Russia

Michael Baker spoke with Olenka and Brie, two activists from the Ukrainian socialist organisation Sotsialny Rukh (Social Movement), about how the war is affecting the struggle for women’s liberation in Ukraine, and how the international feminist movement can help. Olenka and Brie visited the UK for a speaker tour organised by Workers' Liberty, 4-16 March 2023 (more details here ). Published in our socialist feminist magazine Women's Fightback : issue 28, Spring 2023 . Can you both introduce yourselves and Sotsialny Rukh? Brie: . I came to the left in about 2014, when I joined the independent...

Loretta Marie Perera talks with anti-war Russians, one year later February 24, 2022 needs no introduction. We’re now into the second year of Russia’s war against Ukraine, with no sign of it stopping. While 700,000 is the general estimate for Russians who have left the country since the start of the war, with a large spike following mobilisation in September 2022, other sources cite as many as four million leaving the country in the first few months of 2022 alone — countries such as Georgia and Armenia saw as many as 4.5 times the number of arriving Russian citizens as the year before. A year...

Alexei Navalny, Russia’s jailed opposition leader, has published a manifesto for the first time in his long and varied political career. Is this “better late than never”, or “too little, too late”? The manifesto has fifteen points, but most discussion has centred on a small handful of them. Perhaps most notably, as well as calling for the unconditional withdrawal of troops and cooperation with international investigations into Russian war crimes, Navalny has made a U-turn on his prior position regarding Ukraine’s borders, particularly Crimea: “What are Ukraine’s borders? They are similar to...

As the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 approaches it is worth taking a balance sheet of the war, its human costs, political consequences and the left’s response. Ukraine was a poor country before the war began, but its GDP slumped by 45% in 2022. Well over 100,000 residential buildings have been damaged or destroyed. 8 million Ukrainian refugees are now registered across Europe, from a pre-invasion population of 44mn; a further 5mn, at least, are internally displaced. In October 2022 Ukrainian Prime Minister Denis Schmyhal estimated the cost of re...

Russian journalists put their lives on the line to expose the corrupt Putin regime. At least 38 have been murdered in Russia since he came to power. Others face physical attacks, arrest and constant intimidation. One would hope that investigative journalists in Britain can write about Putin and his cronies without suffering negative consequences, given the UK government has imposed several sets of sanctions against oligarchs associated with the Kremlin. That supposition, however, ignores Britain's lenient libel laws, which disproportionately favour the rich and powerful, as well as amoral law...

Andrei Sakharov A spectre is haunting Vladimir Putin — the spectre of Andrei Sakharov. Sakharov was a physicist and the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb. He later became a world-famous campaigner for peace, democracy and human rights. He spent several years in internal exile as the regime did all it could to silence him. In 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev phoned him up to say that he and his wife could finally return to Moscow. Sakharov swiftly took advantage of the democratic reforms which were then transforming the Soviet Union. When free elections were held for the first time since 1917, Sakharov...

Gone: Dan Rapoport For some oligarchs in Putin’s Russia, business isn’t just dangerous, it’s proving to be fatal. Since we highlighted numerous “unexplained deaths” last May ( Solidarity 636), another batch of prominent Russian business people have met with mysterious ends. Some of the latest fatalities — Dan Rapoport, Ravil Maganov, Gregory Kochenov, Pavel Antov — slipped this mortal coil falling from those extremely unsafe Russian windows. Others suffered fatal falls from a motorboat (Ivan Pechorin) or down a flight of stairs (Anatoly Geraschenko. Dmitriy Zelenov). The gunshot wound that saw...

Nearly 170 years ago, Britain was at war with Russia and Karl Marx was convinced that the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, was colluding secretly with the enemy. During his research in the British Museum Marx examined hundreds of British diplomatic documents. His conclusion, according to his biographer Boris Nicolaevsky, was that the documents “revealed a secret connivance between the cabinets in London and St Petersburg dating from the time of Peter the Great.” In other words, for more than a century. Marx went even further than this. Palmerston, he told Friedrich Engels in a letter, had “for...

This article was originally published by Russian student magazine DOXA . Translated by Michael Baker. Although tens of millions of Russians oppose the actions of their government, it is no longer possible to protest legally or to build legal organisations in Russia; private discontent and the actions of individuals are not going to achieve a serious political effect. Now that we need to rebuild the opposition movement from scratch, we have an opportunity to reflect once more on the goals it sets for itself, what it hopes to achieve, and the approaches they choose based on these considerations...

Russian couriers' strike, 2020. Attempts to revive an independent labour movement in Russia must learn the lessons of Sotsprof Part One: Khramov Founded in Moscow in the dying days of the Soviet Union, the trade union Sotsprof (Socialist Trade Union) seemed to be a harbinger of the revival of class-struggle trade unionism. According to the Russian socialist Mikhail Malyutin, in an interview published in 1990 by International Viewpoint , the journal of the avowedly Trotskyist United Secretariat of the Fourth International: “There are some other organisations who support the struggle for a New...