Eastern Europe

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...

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...

William Burns, director of the CIA, estimates that Russian casualties in Ukraine have reached around 15,000 killed and perhaps 45,000 wounded. Russia has suffered the same number of military fatalities in a few months of war in Ukraine as the USSR in the decade it fought in Afghanistan. A growing number of Russian troops are refusing to fight. For example, Corporal Ilya Kaminsky and 77 other troops from Russia’s 11th Air Assault Brigade have refused to return to the front after four and a half months without leave during which, according to Kaminsky, around 1,000 troops — or half his battalion...

Putin’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, declared to state media outlet RIA Novosti on 20 July, that Russia’s war aims now go beyond the seizure of the east of Ukraine. On 23 July, in Cairo, he went further: Russia’s aim is to remove Ukraine’s government. Attempting to blame the West, Lavrov said Russia would have to push Ukraine’s forces further back as the US had supplied Ukraine with highly accurate, longer-range weapons. The US believes Russia intends to stage sham referendums in southern Ukraine, perhaps as early as September, and then declare the annexation of areas round Kherson and...

International campaigning continues in support of prisoners in Belarus accused of acts of sabotage against the country’s railways in the mass protests of 2020, and in protests earlier this year against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. In the summer and autumn of 2020 protests and demonstrations swept through Belarus after Alexander Lukashenko, in power since 1994, was declared the winner in an election which international monitors dismissed as one based on intimidation, repression, violence and straightforward ballot-rigging. Workers of Belarusian Railways – a state-run organisation controlled by...

Only a fortnight before Putin attacked Ukraine, using Belarus as one of the launch pads for his invasion, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko issued Decree No. 34 . Signed off on 9 February, the decree ordered that call-up papers for “active-duty military service” were to be issued to all Belarusian males who turned 18 years of age in the period February-May. But by mid-July the number of conscripts who had responded to the call-up amounted to a mere 6,000 – despite over 43,000 call-up papers having been issued. In part, this mass evasion of the call-up reflects the general lack of...

The July 2022 Annual General Meeting of UK rail and transport union RMT - currently engaged in national strike action to defend wages, jobs and conditions on the railways - passed the following in solidarity with rail workers in Belarus, jailed for taking action in solidarity with Ukraine. Free the Belarus Railway 11 This union notes that: 1. on 19 April 2022, more than twenty leaders and activists of the Belarusian Congress of Democratic Trade Unions (BKDP) were detained by State Security. At least ten are still in custody, including the BKDP President and International Trade Union...

On 17 June Kazakhstan’s President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev discussed world politics with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg. Tokayev repeated his refusal to recognise the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics in eastern Ukraine, formally recognised by Russia two days before the invasion on Ukraine on 24 February. In January Russian troops had helped Tokayev snuff out a crisis in Kazakhstan. But Kazakhstan has a long border with Russia and a large ethnic Russian minority in its northern areas. Russian MPs then threatened Kazakhstan. Konstantin Zatulin said,...

Estonian women landworkers c. late 1890s Len Glover reviews Vargamäe (vol. 1 of the Truth and Justice pentalogy), by A H Tammsaare; first English translation by Inna Feldbach and Alan Peter Trei; published by Vagabond Voices, Glasgow, 2019. Estonian fiction is not that well-known in the English-speaking world and small nations have to shout loudly for their voices to be heard. Considered by many to be the landmark novel of Estonian literature, A. H. Tammsaare’s 1926 book Vargamäe is now, at last, available to the English language reader. Tammsaare (originally Anton Hansen, 1878) was born into...