Culture
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Raphael up against the wall
In his 1918 poem Radovat’sia rano (It’s Too Early to Rejoice), Vladimir Mayakovsky, the most celebrated poet of his generation in Russia, muses that if his Bolshevik comrades were to ‘find a white guardsman’, they would, without doubt, put him ‘up against the wall’. At the time of the Russian Civil War, an enemy of the new revolutionary government would,…
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Westsplaining versus eastsplaining | Eurozine
Westsplaining emerged in the 1990s but gained visibility when Russia escalated its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Political scientists Jan Smoleński and Jan Dutkiewicz describe the phenomenon as an ‘unending stream of Western scholars and pundits’ that ‘condescend to explain the situation in Ukraine and Eastern Europe.’ And the gist of this ‘explanation’ is that ‘the situation’ came about…
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Emergency in Slovakia | Eurozine
‘Emergencies’ have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have eroded. F. Hayek The assassination attempt against Slovak prime minister Robert Fico on 15 May 2024 shocked Slovakia and attracted attention from around the world to this small central European country. Yet the population’s natural expression of grief and the prudent and calming words of the…
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Bracing for a populist surge
In all three Baltic states, the ubiquitous gloom stemming from Russia’s ongoing threat has firmed up the view of the European Union (EU) and NATO as guarantors of national security ahead of the 2024 European Parliament elections in early June. The result? Fewer eurosceptics and what is expected to be a larger than usual turnout on 9 June. According to…
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Vertical occupation | Eurozine
Wars have many beginnings, but they refuse to end — history is merciless in giving this lesson to us again and again. Amid the ten-year Russian war in Ukraine, this thought is unbearable. Despite all odds, we need the idea of victory to hold us together in a shared effort of moving through the horrid reality of loss and devastation…
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Back to square one | Eurozine
When intellectuals and politicians start talking obsessively about their country’s great ‘originality’, ‘special path’ and a ‘unique mission in the world’, it’s a sure sign they’re facing mounting problems in forging a modern democratic polity, civic nation and respectable international identity. Contemporary Russia is a case in point. Its new foreign policy doctrine, signed into law by President Vladimir Putin…
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Forerunners of the free market
In economic terms, state socialism is usually associated with the monopoly of an authoritarian state over core elements of the economy such as trade, the distribution of resources, and the regulation of wages and prices. Yet, limited forms of legal private enterprise – often in the form of micro-craft and retail (family) businesses –existed sporadically in some state socialist countries,…
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Of our daily plov | Eurozine
As a child in communist Romania of the 1980’s, I remember pilaf was one of the staples in the Ottoman-influenced cuisine of the south of the country. My mother and my grandmother used to put it in the oven, after briefly boiling the rice on the stove. Made with chicken (from the countryside, of course, as on the shelves of…
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Running scared | Eurozine
Leading up to the March 7 State of the Union speech, Biden supporters were scared. They had every reason to be. The President’s approval rating had dropped from 42% to an abysmal 38%, even lower than ex-President Trump’s before the January 6 riot. Biden’s stance on the Israeli-Gaza conflict was losing him support from the left wing of his party.…
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Silent Palestinians in Gaza and Israel
Editor’s note: This article was first published in Index on Censorship on 9 November 2023. Since then, many of the author’s predictions have been tragically confirmed, above all that of a vast-scale civilian catastrophe in Gaza. ‘Where are you Mohammed?’ I muttered to myself while scrolling down my Facebook feed. Since the start of war in Gaza, as soon as…
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