Russia

When I studied at university, I had access to reprinted editions of many American left publications. Among them was Labor Action , the weekly newspaper of Max Shachtman’s Workers Party. I have never forgotten the headline from an edition in late August 1940. The headline was “Stalin has murdered our comrade Trotsky”. Those first three words are still relevant today: “Stalin has murdered”. Because we now know, decades later, that the assassin was in fact an agent of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. But back then in August 1940, we did not really know. The assassin had pretended to be someone...

Ten years ago — in the early hours of 23 February 2014 — Russian President Vladimir Putin met with his personal advisers and military and security chiefs. The meeting agreed that Russia should seize the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea. Less than 24 hours earlier Putin’s placeman in Ukraine, President Viktor Yanukovych, had fled Kyiv after three months of mass popular protests. He had then been voted out of office by the Ukrainian Parliament. Even before Putin’s meeting had finished, Russia was already transporting marine and Spetsnaz (Special Operations) units to the Anapa airfield on the...

Keke would have been so proud. When her son Joseph was growing up in the small, dusty town of Gori, she dreamed that one day he would be a priest. He did eventually study at the Tbilisi Theological Seminary, but like so many others, he spent more time secretly reading banned books than studying for the priesthood. He was eventually thrown out of the seminary, and according to stories that made the rounds, he told the authorities about all the other students at the seminary who shared his radical views — who were then expelled as well. Joseph went on to become a revolutionary, and took on the...

Ukraine is the victim of unprovoked Russian imperialist aggression. Ukraine is facing an enemy — Russian President, Vladimir Putin — who has openly stated that Russia’s war aims are to abolish Ukraine and subsume it into Russia. Russia’s brutal war has probably cost Ukraine 70,000 military dead, some thousands of civilian casualties including at least 550 children. 1700 secondary schools and over 1,200 medical facilities have been damaged or destroyed together with 170,000 units of housing. 18% of Ukrainian territory is currently occupied by Russia and 5mn people have fled the country. Russia...

From a speech at a local Workers’ Liberty meeting by an anti-war, anti-Putin Russian exile My name is Salavat Abylkalikov, and I come from Russia. My actions and speeches against Putin’s aggressive war on Ukraine have placed me and my family in a dangerous position. I sincerely thank... all of you for making sure my family is now safe. However, today I don’t wish to speak about myself. Often, Putin is portrayed as the embodiment of evil, but in reality, he’s just an ordinary person with certain personality traits. He lacks moral compass, principles, and beliefs. He thinks like a criminal...

Nikolai Yuriev, who is accused of planning to set fire to a military recruitment centre, has been sentenced to 18 years in prison. The Central District Military Court in Yekaterinburg sentenced Yuriev for planning to set fire to a military recruitment centre in Novouralsk, one of Rosatom’s “closed cities” [cities in Russia and the former USSR where migration in and out is monitored by the state]. Nikolai was detained on the street on 5 February. He confessed to planning to commit arson on a military recruitment centre using a Molotov cocktail. According to the investigation, he prepared...

After an ambiguous Russian Supreme Court ruling, trans people in Russia are "scared for their lives"

Michael Baker’s discontent ( Solidarity 689 ) with the sentence added in sub-editing to Solidarity 688 to signal how there come to be so many people of Russian background in Israel must be partly down to us being too elliptical. The sentence said that Russians came to Israel in the 1990s “fleeing antisemitism”, not that they were fleeing antisemitic violence . It did not seek to deny that better economic prospects in Israel, and the fact that Israel would let them in, were factors. I had in mind the book Love and Math , by Edward Frenkel. Frenkel describes how as a talented young mathematician...

A sentence that was added by an editor for context to my article for Solidarity 688, on the antisemitic protests in Dagestan, unintentionally misrepresented my views on migration to Israel from the (former) Soviet Union. Contrary to the editor, I do not believe that the majority of Soviet Jews were “fleeing Russian antisemitism”. While Soviet Russia certainly had a horrific history of antisemitism, by the 1980s and 1990s this was considerably less pronounced than it had been for almost the entirety of the rest of the union’s existence. The reasons for migration to Israel were far more linked...

Russia has now seen what may be the starkest outburst of antisemitism worldwide since the beginning of the war in Israel-Gaza. Ten people (largely police and protestors) were taken to hospital, with two left in a critical condition, on Sunday 29 October, after a crowd stormed Makhachkala International Airport in Dagestan, looking for passengers from an inbound Israeli flight. Hundreds of protestors gathered outside the airport after rumours spread through local Telegram channels that a Tel Aviv-Makhachkala flight would be bringing refugees to be relocated in Dagestan. Some in the crowd carried...