Eastern Europe

From the archives: How the STUC ratted on Solidarnosc in 1982

In late 1981 Stalinist Poland's one-party state imposed martial law in an attempt to crush the free trade union Solidarnosc. Mass arrests of its leaders were carried out, the riot police were used to break strikes, and government forces shot and killed demonstrators. The following report from Socialist Organiser (predecessor of Solidarity ) describes the debate on Poland at the 1982 STUC congress and the controversy triggered by motions advocating that the STUC sever links, as an act of solidarity with Solidarnosc, with the fake Stalinist "trade unions" in Eastern Europe. … The need for such...

Country and city in Estonia

Indrek by A.H. Tammsaare is volume 2 of the "Truth and Justice" pentalogy The second of A. H. Tammsaare’s classic five volume epic of Estonian life is now available in English. I reviewed the first volume, ‘Vargäme’ online in Solidarity 638 . At the end of that volume, Indrek, son of the farmer Andres Paas, leaves Vargäme, the remote village of his birth, to settle in the university town of Tartu. In some respects it is a classic tale of country bumpkin meets the city. He attends the boarding school of odd-ball Headmaster Maurus, a figure straight out of Dickens (minus the violence). Indrek’s...

The dark side of Ikea

As a company based in Sweden, which is home to some of the world’s most powerful unions, you would think that IKEA would be an employer that understood the importance of workers’ rights. And if you read what the company says about itself, it sounds wonderful. On their website, IKEA says that it takes into consideration “at a minimum” the following: “the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work.” That...

Kino Eye: Holocaust Memorial Day - Eva's diary

Friday 27 January was International Holocaust Remembrance Day. My chosen film, unfortunately, is not easily accessible and is not that well-known. Omer Bartov in his otherwise excellent book The “Jew” in Cinema doesn’t even mention it, although it is one of the most interesting, if perplexing because of a peculiar twist, of the films depicting those terrible events. There was a publishing sensation in post-war Hungary when the diary of Holocaust victim Éva Heyman, a 13 year-old girl from the Transylvanian town of Nagyvárad (now Oradea in Romania), was found by her mother. Éva perished in...

G M Tamás, 1948-2023

Gáspár Miklós Tamás, a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, passed away on 15 January, at the age of 74. Under the Stalinist regime of Hungary, he was a dissident, libertarian socialist, who got fired from his teaching position at the University of Budapest for political reasons. He became the leader of the liberal Alliance of Free Democrats in 1989, where he represented the right-wing of the party, at the beginning of Hungary’s transition to market capitalism / capitalist democracy. He started identifying as a Marxist again in the 2000s, and was elected president for the extra-parliamentary eco...

Kino Eye: Football on film

A football film? Not an easy choice: as a critic once put it, you either have footballers who can’t act or actors who can’t play football. The end-product is fairly predictable. A good illustration is the ludicrous Escape to Victory (directed by John Huston, 1981) where a scratch team of World War 2 POWs (which for some inexplicable reason includes Pelé) take on a crack German team and force a draw while managing to escape their captors in the post-match chaos. It’s good for a laugh — and not much else — but was partly inspired by a much better Hungarian film Two Half Times in Hell (1961)...

1,450 political prisoners in Belarus

Sunday 27 November was the Global Day of Solidarity with Belarusian Political Prisoners. They currently number some 1,450 – but the number continues to increase. Initiated by exiled opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the Day of Solidarity was backed by a range of Belarusian human rights organisations which have supported and campaigned for the release of the country’s political prisoners. Exiled Belarusian communities and professional associations whose members in Belarus have been targeted for repression, such as the European Federation of Journalists and the Belarusian Association of...

Kino Eye: A film for Tube workers

Comrades working on the London Underground should enjoy this. Kontroll (2003, directed by Hungarian Antal Nimród) takes place entirely within the Budapest Metro, where a hilariously incompetent team of ticket inspectors (the “kontroll”) attempt to carry out their duties, only to be harassed at every turn by ticker-dodgers, drunks, gangs of thugs and tourists. Meanwhile a hooded killer is pushing people under oncoming trains. Trying to hold his team of deadbeats together and keep his sanity in all this is Bulcsú (Sándor Csányi). Bulscú’s rival, the thuggish Gonzó (Balázs Mihályfi), challenges...

Far right rallies 70,000 in Prague

Czech Communist Party members at far-right demonstration On 3 September, a 70,000-strong crowd took to Prague’s Wenceslas Square to demand action on the rising cost of living and energy prices. The demands for governments to act rising across Europe give an opportunity for the labour movement to push forward a political agenda of social justice and workers’ rights. But in fact the protest in Prague was organised by a vicious alliance of far-right forces pushing anti-immigrant and anti-vax conspiracy theories alongside demands to abandon Ukraine and support Russia for the sake of cheap gas. The...

Orbán: best just to say nothing?

On 23 July, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán spoke to to ethnic Hungarians in Romania. He argued that his supporters “do not want to become peoples of mixed race”. He went on to claim that migration had divided Europe into two. In one part, Europeans and non-Europeans were living together. The countries where this was happening were no longer "nations", merely conglomerates of peoples. The clear message was that "racial purity" must be maintained at all costs. A longtime friend and adviser to Orbán, Zsuzsa Hegedus, resigned after the speech, calling it a “pure Nazi text… worthy of...

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