Eastern Europe

The fall of Stalinism in Eastern Europe — Workers' Liberty 3/25

Download as pdf , or read online below. Timeline Introduction 1. The risen people: Eastern Europe after the revolutions 2. What’s in the coffin at the funeral of socialism? 3. Lies against socialism answered 4. Stalin’s system collapses 5. Why socialists should support the banning of the CPSU 6. The triumph of unreason: market madness in the ex-USSR 7. What was the Bolsheviks’ conception of the 1917 revolution? 8. Why the workers want to restore capitalism 9. In the beginning was the critique of capitalism 10. An open letter to Ernest Mandel 11. Trotsky and the collapse of Stalinism 12. And...

The fight for free unions in Belarus

On 16 February Dzmitry Shcharbina, an employee of the OJSC Belarusian Steelworks, was charged under Article 130 of the Belarusian Criminal Code: “Incitement of racial, national, religious or other social enmity or discord”. The basis of the charge is his alleged participation in protests in his workplace after the rigged presidential elections of 2020. Dzmitry faces up to five years in prison. A few days earlier three employees of Gazprom Transgaz Belarus were taken into detention. According to the Belarusian trade-union-rights organisation Salidarnast, they were then forced to sign statements...

Belarus's 25 February election is rigged

In 2020 Alexander Lukashenko was elected to his sixth term of office as President of Belarus. Every election, apart from his first in 1994, has been neither free nor fair.

Exile and the fight for democracy

Olga Karach is a Belarusian dissident, who helped to found the human rights group “Nash Dom”, Our House, in 2005. She lives in exile in Lithuania, from where she has run the organisation since 2014. Olga spoke to Michael Baker. Our House We are a peace-building, human rights-focused, feminist organisation. More than 80% of our activists are women, and we do a lot of advocacy campaigns within Belarus, as well as in Lithuania and Poland. In Belarus there is a list of prohibited professions for women. That list used to contain 252 professions. It’s been lowered now, to 186. In our opinion there...

War moves wipe out Armenian enclave

After a one-day war initiated by Azerbaijan, the republic of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) has dissolved its borders, state structures and military. It has effectively wiped itself off the map. Most of its population has fled. The disputed ethnic-Armenian territory inside Azerbaijan had been blockaded for nine months. On 19 September, after demanding that Armenian troops evacuated the territory immediately (there was no proof of Armenian military in Artsakh), Azerbaijan began firing missiles and gunfire was heard throughout the area. Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan announced almost...

Against the blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh

The situation in the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) is growing increasingly desperate, as the Azerbaijan government’s blockade of the region deprives its majority-Armenian residents of food, water, electricity and medical equipment. The 2020 six-week war between Armenia and Azerbaijan ended in a peace treaty brokered by Russia. That treaty stopped open conflict while confirming Azerbaijan’s recapture of the roughly 20% of Azerbaijani territory that Armenia had won in the first war, from 1988-1994. The republic of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), an enclave of 120,000 ethnically...

Azerbaijan: new unions emerge

In places where existing trade unions fail to organise workers, new unions will often emerge to fill the gap. And those new unions will sometimes be the subject of state repression as a result. This is what appears to be happening today in Azerbaijan. The existing trade unions in the oil-rich former Soviet republic are strongly tied to the regime. The news on their website consists primarily of support for whatever the regime wants and says, and opposition to Azerbaijan’s traditional enemy, Armenia. Meanwhile a new union has come into existence to organise workers the traditional unions won’t...

Kino Eye: Milan Kundera (1929-2023) and a “joke” about Trotsky

The famous Czech writer, Milan Kundera, died on 11 July. Best-known for The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), he also wrote The Joke in 1967. Adapted for the screen by Czech film director Jaromil Jireš in 1969, the “joke” in question refers to a comment by the main protagonist Ludvik Jahn, a Young Communist, who sends a postcard to his lover, Markéta, while attending a Party Summer School. Ludvik thinks Markéta is far too serious and although the postcard is obviously meant as a (not very funny) joke, the repercussions are serious. It reads: “Optimism is the opium of the people. A ‘healthy...

Tbilisi: Meeting at a time of crises

I’ve just come back from an international conference that could not have happened thirty years ago. And it’s a conference that might also prove impossible to hold in just a few short years. LabourStart’s Global Solidarity Conference on the theme of “trade union internationalism today” was held on the weekend before May Day in Tbilisi, Georgia. The vast majority of the nearly 300 participants came from countries which within living memory had no legal independent trade unions. The post-Soviet world was represented not only by a large number of Georgian trade unionists, but also by...

Montenegro: A much-needed new start, but one that could further divide

Bar, Montenegro: On an otherwise quiet Sunday in this coastal town, horns started to blare and soon enough, round after round of fireworks erupted in the sky. The fireworks and horns weren't entirely unusual - in the small Balkan country, bouts of celebratory explosives are common, especially for sporting events and other celebrations. But on this night, the noise and festivities continued to intensify as the news spread: Djukanovic out, Milatovic in. The long-standing president of Montenegro, Milo Djukanovic, had lost a second round of votes that would decide the country's new leader (albeit...

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