pan-Slavism (the unity of all...

The latest opinion polls suggest that, in Hungary's elections on 3 April, the ruling party, Fidesz, will receive more votes than United for Hungary, an alliance of all the major opposition parties. The alliance includes: MSZP, the Hungarian Socialist Party, which was in power prior to Orbán; Democratic Coalition, the liberal party formed by Ferenc Gyurcsány, an unpopular previous prime minister, after leaving MSZP; Jobbik, a “former” far-right party, which has tried to distance itself from its racist and anti-semitic roots in the last few years, and now defines itself as a “conservative, pro...

When the Council of Europe suspended Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, the only vote against was from Armenia. Since the end of Armenia’s war with Azerbaijan in autumn 2020, two thousand Russian “peacekeepers” have been protecting it from its neighbour. Ukraine backed and aided Azerbaijan in the war. Now the conflict may be starting again. There are reports that Azerbaijani forces have crossed the “line of contact” established in November 2020 and fired on soldiers of the ethnic-Armenian Republic of Artsakh in Azerbaijan’s Nagorno-Karabakh region. The Armenian government says Azerbaijan has...

Teachers in Hungary launched an indefinite strike from 16 March. The two education workers’ unions, PDSZ and PSZ, demand increased wages for teachers and everyone else working in education. They also want to place a cap on the weekly amount of mandatory hours spent teaching at 22 hours. Hungary has the second lowest pay for teachers in the EU after Bulgaria. The yearly take-home pay was 4,854 euros in 2018/2019. Meanwhile, teachers in Scotland take home an average of 32,195 euros. It also takes Hungarian teachers 42 years to reach the highest grade of pay in their field. Before 2014, teachers’...

What makes Russian President Vladimir Putin tick, ideologically? One starting point could be the body of ideas called Eurasianism and the writings of Alexander Dugin (pictured above), sometimes referred to (fancifully) as “Putin’s Rasputin”. In times of political and social dislocation, ideas and theories can emerge from the fringes of society which challenge the standard divisions of right and left. The period after the collapse of the Soviet Union was one such time. There are many historical examples; for example, the varied sects that arose during the English revolutionary period of the...

British soldier in Bosnia in the 1990s, there to provide security for UN aid convoys In Croatia's war of independence (1991-5), about 14,000 civilians died; in the Bosnian war (1992-5), about 40,000; in the Kosovan war (1998-9), about 12,000. We distrust and dislike NATO; but it was far from the main problem in these cases. It intervened only very late (a short bombing campaign against Serb nationalists in Bosnia in September 1995, another against Serbia over Kosova in March-June 1999), and it accounted for some hundreds among the tens of thousands of civilian casualties. The great majority...

When the Soviet Union came crashing down three decades ago, among the very first republics to declare independence were the three Baltic states - Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. This made sense as they had been among the last to be brought under Soviet rule, back in the 1940s. There were people living in those countries who remembered independence in their lifetimes. What many of us hoped for back then was a quick revival of the political parties that had been crushed under Communist Party rule, and the emergence of strong, independent trade unions to replace the state-controlled labour fronts...