Eastern Europe

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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)...

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...

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...