Today, Armenians go to the polls to cast their votes in consequential parliamentary elections, which, according to most English-language media, will define the country’s foreign policy vector.

Most recently, Russia has begun putting economic pressure on Armenia following the deepening of diplomatic ties between the latter and the West. The EU, for its part, locally has pushed an aggressively anti-Russian agenda through its increasingly jingoistic foreign policy. Meanwhile, US President Trump has been unabashedly intervening in Armenia’s elections, dispensing with the pretense of nonintervention that his counterparts in Moscow and Brussels usually maintain. As a result, the English-language media coverage has largely subordinated Armenia’s domestic politics to the spectacle of regional geopolitics, viewing the country only through the prism of great-power competition.

The popular story about Armenian voters is that they care about two issues: the return to the ethnically cleansed Nagorno Karabakh (NK) and choosing between Russia and the EU as their civilizational destination. But credible survey data show that neither the issue of NK nor Armenia’s foreign policy vector dominates the electorate’s preferences. When it comes to foreign policy, preferences remain relatively balanced, tempered by fears of ‘turning Armenia into another Ukraine’ (a warning Russian officials continue to repeat with condescension). Meanwhile, the issue of NK, which defined post-Soviet Armenia’s identity through right-wing nationalism and militarism, is going through a transformation where anti-war sentiments are dominant in the Armenian political imaginary and discourse.

So, what issues actually sit at the top of the electorate’s priorities? Economic inequality and a peace agreement with Azerbaijan. By framing Armenia’s elections as a struggle between Russia and the West, foreign observers dismiss the issues that actually animate the electorate. The decisive questions for most Armenians are not geopolitical allegiance or civilizational destinations, but welfare reforms and provision at home, and the prospect of ending decades-long insecurity with regard to the conflict with Azerbaijan. These priorities only become more salient when the alternatives dismiss social protections and appear more willing to embrace the politics of war.

Nikol, the False Prophet

Nikol Pashinyan and his party, Civil Contract, came to power after the 2018 regime change. While some have characterized this regime change as a color revolution, thus linking it with earlier regime changes in post-Soviet countries, the driving factors behind it were largely domestic. In Spring 2018, a mass movement against Armenia’s oligarchic government began. By then, this government had realized that a war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over NK was inevitable, as the decades-long negotiations had reached a stalemate. Moreover, after the Four-Day war in 2016, they understood that the mere size difference between the two militaries indicated Armenia would lose the war. Then, the president-turned-PM Serzh Sargsyan resigned, leaving the responsibility for that war and its consequences to his successor government: Pashinyan. For two years, the oligarch-funded media claimed Pashinyan was preparing ‘to give our lands away,’ poisoning public discourse with hardline ethnonationalist rhetoric. The populist Pashinyan, in 2020, went to war with hawkish and bellicose rhetoric, which he has since admitted would have been avoided had Armenia at least negotiated the peaceful return of the Azerbaijani territories Armenian forces occupied around NK.

The 2020 war weakened Armenia, and its negotiating standing collapsed, which only led to more concessions being forced on Armenia by Azerbaijan and the mediators in Moscow and Brussels (and currently Washington). The ruling party, however, has spun this loss into a win, arguing that exiting the conflict has given Armenia freedom from the need to constantly seek a great power mediator, often openly saying that Russia has used the conflict for its own benefit. This has historically been true; most recently, the ceasefire agreement of November 9, 2020, had a provision on an extraterritorial corridor that would connect Azerbaijan to Nakhchivan, which would be overseen by the Russian FSB. This became the only point from that agreement that did not become defunct after the ethnic cleansing of NK as both Baku and Moscow were pushing for the corridor, with Iran and the EU playing different roles in the last three years in stopping them. Now, this corridor has been repackaged into the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP). Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

To those outside of Armenia, it may be puzzling why Pashinyan continues to be in power despite losing a war in 2020 and being in office when NK was ethnically cleansed in 2023. The issue of NK, however, is not as simple as some on the Armenian right – who dominate the diaspora and local media– will have everyone believe. Pashinyan has been campaigning on the premise that the previous governments, under the guise of national security, have continuously plundered the state budgets and left the military unable to fight the war, which they knew was brewing. According to him, the NK conflict has been used as an ideological smokescreen while the criminal-oligarchic regimes divided the Soviet-era wealth and infrastructure between themselves.

But Pashinyan could not popularize these narratives about the conflict and the wars if they were not already latent in Armenian public discourse. The defeat in 2020, as well as the ethnic cleansing of NK, has served as an opening for the working class to finally have critical conversations about the NK movement. As a postsocialist state, Armenia’s transition from state socialism to market liberalism has left large sections of the working class disenfranchised and marginalized. The country’s excessive militarization and securitization following the First Nagorno Karabakh War (1991–1994) facilitated state capture and shock-therapy market reforms, justifying the economic dispossession, political abandonment, and cultural erasure of the working class. For decades, this working class has harbored animosity toward what was colloquially known as the Karabakh clan, blaming these ruling elites for the demise of the welfare state and disorderly deindustrialization. To be fair, these critical conversations have been full of overcorrections that sometimes spill into hatred towards ordinary NK Armenians. Also, unfortunately, these conversations often happen in the framework of the ruling party’s liberal nationalism.

In the last month, the ruling party’s campaign would put a K-pop group’s promotional activities to shame. It featured excessive aegyo with hand heart signs and showed Pashinyan and the Speaker of the Parliament constantly doing a mukbang—on the campaign bus, at campaign events, and at ordinary people’s homes. Pashinyan has proven that he has immense virality as well. His social media clips, in which he eerily stares down at the camera with a Hitchcockian stare, listening to the most random songs —from mainstream pop to Armenian rabiz to Russian chanson —have gone viral across the post-Soviet social media. It is unquestionable that while his opposition has the resources, Pashinyan dominates the attention economy so indispensable to elections. However, the campaign has not been without its faults and scandals. Pashinyan’s emotional outbursts at rallies towards voters with critiques or opposite views have drawn criticism over his self-righteous behavior, which often does not differentiate between good and bad faith criticism.

The common theme of the ruling party’s campaign events is that Armenians cannot grieve forever. We witness state-sanctioned toxic positivity, where the grief and the traumas of the Armenian people are being processed through extreme compartmentalization and unapologetic consumerism. Out of numerous festivities organized by the state (and their generous private donors’ illegal funding) in the last two months, the best example is the botched and appropriated May Day celebrations, where they even changed the name of the holiday from Workers’ Day to Day of Work. The most sickening scene was the spectacle of Yandex delivery drivers, predominantly Indian migrant workers, being paraded through Republic Square on their mopeds, turning some of the city’s most precarious workers into props for appalling merriment. A few days later, 130 km away from Yerevan, Indian migrant workers at a Russian-owned garment factory went on a strike, protesting against inhumane working conditions and months of unpaid wages, only to be brutalized by the local police and go back to India without proper compensation.

Pashinyan knows the cornerstone of his rule is economic populism, which is why public sector spending, especially in the regions, has been increased. Over the years, the government has prided itself on investing in building and renovating roads, schools, kindergartens, and hospitals. Their biggest reform has been the healthcare reform, which, since January of this year, has ensured that minors and retired citizens can receive healthcare at significantly lower costs. According to the data provided by the Healthcare Ministry, as of March 31st, 614,000 citizens had benefited from the reform (for comparison, Pashinyan won the 2021 elections with 688,761 votes). One of the main reasons Pashinyan’s base often brings up for their support for him is the complete reduction of out-of-pocket healthcare expenses.

Pashinyan’s base is often referred to as jekh by his opponents and their media satellites. Jekh means trash or human waste in Armenian. Most recently, an opposition MP described them as toothless pensioners ‘who, from the looks of it, did not lead good lives.’ According to a recent IRI poll, Pashiyan’s main support base is the 56+ age group. Pashinyan’s screwball, sometimes vulgar, personality resonates with the old Soviet generation, who do not see his emotional outbursts about jailing his oligarch opponents as unbecoming for a head of state but as rightful frustration and anger. His base is channeling its economic rage through him. For them, it is an outlet for their own grievances, which have been made culturally invisible for a long time. And this working-class unrest is unfortunately being neutralized through Pashinyan’s liberal democratization promotion.

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Political capitalists, an astroturfed opposition

The main and most resourceful opposition to Pashinyan are three oligarchs he has since nicknamed the three-headed party of war. The one polling the best is Russian-Armenian oligarch Samvel Karapetyan, whose campaign has flooded public discourse with AI-generated attack ads fearmongering about the future settlement of 300,000 Azerbaijanis in Armenia. The second one is Armenia’s second president, Robert Kocharyan, who is back after a humiliating defeat in 2021 and whose rule from 1998 to 2008 was notorious for political assassinations, repression of anti-regime voices, media and protests, and most importantly, the auction of Armenia’s strategic assets to foreign capital. Finally, in third place is another oligarch, Gagik Tsarukyan, who is on a quest to build the world’s highest statue of Jesus Christ, apparently testing God’s patience with the first Christian nation. So, what do these political actors have in common despite their obscene wealth built on state capture and their inability to form a cohesive sentence in Armenian? Hardline ethnonationalism, strongman appeal, and a zest for another war.

Pashinyan’s base might be delusional when it comes to their views about him (from ‘You’re our king’ to ‘Jesus sent you to save us’), but their analysis and understanding of Pashinyan’s main opposition is quite astute. Most of Armenia’s older generation’s interactions with Pashinyan on the campaign trail included demands for reining in the oligarchs—barring them from participating in elections, returning to the state its privatized assets, throwing them in prison for corruption and state-sanctioned violence— while some even demand their executions on the campaign live streams. Liberal interpretation of these demands is, of course, that this generation is simply unable to let go of their Soviet nostalgia and has regretfully not overcome their authoritarian mentality. Often, both from the liberal left and the nationalist right, these people are condemned for being Stalinists who yearn for the terror of the 1930s.

While vote buying has been a feature of Armenian elections since at least the mid-90s, it is the first time that law enforcement is cracking down on this practice on a large scale and in an aggressive manner. Almost every day in the past month, there have been intercepted recordings released by the Anti-Corruption Committee that paint the saddest picture. Organized crime wannabes are engaged in mobilizing their communities, with promises of 100-200 thousand Armenian drams (around $300-400) if they vote for one of the three opposition parties, mostly the Kremlin-backed Karapetyan. The recordings reveal young and middle-aged men, high on their own hubris, speaking to each other in criminal slang. In one of the recordings, one man informs another that a respected crime boss has issued a progon (Rus: прогон), forbidding people to vote for Pashinyan. Organized crime has long participated in the plunder of Soviet Armenia’s social and economic assets, acting as an insurance mechanism for those who captured state infrastructure and resources during the transition period. These recordings reveal a deeply entrenched classist contempt for the very people whose votes they seek to buy. In postsocialist states, vote-selling is often a survival strategy, an unfortunate response to material insecurity among those who struggle to imagine a future beyond their immediate needs.

In the context of political oppositions, the Armenian Church has to be mentioned. Pashinyan had a public fallout with the Catholicos after the latter got involved in Armenia’s domestic and foreign policies. While the liberal side will paint a picture of the state intervening in the affairs of the church, it is no secret in Armenia that the Church has been thoroughly integrated into the capitalist class structures of Armenia, and what Pashinyan is currently doing is simply co-opting its institutional power for his own benefit.

The less talked-about aspect of this campaign is how the political patriarchy is reinforcing itself. The narratives dominating the campaign construct an Armenian identity around strong men and masculine power. Most major parties refer to the electorate as male and make promises that are often directed to men – tgherk (men) is the default political subject. Right-wing parties promote aggressive pro-natalist policies as a way to increase the birth rates. Criminal slang is usually used to describe Armenia’s military defeats and weak negotiating standing; the usual undertones are sexual violence and humiliation. In fact, one of the major oligarch opponents is a convicted rapist. Male-dominated political parties that position themselves as being against everyone will proudly claim they are apolitical while calling for militarism and the nation-army doctrine, without a shred of irony.

Pashinyan also has his very own controlled opposition. Among his critics in other parties are liberal nationalists, who believe not enough is being done to sever ties with Russia and head towards Europeanization. These parties have been essential in promoting civilizational myths and illusions about the West in Armenia and enjoy a sizable audience on YouTube. Another group that promotes these Western interests is the NGO professional class, which has greatly benefited from the increased democratization funding coming to Armenia since 2018. The NGO professional class, which periodically offers token criticisms of the government to sustain the façade of being independent watchdogs, ultimately supports it because its alternative is an Orbán-style crackdown on foreign funding. This development funding is instrumental in shaping discussions around political processes. Political questions become less about class interests and material relations and more about liberal moralizing centered on civility and respectability. The role of NGO intellectuals—who call themselves ‘civil society’ and clutch their pearls whenever their very real dependence on foreign donors is scrutinized—is to serve as agents of Western soft power in Armenia.

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The West vs Russia question

In this high-pressure geopolitical environment, both Russia and the West instrumentalize their local actors to ensure Armenia makes mistakes. Russia has used its leverage on Armenian political capitalists and significantly increased anti-Pashinyan misinformation. The West’s local actors have been pushing for partisan anti-Russian pivots and policies, gleefully – and prematurely– declaring the end of Russian influence in Armenia. While both the West and Russia demand quick answers from Armenia as to where its political future is, historically, this region and the conflict mediation between Armenia and Azerbaijan go through geopolitical cycles. The outcome in this region largely depends on the outcomes of the Russia-Ukraine and Iran-US wars. The longer these wars continue, the more tensions intensify and uncompromising militarism is pushed, the less likely it is that this region will finally achieve peace. The sad reality being that the people here will become collateral and an afterthought to great power clashes, as much as they try to balance their vector and stay neutral.

At the beginning of May, the EU leaders held a historic first summit in Armenia, with empty promises of European integration for its host. This summit brought the Ukrainian President Zelenskyy to Armenia, obviously touching a nerve in Moscow. In the wake of the EU summit in Yerevan, Putin has suggested a conscious uncoupling between Armenia and Russia. At the same time, Russian state media and Kremlin-affiliated political circles have pushed the Armenian nationalist framing of the loss of NK, blaming Pashinyan and his government, despite Putin and Lavrov’s earlier assessments in the wake of the 2020 war that Armenian maximalism was to blame for the failures of the negotiations from 1994 to 2020.

On May 26, Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited Armenia, widely believed to boost Pashinyan’s ratings two weeks before the election. The proponents of the West and Euro-integration have been ecstatic about this blatant intervention into Armenia’s elections, while hailing the TRIPP and additional agreements between Armenia and the US as diplomatic and economic achievements. Meanwhile, the actual face of American investments in Armenia is the $500 million to build a data center for NVIDIA in the deindustrialized city of Hrazdan, the environmental assessments for which have been suspiciously passed over. When asked by journalists to comment on this, a local government official’s response reads like a two-sentence horror story: “It’s a big international company. I’m sure they know what they are doing.”

In conclusion, Armenia’s ruling party, with its peculiar leader, dominates Armenian politics despite all the legitimate reasons it should not be. Yet, their puzzling popularity is driven by the lack of real alternatives on the left and the oligarch boogeyman on the right. Pashinyan speaks to the economic anxieties and security concerns of his base, offering them selective welfare and commitment to peaceful negotiations. In the absence of a political project capable of addressing the structural problems produced by postsocialist transformation, many voters continue to place their hopes in the least undesirable option. Whether this arrangement can survive the passing of the Soviet generation remains a bitter question, one that may determine the future trajectory of the postsocialist state.

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The author has requested anonymity due to concerns about potential repercussions for critical political commentary.

Reconciliation as a concept and strategy of subjectification belongs to the field of morality, historically to the field of Christian morality. How to reconcile with the world, with one’s sinful actions, what conditions are sufficient for forgiveness, and who should forgive these actions, the perpetrator himself, the victim, the community, the priest, the Church or God - all these have remained extremely important theological questions of spiritual authority, onto which also the link between moral economy and (re)production of wealth of temporal authority was based. Thus, reconciliation has deeply influenced the strategy of contemporary memory strategy and has once again shown that this discourse has never been a simple individual matter, but rather deeply invested in dominant power relations, moral ideology, and economy.

The Slovenian transition to capitalism in the 1990s has boasted a few distinctive features: it did not undergo bloody ethnic wars, it was gradual and social democratic, and the consolidation of the new political class happened through the discourse of national reconciliation. It is this last aspect that I will address in this short text. In Slovenia, despite being largely seen as an atheistic and Catholic country, where Church and State were officially separated, the Church has gained renewed ideological and economic power in the postsocialist period, as has been the case throughout East Central Europe.

What were the key parameters of national reconciliation in Slovenia, which allegedly, like a good disciple of German memory culture, cultivated a civilisational climate in which past wounds of the twentieth century could be properly addressed and commemorated? I will show that rather than being a moral-memory laboratory of intellectuals and cultural-memory workers, national reconciliation in both the late socialist and postsocialist periods played three vital – and problematic – historical roles in Slovenia. First, before and during the transition from socialism to capitalism, national reconciliation acted as one of the key ideological appeasements and erasures of class antagonism. Second, reconciliation enabled the consolidation – without lustration – of parts of the new and old political class during the transition itself. Thus, a new transitional elite united under the banner of national reconciliation, which consequently became the ideology of the ruling class (Močnik 2003). And third, instead of the memory of World War II, which in Yugoslavia focused on the victory over Nazism and fascism, in Slovenia, reconciliation shifted focus to the crimes of the so-called totalitarian regime and the catastrophe that Yugoslav socialism supposedly represented for the Slovenian nation.

National reconciliation was embedded in a broader social process that I have called, elsewhere, the “primitive accumulation” of nationalist memory and capital (Kirn 2022). This process began in the second half of the 1980s and operated dialectically: the war of memory was set up with the aim of nullifying/demonizing the anti-fascist consensus and the unity of socialist Yugoslavia, while creating a new nationalist imaginary. The “invention of national traditions” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1988) and the establishment of nationalist “places of memory” (Nora and Kritzman 1996) became the key cultural and political work of conservative intellectuals who began to revise the public memory associated with World War II and the partisan anti-fascist period. Public memory was structured around the federal, self-governing, and anti-fascist legacy, which nationalist actors, especially in Slovenia and Serbia, attacked in the 1980s by exposing partisan crimes. Defeated former fascist collaborators were placed in the position of new national victims and even rehabilitated as the only true patriots. This war of memories served as ideological fuel, which was then instrumentalized by political elites to exacerbate political conflicts and mobilize people in interethnic wars in the 1990s (Kirn 2022).

Yugoslav socialism was not a paradise on earth, despite its differences with other socialist countries, its historical achievements in education, social infrastructure, and services, and its experimentation with workers’ self-management, which achieved relative socio-economic prosperity and workers’ participation in the sphere of (re)production. The political structure of Yugoslav self-management was quite authoritarian. Focusing for a moment on the field of public memory, the main political and cultural institutions invested effort and resources in remembering and commemorating the partisan and anti-fascist heritage, which was considered the foundation of the new socialist and federal Yugoslavia. The commemorative formula of mourning the victims of occupation and collaborationism, on the one hand, and celebrating the victory of the partisan liberation struggle on the other, was culturally embodied in a wide range of practices, museums, monuments, and cultural artifacts. The centerpiece of that memory culture was the Yugoslav partisan anti-fascist resistance – mostly organized by communists, the Anti-Fascist Front of Women, and the Democratic Left Forces, – which managed to liberate Yugoslavia on its own, was an integral part of the official constitution of socialist Yugoslavia and formed its ideological and political basis. By the 1980s, a slow process of mythologizing and oversaturation of the narrative and representations of the partisan past led to anti-fascist politics becoming emptied out of content. By the middle of the decade, the fundamental structure of socialist Yugoslavia, which was based on inter-republic solidarity (preventing the growth of inequality between republics) and a common memory of the partisan anti-fascist past, was also thoroughly challenged and eventually destroyed.

Civil society during this period did not function exclusively as a progressive and democratic force; indeed, it was also very reactionary, especially within the cultural elite (Dragović-Soso 2014). Anti-socialist, anti-Yugoslav, and (extreme) nationalist positions were articulated in the socialist republics of Serbia and Slovenia. When major strikes of workers emerged in Kosovo, dissent was met with a wave of police repression. Most notably, what started as a protest based on socio-economic grievances in the aftermath of austerity politics was immediately translated into nationalist terms (Magas 1994). Right from the start, it was precisely conservative intellectuals from the Scientific Academies in Slovenia and Serbia who were the first to create nationalist “dissident” texts and declarations in 1986–87, with which they articulated nationalist sentiments and called people to “arms,” weaponizing nationalist past and victimhood (I return to this below). Various intellectuals, writers, and poets spoke of the preservation and defense of the “national being” and emphasized the eternal national role of the victim now increasingly felt under communist rule. These were the alarming signs of the early period of memory wars. The first target was Yugoslavia and its shared collective memory of anti-fascist struggle and international solidarity. The increasing investment in national imaginary took place alongside the power struggles between the republican/national fractions of the League of Communists and the dismantling of economic solidarity between workers and republics with the help of commercial banks and international credit institutions. The latter forced republican leaders - especially those from the rich “North” - to make calculations based on their own national interests and to gradually move away from the federal model of Yugoslavia.

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The increasing nationalization of the public sphere and public memory took place in the late 1980s, when democratic and socialist initiatives, as a form of internal critique, was hegemonized by nationalized civil society, and heavily backed by conservative agents, such as the Catholic Church in Slovenia. These ideological moves were accompanied by calls to defend the national future. Before socialism withered away with the transfer of social property and the dispossession of the working masses, Yugoslavia and its antifascist legacy needed to be destroyed. This is where we can observe how ideology and within it, the memory wars, formed the core of the violent processes very much internal to the logic of what Marx called the “primitive accumulation” of capital. What emerged in the early 1990s, I argue, was “war capitalism,” a form of capitalism that managed to mobilize society and military forces for war, especially through the primitive accumulation of memory, as explained in more detail below. This kind of war capitalism caused at first all-encompassing deaccumulation of social capital and the disintegration of other modes of production and exchange that had been established during self-management in Yugoslavia. The transition to liberal democracy and capitalism here fully draws on a paradox of “primitive accumulation” of capital: how else but through utter violence, destruction, ruination of the social infrastructure and people, and with it de-industrialisation of formerly coordinated political economy, can we understand the specificity of the Yugoslav transition? One can observe this destructive policy of physical waste and symbolic destruction on three fundamental levels: 1) symbolic violence against emancipatory ideas associated with Yugoslav federalism, non-alignment, socialist self-management, and gender and ethnic equality; 2) symbolic and real violence against (working) people who, due to their localization, beliefs, or other reasons, resisted transformation into ethnic subjects (of the new nation-states); and 3) violence against the infrastructure, property, and social fabric that were created, accumulated, and became social property under socialism.

Instead of the more conventional path of neoliberal shock therapy, where primitive accumulation of capital in the former Eastern Bloc progressed through the swift exchange of ownership and the expropriation of enterprises, the state, land, and the public sector, in the post-Yugoslav space, war capitalism left behind enormous destruction. The most primitive side of capital accumulation can be found in the force of deaccumulation of the former social assets and infrastructure of the self-governing society in Yugoslavia. Class racism, national hatred, memory wars weaponizing across the whole country in the times of prolonged crisis of the 1980s resulted in wars that prepared the path to ground zero, to terra nullius post-Yugoslava, onto which the ethnically cleansed nations and their atomised citizen-subjects could start searching for their happiness, possibly reconciled with a string of sins, war crimes, catastrophes, and increasing debts. Wars and at first transitions to nationally owned enterprises (social property was first nationalised in the post-Yugoslav context, and later privatized, to different degrees and at speeds) contributed to the collapse of social security and what formed the “socialist market” (Kirn, 2019), with its specific protected institutions and time regimes. The 1990s not only led to the bankruptcy of many enterprises and factories, but also to a dizzying increase in unemployment. The consequence of these most primitive forms of accumulation of capital was first of all the intensive accumulation of a huge and cheap “reserve army” of labor, either mobilized for war, prepared to migrate, or ready to work in the privatized sectors of the economy under the hegemony of autonomous capitals. The experience of the post-Yugoslav transition could be described as a striking example of the “development of underdevelopment” (Frank 1967), where the majority of people fell massively behind the productivity and standard of living of 1980s Yugoslav socialism.The underdevelopment was not merely an absence of growth due to war, but an active, structural dismantling of industrial infrastructure, the liquidation of socially-owned enterprises, and the deliberate erosion of the productive capacities that Yugoslav self-management had, however contradictorily, built over decades. Factories were shuttered, workforces dispersed, and entire branches of regional industry rendered obsolete not by market competition but by the political logics of privatisation and external conditionality. What was inherited as a relatively industrialised, regionally integrated economy was disaggregated into a series of dependent, deindustrialised peripheries oriented toward consumption and extraction rather than production. Capitalist transition was, as Boris Buden would call it, an unfolding of catastrophe (Buden 2020).

Instead of the old and emptied-out socialist slogan of brotherhood and unity, the slogan of national unity prevailed in the post-Yugoslav space. The mobilization of people for war took place in the name of one nation in one state, and did not follow any rational economic formula. The disintegration and subsequent wars had an extremely negative impact on the economies of these new states. Transitological discourse described this irrational and violent process as “catching up with the West” (Buden 2020, 158), while heavily invested in the imaginary of a national glorious past and future. After the complete destruction of socialism and of Yugoslavia, we can speak of the subordination of new nation-states to the logic of the capitalist economy. In this respect, the post-Yugoslav specificity and transition to capitalism reverse the old Marxian dictum of “economic base determining (ideological) superstructure.” The horrific aspects of the ideological wars and political hegemony of nationalist agents were central for the transition to capitalism.

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Memory war: national reconciliation does not calm down the disputed memory, but accumulates violence

As explained elsewhere (Kirn 2022), the wars of memory were articulated with the nationalist and liberal ideology that reigned supreme in the late 1980s. Moreover, nationalist ideology was not something that could be ascribed to the “backward” masses or the rural areas of Yugoslavia, as is typical for the liberal retrospective justification, but was articulated by the core of the cultural and political elite of the late 1980s. Memory wars gave fuel to (inter)ethnic wars, weaponising national victimhood and accumulating series of new injustices and harmsPrimitive accumulation of memory involves the imposition of a long-term ethno-nationalist narrative about a specific heroic and, in many cases, victimized nation. In the mid- and late 1980s, this was realized by reactionary intelligentsia, political figures, and representatives of the church. The most important debates that openly welcomed the nationalist imaginary and the legitimizing narrative of one nation in one state were the memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1986 and the 57th issue of Nova Revija in Slovenia. Speeches that appropriated specific commemorative events and helped establish new nationalist memorial sites were given by leading politicians of the League of Communists (e.g., in Slovenia, the most important commemoration took place in Kočevski Rog in 1990 with a speech by Milan Kučan; in Serbia, it was Slobodan Milošević’s speech at Gazimestan in 1989). References to Yugoslavia and socialism became empty and ritualized, while the central message was directed at defending narrow national interests and proclaiming new nationalist memorial projects. The cultural intelligentsia, together with liberal currents in the socialist political apparatus, formed an anti-hegemonic bloc (Kirn 2022), which defeated the older pro-federal and anti-theist cadres in the branches of the League of Communists. Within the new “democratic” civil society, it was conservative forces and the Church institutions that hegemonised transitional process, and engaged in what Mastnak excellently coined as a process of “totalitarianism from below” (Mastnak 1987). This concept makes a double point: first of all, against the (liberal-conservative) idealisation of civil society, it points again to younger Marx point and the bürgerliche injustices of civil society here developing into undemocratic, nationalist, and reactionary tendencies. And secondly, I read it as an ironic counterpoint to the flattening Cold War formula that equated communism with fascism as twin totalitarianisms “from above.” It was precisely these reactionary forces, operating through Church networks, where right-wing movements and nationalist sentiment emerged. Together with liberal forces (Kirn 2019) and “renewed” Third Way communists they then drove economic and ideological change from within the newly celebrated democratic sphere. It was these forces – mostly part of the emerging political elite – that embraced the project of one nation in one state that emerged on the capitalist horizon.” It was these forces, and a big part of the emerging political elite, that embraced the project of one nation in one state that emerged on the capitalist horizon.

Within this context, one of the memory strategies – national reconciliation – might at first glance seem a dignified approach to “pacifying” the ideological struggle in public memory debates. It became very popular in Slovenia in the mid- and late 1980s, and was important for the country’s later central state memory project. In other countries of the former Yugoslavia, it only rose to prominence in the first decade of the new millennium, after a short-lived period when some political leaders preached the need for symbolic reconciliation following the recent wars. Slovenia has long prided itself on having the most democratic and “exemplary” transition, which is also said to have included an “appropriate” confrontation with the past in a cultural landscape full of furrows and traumas. Nevertheless, this image should be critically reassessed because what was a seemingly pacifying discourse – the discourse of national reconciliation – has actually been one of the main triggers of cultural and memory wars that led to the rehabilitation of (local) fascism, thus openly participating in the nationalization and ethnicization of society.

In Slovenia, the debate on national reconciliation was initiated by the moral philosopher Spomenka Hribar. She was one of the key dissident intellectuals who published in the main magazines of the 1980s. Most notably, in 1987, in the aforementioned 57th issue of Nova Revija, she published an article in which she declared the anti-communist program to be the national independence of Slovenia. Her interventions became popular semantic anchors, which “created” new memorial sites and shaped the public memory of World War II. The main impetus for national reconciliation was related to fascists and partisans:

Reconciliation also means “consent” to our history. It allows us to see both revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries as ultimately unfortunate “sons of our mother,” that is, to see and recognize them primarily as people (of a certain epoch). Of course, this does not mean accepting ideology! Mistakes are human, but they cannot be accepted and perpetuated. But not accepting ideology does not mean excommunicating its bearers; we must therefore distinguish between man AND ideology. (Hribar 1987, 100)

The moralistic common-sense definition of national reconciliation is buried in the argument of “national soil,” which claims that reconciliation is the excavation of “the soil from which love and memory grow” (101), and that it can only occur “among us as people” (100). Reconciliation establishes symbolic equivalence and relativizes the past: the victims of all wars are the same. The discourse thus presents itself as a seemingly anti-war moral exaltation. The next step within and after reconciliation is that all – fascists and anti-fascists alike, nationalists and internationalists alike – belong to the same “national being” and are therefore merely “sons of their mother.” The basic formula of reconciliation is the equalization of all victims and their nationalization. Hribar argues that the fascist occupation caused many civilian and partisan casualties, but one must also take into account partisan crimes and, above all, extrajudicial post-war killings of fascist collaborators (for historical details on post-war killings, see Tomasevich 2001; Troha et. al. 2017). According to Hribar, we can therefore hope for reconciliation of the Slovenian nation only when all crimes are recognized and processed through forgiveness or punishment (Hribar 1987).

Hribar succeeded in strongly popularizing national reconciliation in the mid-1980s, openly calling for a war memorial with the official discourse of anti-fascism and the public memory of socialist Yugoslavia. After publishing several articles, major political actors began calling for national reconciliation, culminating in declarations by the Catholic Church and the Socialist Assembly of Slovenia in early March 1990. A few months later, in July 1990, some political forces, the communists, and the Catholic Church prepared a large joint commemoration on the 45th anniversary of the post-war massacres of fascist collaborators. At the commemoration, Archbishop Alojzij Šuštar shook hands with the president of the League of Communists of Slovenia and later the first president of independent Slovenia, Milan Kučan. Kučan gave a speech in which he acknowledged the post-war crimes committed by the communists and partisans while Šuštar led a mass for reconciliation between the dead and the living. This was the first official public apology and acknowledgement of past crimes, which was encapsulated in the symbolic gesture of a handshake between the opposition camps.

The event took place in Kočevski Rog, a memorial site where the headquarters of the Slovenian Partisan Command was located during World War II, and which was long associated with the activities of the Partisan liberation struggle in Slovenia. From that moment on, it became the central memorial site for mourning the post-war massacres of fascist collaborators who were returned to the Partisans by British forces from Bleiburg (in southern Austria). Some fascist prisoners of war were put to jail, some were deported, and a significant number (estimates range from 15,000 to 30,000) were executed by the secret police and parts of the Partisan army (Troha et al. 2017). These were war crimes for which no one was held accountable and which left a stain on the Partisan liberation struggle. But what began as an ethical call for reconciliation and processing of the tragic events of the past became the subject of political manipulation by emerging far-right forces and the Catholic Church. The intended conciliatory discussion between (former) partisans and their associations on the one hand, and the Catholic Church and representatives of the new state parties on the other, remained rooted in cultural struggle and did not actually deal with the past. Instead, the logical consequence was the rehabilitation of fascist collaborators as equal – if not more morally worthy – actors of World War II (Kirn 2020). Such a constellation obscures the asymmetrical relations between the fascists and the partisans, as well as the causes of fascism, and avoids the question of its role in the present. Relativizing the fascist crimes of the past, and the cumulative anger and rage of the defeated justified a wave of neofascist crimes in the 1990s, resulting in genocide, concentration camps, and ethnically cleansed entities.

How does the primitive accumulation of memory connect with the primitive accumulation of capital in this case? It is important to note that during state socialism, the Catholic Church, alongside other churches and the ruling class of the prewar Kingdom of Yugoslavia was dispossessed of its major land holdings and also of its ideological power. With the demise of socialist Yugoslavia, and emboldened by the historical events following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Church representatives and civil initiatives moved from an initially defensive position of mourning postwar killings of fascist collaborators to a search for a “new truth” about who the real national patriots were, the true representatives of Slovenia. When the massacres of fascist collaborators were officially recognized as a crime and the search for the victims’ graves was institutionalized in a commission funded by the National Assembly, the time had come to demand recognition of the damage and “unjust” expropriation of property by the previous regime (Cmrečnjak 2016, 398). The shift towards a (re)nationalized memory policy came at the same time as the demand for the “nationalization” of social property. It is not surprising that the largest share in this transfer of property and power was acquired by a small layer of former capitalists, part of the ruling class in which the Church was a hegemonic actor. It is no secret that the Catholic Church became the largest landowner (of forests and real estate), which, in addition to benefiting it economically, helped its ideological empowerment. The new state budget included payments of clergy salaries and the return of church property expropriated by the socialist state. The project of “national reconciliation” became, strictly speaking, the central ideology of the ruling class and an important feature of the Slovenian state-building and reconciliation process. The discourse, which initially seemed pacifying and mitigating, established itself among the emerging political class, but certainly not in Slovenian society in general, even less so when we evaluate its active role in the collapse of the anti-fascist consensus in the Yugoslav context. The memory wars, on the contrary, helped to establish the ethnic principle as the sole measure of history and the future, and justified the transfer of property as well. The reconciliation crux is thereby essential to understand both the ethno-religious foundations of the wars of the 1990s, among ethnically cleansed political entities, and the moral justification for capitalist transition from the perspective of the Church.

Conclusion

This text has offered a critique of the role of national reconciliation in the Slovenian context against the background of a broader process of primitive accumulation of nationalist memory. The latter was of crucial importance in challenging the anti-fascist consensus in the historiography and public memory of former Yugoslavia. Such primitive accumulation found its purest manifestation in the discourse of national reconciliation and the rehabilitation of local fascist collaborationism. This process was accompanied in the early 1990s by both organized and spontaneous commemorative actions from below: from the iconoclastic destruction of partisan and socialist monuments to the renaming of streets and the destruction of books. One could speculate further how the legal and memory-related cleansing of the socialist and antifascist past reinforced the dominant policy of the early 1990s – that of ethnic cleansing. Those who did not properly belong (in terms of ethnic identity) and could not adapt to the newly imagined nation-states were mortally threatened as the wars of the 1990s clearly showed.

The initial slogan of national reconciliation was supposed to unite the wounded Slovene nation and its traumatic memories of World War II on an ethnic basis and thus allow that nation to move, united, into a European future. The call for reconciliation at the end of socialism can be understood as a battle cry and even as an essential part of the memory wars, the intellectual and political advocates of which, from the mid-1980s, were active mainly in Slovenia and Serbia. The dominant revisionism was characterized by an openly negative attitude towards the Yugoslav, socialist, and partisan past. This attitude contributed to a memory shift that disintegrated the already unstable solidarity between people and nations in socialist and federative Yugoslavia. Reconciliation succeeded in expropriating the public memory of its own emancipatory anti-fascist past, and it also helped to consolidate the ruling class in a period of transition that introduced sharp class antagonisms. Therefore, the question of why reconcile, with whom, and for what material interests should always come at the very start of any assessment of memorialization shifts and policies. At the same time, the focus on the dominant memory management must not obscure the many alternative approaches to the antifascist and socialist past that have been emerging in the last decade, and that are more productive and necessary for our time, which lacks utopian force and imagination.

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Literature

Buden, Boris. 2020. Transition to Nowhere. Berlin: Archive Books.

Cmrečnjak, Sašo. 2016. “Slovenian Reconciliation: A Historical Overview.” Historical Journal 70 (3–4): 382–436.

Dragović-Soso, Jasna. 2014. Saviors of the Nation: Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Frank, Andre Gunder. 1967. Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. 1988. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hribar, Spomenka. 1987. “The Logic of Hate and Reconciliation.” Nova revija 57: 74–104.

Kirn, Gal, 2019. Partisan Ruptures. London: Pluto Press.

Kirn, Gal. 2022. “The Primitive Accumulation of Capital and Memory’: Mnemonic Wars as National Reconciliation Discourse in (Post-)Yugoslavia.” Memory Studies, 15 (6), 1470–83.

Magaš, Branka 1993. Destruction of Yugoslavia. London: Verso.

Marx, Karl. (1867) 1967. Capital. Vol. 1. New York.

Močnik, Rastko. 2003. “Social Change in the Balkans.” Eurozine, March 20. http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2003-03-20-mocnik-en.html.

Nora, Pierre, and Lawrence D. Kritzman. 1996. Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. New York: Columbia University Press.

Šumi, Irena. 2015. “Slovenian Antisemitism, Buried Alive in the Ideology of Slovenian National Reconciliation.” Journal for Science Criticism 43 (260): 69–84.

Tomasevich, Jozo. 2001. War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Troha, Nevenka, Damijan Guštin, and Zdenko Čepić. 2017. Slovenija v vojni: 1941–1945. Ljubljana: Modrijan.

Gal Kirn is an assistant professor of cultural sociology (University of Ljubljana) and research associate at the Chair of Cultural Philosophy at the European University Viadrina. He primarily works in the fields of cultural sociology, critical memory studies, and theories of ecological and social transformation. His publications include Memory of Liberation (Ljubljana University Press, 2025), Partisan Ruptures (Pluto Press, 2019), Partisan Counter-Archive (De Gruyter, 2020), and Nights of the Dispossessed: Riots Unbound (co-edited with Natasha Ginwala and Niloufar Tajeri, Columbia Press, 2021)

In the late twentieth century, Western historiography underwent profound transformations as intellectual trends reshaped both methodology and epistemology. It seemed to many that liberal democracy represented the culmination of ideological evolution, effectively closing the grand narrative tension that had defined political history for centuries.^[i] The “End of History” thesis suggested that the collapse of communism and the decline of fascism marked the end of large-scale ideological struggle, offering a teleological vision in which the liberal democratic model emerged as humanity’s endpoint, the grand, triumphal narrative of liberal history. While primarily a political argument, its implications reverberated through historical studies, intersecting with the concurrent cultural turn, which de-emphasized the materialist and structural approaches characteristic of the hitherto dominant social history and embraced cultural themes like narrative, meaning, agency, emotion, identity, linguistics, and human perception. The convergence of liberal triumphalism and the cultural turn expressed itself within Soviet historiography as a turn toward explaining why the Soviet Union collapsed with a new emphasis on failures of state ideology, nationalities policy, and, particularly in light of Chornobyl, environmental negligence. That meant that the relatively new field of Environmental History, with a uniquely declensionist narrative that seeks to historicize climate change, provided a ready-made interpretive framework for historians aiming to expose Soviet failures. By first outlining the broad ways in which the cultural turn impacted Western histories of the Soviet Union, I turn specifically to environmental history to demonstrate how the emplotment of environmental destruction has politically determined the stories we tell about the Soviet Union.

The cultural turn emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as historians increasingly drew on anthropology, literary theory, and poststructuralist frameworks to understand the construction of meaning in historical contexts. It denoted a form of historicism that focused less on material conditions and more on ideas, sensibilities, emotions, and cultural production as a reflection of larger ideas and patterns of lived experience.^[ii] Scholars such as Natalie Zemon Davis, in The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), demonstrated how local customs, identity, and cultural perceptions shaped the actions and interpretations of historical actors. Similarly, Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) advocated for “thick description,” emphasizing that cultural practices must be interpreted within the webs of meaning in which they exist. Robert Darnton highlighted how information, rumor, and narrative shaped social perception and action. Finally, Carolyn Merchant, in The Death of Nature (1980), traced how conceptualizations of nature were deeply intertwined with social hierarchies, proving the ideological power of environmental ideas.^[iii] Within Soviet historiography, the cultural turn witnessed an explosion of new books dealing with a range of topics and time periods: Paul Werth and Michael Khodarkovsky on pre-Soviet religious policy as a means of understanding the confessional state, Mark Steinberg and Reginald Zelnik’s work on late imperial working class sensibilities, Lynne Viola and Stephen Kotkin on cultures of resistance and ideology under Stalin, Juliane Fürst on Cold War alternative youth culture, and many more. These historians collectively identified sensibilities, ideologies, emotions, and belief systems that they argued were integral to understanding life in the Soviet Union. I point these works out not only to showcase the variety that the cultural turn took but also to demonstrate their lasting power in the field of history, as I do not doubt that all scholars know these works well from their graduate reading lists.

While the cultural turn sought to overcome the explicitly political historicism, many scholars correctly understood that culture constituted a smaller part of a much larger social superstructure. Leading historians of the Soviet Union, like Sheila Fitzpatrick, Ronald Suny, and Lewis Siegelbaum, blended studies of everyday life and culture with a more focused analysis of class dynamics, social tensions, and the formation of new cultural expressions as part of the social superstructure.^[iv] More importantly, they challenged the “totalitarian” narrative of the Cold War that narrowly focused on ideology and considered the Soviet Union to be a monolithic dictatorship that retained total control over public and private life. Until 1989, both culturalists and structuralists sought to explain and historicize Soviet life, to make sense of what was, at least from their Cold War perspective, very much an enigma.

Yet, the events that occurred between 1986-1991 were monumental, not just in the political sense but also because the collapse accelerated another historiographical transition that reshaped a core question for inquiry: instead of asking what the Soviet Union is, i.e. how do we explain the USSR and the cultural/ social complexities that constituted it, the question became: how did we get to collapse? The new narrative checkpoint to be explained shifted from 1917 or Stalinism and its aftermath to Gorbachev, to transition, and eventually to the collapse, supported by new archival access. For many, but not all, that seemed like a story that only a cultural analysis of ideas, particularly nationalism, environmentalism, and stagnation, could explain.

The consequences of the tripartite emergence of the cultural turn with declensionist environmental history and the triumph of liberalism after 1991 allowed certain narrative devices from the Cold War to persist into the present. To think through this, I want to conjure one of the foremost poststructural thinkers, Hayden White, and his theory of metahistory, which can help us understand the implications of the broader focus on cultural historicism and how it reinforces tragic narratives of the Soviet Union. I want to do this not only because I believe White’s analysis to be sound, but because I want to expose the circular logic through which cultural history operates, to the point of self-implication.

White contended that historians do not merely report facts but organize them into narratives structured by emplotments—romance, tragedy, comedy, and satire being the main four.^[v] These narrative forms reflect underlying ideological, ethical, and moral frameworks and shape the meaning assigned to historical events. For instance, romantic emplotments depict history as a progression of heroic struggle culminating in triumph—one might think of Ivan in Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible Part 1. Tragic emplotments emphasize the inevitability of decline, moral decay, and missed opportunities—the Soviet Tragedy described by Martin Malia in 1995. Yet, White’s insights suggest that all historical writing is inherently interpretive, and that the historian’s role is as much creative as analytical, selecting and arranging sources and facts to craft meaning. My question, then, is what White’s insights mean for our field today, both as a field of study and as a tool of political commentary.

The entire edifice of cultural historicism within our field after 1990 can be read through White’s lens as a tragic emplotment of the history of competing Cold War ideologies: liberal democracy is cast as the ultimate triumphal narrative that defeated the backward and defunct communist ideology by default of its triumph. Even the so-called revisionists of the ‘70s and ‘80s mobilized the language of tragedy to structure their narratives in the 1990s, especially when taking Stalinism as a negative point of departure.^[vi] As White showed, history is simultaneously interpretive, contingent, and literary, shaped by the ideological and narrative choices of its practitioners. The cultural turn’s reliance on national identity blended with liberal triumphalism after 1990 within the context of collapse. Perhaps this is a convoluted way of saying history is written by the victors. Still, it is more than that: our region’s gravity toward cultural historicism has remained uniquely strong; scholars, often from that part of the world, dismiss material analysis as outdated, dogmatic, and ideological, while simultaneously applying their own ideological commitments to the field through cultural historicism. Indeed, the anti-communist nationalism of the region is based on a sense of “victimhood” that reinforces the colonial, and thus imperial, narratives being pushed. While cultural studies certainly has itsplace, one is grasping for straws by arguing that, for instance, national identity is based on abstract symbols like cuisine or articles of clothing rather than material forces (investment capital, resource sovereignty, trade, and private property) that made those items possible and promoted them as national symbols to begin with.^[vii] It seems as though some in our field can’t help but be boxed by the ideological triumph of liberal cultural historicism and limited by the tragic narrative form that frames almost all of our stories. It becomes particularly problematic when the “empire” paradigm appears as a lazy intellectual framework to make sense of something like the Soviet-era exchange of natural resources, which was inherently political and a result of union-wide comparative advantage.^[viii] The theme of resources is an important one, so to narrow my point, permit me to use environmental history as a case study.

The subfield of environmental history emerged in the 1980s and shares some of the concerns of the broader historiographical and political turn I’ve traced so far. Its primary concern is studying the reciprocal relationship between humans and the natural world, treating ecosystems, climate, and geography as historical actors. Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange (1972) illustrates this approach, presenting European colonization as a tragic ecological and demographic event.^[ix] The arrival of Old-World diseases devastated Indigenous populations, while new plants and animals transformed both European and American ecologies. Crosby’s work demonstrates how ecological processes can be narrated with multiple emplotments: tragedy in the story of indigenous depopulation, romance in European expansion narratives, and satire in accounts of ecological mismanagement. William Cronon’s Changes in the Land (1983) similarly integrates empirical ecological data with cultural interpretation, focusing on how European settlement reshaped New England’s forests, wetlands, and wildlife while reflecting changing social and economic practices.^[x] Donald Worster, in Nature’s Economy (1985), emphasizes that ideas about ecology and society co-evolve, producing cultural narratives that shape human interaction with the environment.^[xi] However, because of the field’s heavy emphasis on ecology and dialectical relations between humans and nature, it seemed impossible for early practitioners to fully break free of materialism.

Yet by 1990, American historian Richard White proposed such a break from the excessive materialism in environmental history. In an article criticizing Worsteter’s materialist framework, White contended that environmental history has failed to “recognize the role of value judgments and beliefs.” He went on to argue that “environmental historians do face grave difficulties in trying to incorporate natural history, social relations, technology, and culture into unified explanations of social change.”^[xii] White wanted environmental historians to take the cultural turn: to plunge into the ideas, aesthetics, and non-material relations humans have with the environment in order to dive deeper into motivations, stewardship, and causality. Since then, environmental historians have balanced material and cultural analysis probably better than most other sub-fields.

Yet, practitioners of Soviet environmental history are often tilted toward the cultural analysis because of the narrative emplotments that cultivated their intellectual upbringing and guided their research questions. Histories of Soviet environmental management—ranging from industrialization projects to large-scale water and energy schemes—frequently rely on tragedy as their primary narrative frame. Recently, scholars such as Paul Josephson, and Kate Brown have highlighted the ecological and human costs of Soviet projects within the framework of an ideologically negligent state, from the diversion of rivers and draining of wetlands to the catastrophic consequences of industrial pollution and nuclear contamination.^[xiii] In works such as Brown’s Manual for Survival (2013) and Weiner’s Models of Nature (1999), the dominant narrative emphasizes environmental degradation, human suffering, and state mismanagement as a product of Soviet ideology, positioning the overall Soviet ecological experiment as a cautionary tale. This tragic emplotment aligns closely with Hayden White’s observation that historians organize facts into emplotments that convey moral or ideological meaning, and in the case of the Soviet Union, the pervasive focus on tragedy constructs a vision of the “empire” as hubristic, coercive, and ultimately destructive to both nature and society. What is important is that all of these studies offer the possibility of a fruitful material and structural analysis, but revert to ideological conclusions.

The emphasis on tragedy in Soviet environmental histories carries significant political and historiographical repercussions. By framing the Soviet environmental project almost exclusively through catastrophe and failure, historians risk reinforcing Cold-War-era ideological narratives that depict the USSR as inherently irrational, authoritarian, and incapable of sustainable management. In other words, absolutely irredeemable, which seems to contradict popular nostalgia in post-Soviet countries. This narrative framing can obscure more complex realities, such as instances of ecological planning that succeeded, local adaptation strategies, or the broader structural pressures imposed by industrialization imperatives in the context of global modernization and competition. For example, if I followed a tragic narrative for my own research project on the Leningrad dam, I might adopt the framework of anti-dam dissidents who considered the project ecologically irresponsible. Yet, such an approach ignores the fact that scientists and engineers spent decades testing models and incorporating new science to understand the hydraulic dynamics and the ecological effects of certain structural components, and it also ignores the simple fact that one way or another St. Petersburg had to be dammed or it would cease to exist. My version frames it as a romantic tale of Soviet science and technological development, and places the tragic narrative on late Soviet civil society’s opposition to the project.

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This narrative emphasis also shapes public understanding and policy debates about the Soviet Union. Tragedy-driven environmental histories contribute to a perception of Soviet governance as inherently destructive, reinforcing Western ideological frameworks that consider liberal democracy as somehow environmentally rational and morally superior and socialism as incapable of addressing environmental problems. The repetition of catastrophic narratives in both academic and popular accounts strengthens the teleological framing of Soviet history as a cautionary tale, paralleling the broader argument about the “end of history” and the triumph of liberal democracy. In other words, the emplotment of Soviet environmental history as tragedy does not merely describe ecological outcomes; it produces interpretive consequences, determining how scholars, policymakers, and the public understand Soviet social, political, and technological systems, providing a commentary on socialism itself. And insofar as Russia today is considered the default successor of the USSR, tragic emplotments permeate how we understand, report on, and interpret Russia today.

Moreover, the prevalence of tragedy in Soviet environmental histories demonstrates the interplay between narrative and evidence in historical writing, where interpreted evidence fits an a priori narrative structure. While ecological and demographic data provide the factual basis for analysis, the selection, emphasis, and arrangement of those facts are made to fit a pre-determined story of imperialism. For instance, Stephen Brain’s “The Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature” (2010) acknowledges the campaign to re-plant large swaths of Soviet territory, but falls short of considering it truly conservationist, viewing it instead as utilitarian and contradictory to five-year-plan goals.^[xiv] Even Bathsheba Demuth’s innovative Floating Coast, while advancing a decidedly materialist argument, romanticizes the material transformation of the land as a destructive force, by naughty human beings. It leaves one questioning how civilizations would survive, how political entities could compete, and what role external structural pressures played in the transformation of land.^[xv] Thus, it seems as though tragic emplotments are so embedded in our scholarly and personal imagination—perhaps a product of graduate education, emotional experiences, or personal politics—that scholars cannot help but foreground human suffering and environmental collapse, often marginalizing countervailing evidence, such as instances of regional ecological recovery, successful technical interventions, or adaptive management strategies employed by local actors. One finds it particularly revealing that Frank Uekoetter’s book The Green and the Brown gave more credit to Nazi conservation efforts as genuine expressions of state paternalism and a concern for the national environment than any Soviet history has yet done.^[xvi] Finally, “Hero projects,” or large-scale geoengineering, the topic of much ink spilled in our field, are a matter of perspective: for us today, confronting climate change, maybe there will be long-term consequences of large-scale construction projects, but at the time of construction, people considered bringing power, faster transportation, and flood control as monumental achievements. So while some may see Dnipro as a vague symbol of “Russian” imperialism, the simple fact is that it brought formerly remote communities into the wider connected space of Soviet modernity.^[xvii] When more positive narratives do emerge about Soviet civil society, such as in the case of the environmental movement that emerged to protect Lake Baikal in the 1960s, their positivity is allowed to exist only as a case of opposition to the state.^[xviii] The narrative remains a condemnation of Soviet socialism in the face of a tragic defeat of civil society.

The tragic framing in Soviet environmental history invites reflection on broader methodological and political implications. It challenges historians to consider the ethical dimensions of narrative emplotment: how the choice of tragedy shapes moral lessons, ideological interpretations, and political consequences. For example, emphasizing tragedy can cultivate empathy and highlight human and ecological vulnerability, but it can also oversimplify complex social-ecological systems and political imperatives. Conversely, integrating multiple emplotments—recognizing tragedy alongside comedy or instances of adaptive resilience—can produce a more nuanced understanding of the Soviet ecological experience, illustrating the contingent interplay between state planning, technological innovation, and environmental response. This approach not only enriches the historiography of the Soviet Union but also provides a model for analyzing environmental history in other contexts.

In fact, the scholarship that is doing this kind of analysis often gets little attention. There are scholars who are actively engaged in bucking the tragic narrative frame of Soviet environmental history. For instance, those who look at environmental activism in the late USSR have found a redemptive quality in activists’ diversity of ideology, protests, and advocacy rooted in international cooperation and inspiration that offered a glimmer of hope in the moment of transition.^[xix] However, even in this topic, the possibility of political alternatives as a redemptive narrative is only made possible by the moment in which it takes place, between 1988 and 1991. Scholars such as Julia Lajus have taken a step further by diving into the Soviet scientists in the 1970s and 80s who took the emerging consensus on the Limits to Growth seriously and sought ways that the socialist state might manage its resources better.^[xx]

The point that I want to stress is that we have all implicitly accepted the implications of White’s theory of emplotment through our willingness to treat history as a field within the humanities rather than a social science, and through our use of frameworks like “empire” and “nation”: such narrative choices, even when unintentional, are not neutral, but encode contemporary moral judgment and ideological interpretation, influencing historiography, collective memory, and thus political positions today. It is through these political implications that the tragedy narrative in our field has become hegemonic, to the extent that the moral judgment of the USSR, which has grafted itself on to Russia thanks to the cultural re-telling of Soviet history that sees it as a continuation of Russia’s empire, impacts hiring decisions, graduate admissions, and research funding. By leaning on the tragic narrative, they have pronounced a moral judgment not just on the Soviet Union, but on socialism and material analysis itself.

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Alexander Herbert is a professor of Global Environmental History and Modern Europe at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He is the author of two books on Soviet culture, and numerous articles on topics ranging from late Soviet environmentalism to early Soviet disasters.

[i] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press, 1992) made this overly confident argument in light of the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and China’s transition to a limited market economy.

[ii] I should make a distinction here between materialist history, that concerns questions of political economy and structural analysis, versus what has been termed the “new materialism” which examines how physical things play an active role in shaping all aspects of society. In this subfield, material objects are just as vital to the development of history and culture as written works or ideas. It is thus cultural historicism finding meaning, symbolism, and emotions within objects. One pioneering case is Leora Auslander, “Beyond Words,” The American Historical Review 110, no. 4 (October 2005): 1015–45.

[iii] Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Harvard University Press, 1983); Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books, 1973); Robert Darton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (Basic Books, 1984); Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (Harper and Row, 1980).

[iv] These scholars have a number of works that take a social-historical perspective. Just two examples include Lewis Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935-1941 (Cambridge University Press, 1988) and Sheila Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921-1934 (Cambridge, 1979).

[v] Haden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 9.

[vi] Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999);

[vii] Esma Kunchulia, “Georgian Cuisine—’Inventing Tradition,’” Spekali 16 (January 2010).

[viii] The “new material histories” are unrelated to traditional Marxist materialism in the sense that they approach material as a reflection of cultural relations, not an economic exchange. The clearest example is Mollie Arbuthnot, Christina Bonin, and Gabriella Ferrari, Soviet Materialities: Socialist Things, Environments, and Affects (Manchester University Press, 2026). At a recent conference I heard a paper that proposed a manuscript that studied the transference of construction materials from the Baltic States to Russia as a sign of a “colonial” relationship. This type of thinking ignores the material outcomes of a economic and political union and erroneously considers all exchange relations as colonial.

[ix] Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport: Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972).

[x] William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).

[xi] Donald Worcester, Nature’s Economy: A history of Ecological Ideas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

[xii] Richard White, “From Wilderness to Hybrid Landscapes: The Cultural Turn in Environmental History,” The Historian 66, no. 3 (Fall 2004).

[xiii] Paul Josephson, Hero Projects: The Russian Empire and Big Technology from Lenin to Putin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 20224). Kate Brown, Manual for Survival: An Environmental History of the Chernobyl Disaster (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2019).

[xiv] Stephen Brain, “The Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature,” Environmental History 15, no. 4 (2010): 670–700.

[xv] Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: And Environmental History of the Bering Straight (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019)

[xvi] Frank Uekoetter, The Green and the Brown: A History of Conservation in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

[xvii] Roman A. Cybriwsky, Along Ukraine’s River: A Social and Environmental History of Dnipro (Central European University Press, 2018).

[xviii] Nicholas Breyfogle, “At the Watershed: 1958 and the Beginnings of Lake Baikal Environmentalism,” The Slavonic and East European Review 93, no. 1 (January 2019): 147-180.

[xix] Alexander Herbert, “Protesting Destruction in Chapaevsk: Green Politics in a Late Soviet City,” Europe Asia Studies 76, no. 7 (2024). Also Laurent Coumel and Marc Elie, “A Belated and Tragic Ecological Revolution: Nature, Disasters, and Green Activists in the Soviet Union and the Post-Soviet States, 1960s-2010s,” The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 30, no. 2 (2013).

[xx] Julia Lajus, “Soviet Official Critiques of Resource Scarcity Predictions by Limits to Growth Report: The Case of Evgenii Fedorov’s Ecological Crisis Rhetoric,” European Review of History 27, no. 3 (2020): 321-341.

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Avral is Russian for ’all hands on deck’ but repurposed to mean rushing to meet a target, the frantic sprint against a deadline that leaves no space for breath. A word born in the Soviet factory, in the peculiar rhythms of the planned economy where long stretches of managed idleness were punctured by collective effort. That it remains everyone knows tells us something important about what has been preserved and what has been lost since 1991. What was lost is self-evident to anyone alive today in the Russian Federation: an industrialized workforce with job guarantees and symbolic capital, if poor working conditions. What is preserved is an embedded sense that the rush is shared, that the labour-time and space of others is implicated in your own. That understanding has survived the destruction of the institutions that once structured it, lingering now like feeling a phantom limb.

The phantom limb metaphor is just one possible way of thinking about what I call the ‘absent presence’ of social reproduction in Russia. Institutions that once organized collective existence are gone, but the sense of their potentiality is not. Now, in the conjuncture of post-2022 wartime Russia, that frustrated desire is being channelled into new forms: into an ersatz corporate kinship that promises protection from mobilization while delivering the discipline of the market, that invokes family while enforcing hierarchy. Understanding this dynamic requires thinking simultaneously about social reproduction but embedding that within the texture of lived experience in wartime Russia.

The Feeling of What’s Missing

The most common framework for understanding Russian political life in the West is via the optic of authoritarianism, revanchism, and imperial nostalgia. Russians who express support for Putin, or who do not visibly oppose the war on Ukraine are understood to be acting out a collective geopolitical identity: the wounded pride of a post-imperial nation, the resentment of Western humiliation, the backward-looking desire for Soviet greatness. This frontstage Punch and Judy show played out daily on TV misidentifies what drives the bulk of political behaviour and non-behaviour in Russia.

I argue, on the contrary, based on my long-term ethnographic engagement with rustbest company towns, regional cities and rural settlements, that a deeper resentment is about ‘feeling for an absent presence’: a haunting by the possibility of connection and belonging that the Soviet project — contradictory, coercive, and ultimately failed — once nevertheless instantiated. As with all anthropology, I focus on specific times and places, but as far as it’s possible to generalize, Kaluga region, four hours south of Moscow, is not untypical in representing a snapshot of a national feeling for such resentment. This is not nostalgia in the straightforward sense, which tends towards affective sentiment. It is closer to what Raymond Williams meant by a ‘structure of feeling’: a humming tension within experience, a social formation that is not yet fully articulate itself outside the dominant hegemony, but that nonetheless inflects one’s sense of time and place. It is more like the relation of a tree to water than the relation of an ageing person to a cherished photograph. The desire for connection is not chosen or purely personal, but intersubjective and ‘historically’ aware of itself.

The absent presence in question is not the gulag, not the nomenklatura, not the Stalinist terror — though those are also sedimentations. Georgian-Russian philosopher Keti Chukhrov has arguably captured it best: the Soviet model might be called dealienated sociality: the set of actually-existing practices, imperfect and often degraded, through which people were incorporated into something larger than themselves. The factory collective that organized not just production but housing, childcare, holidays, and funerals. The trade union that was also a social club, a welfare office, a venue for the distribution of not just wages but the so-called ‘social wage’: subsidized meals, sanatorium vouchers, kindergarten places, access to better housing. The institution of work itself as a site not merely of economic exploitation but of social recognition and mutual obligation. Caroline Humphrey, writing in the early 2000s about the shock of the transition period, described these (and other organizations) as ‘possessive domains’: spaces in which the self was constituted through collective inclusion, so that to be expelled from them was to lose not just income but a form of personhood. When those institutions collapsed, or were transferred to the market, or decayed into hollow shells, the loss was triply dispossessing. People lost access to work and economic security. They lost the associational life that work had organized. And they lost, in Humphrey’s formulation, an ontological reference point: the sense of being held within a structure of purpose and mutual recognition that exceeded individual reproduction.

Compressing dispossession

The transition from Soviet to post-Soviet was a catastrophic time compression of the dispossession that Western capitalism had accomplished over centuries. The ‘social wage’ — that complex of subsidized goods and services through which the Soviet state had effectively socialized much of the cost of reproducing labour power — was dismantled at speed. Childcare facilities closed or were privatized. Factory social clubs and canteens disappeared. Housing privatization transferred public assets to private hands. Healthcare and education were nominally retained as public goods but were stripped of funding and increasingly captured by informal payments and outright commercial providers. The reproductive burden was, in Silvia Federici’s terms, ‘re-enclosed’: transferred from the collective back to the household, which meant, in practice, back to women who still needed to also hold down a job (if they were lucky), or sell their possessions and yard-grown vegetables on the side of the road.

Zooming forwards to 2022, in the provincial towns of Kaluga region I study, a worker named Igor faces potential mobilization. For merely five weeks from September 2022, the authorities attempted to call-up former servicepersonnel, but this proved so politically risky, that they quickly backtracked in October 2022, announcing the ‘success’ of the policy. Relatively quickly into 2023, recruitment using large monetary payments among the more economically vulnerable parts of the population replaced mobilization of reservists amounting to hundreds of thousands of troops per year.

Igor’s talk always veers into the question of ‘how to get by’. He summarizes the situation with the matter-of-fact bitterness of someone who has calculated the same equation too many times: wages don’t keep up with wartime inflation. In any case, bank rates are too high for a mortgage; a child’s illness sufficient to lose a job; ‘social protection for women is a legal fiction’. These are not exceptional grievances. They are the ordinary texture of Nancy Fraser’s crisis of care in its specifically post-Soviet form. All the costs and risks of precarity are transferred to individuals who must then spin — krutitsia — forever adapting, forever calculating, with no cognitive or emotional bandwidth left over, even when war looms.

What distinguishes the Russian case from, say, the British or even American experience of neoliberal social dispossession is precisely the depth and freshness of that absent presence. In societies where the commons of social reproduction were enclosed centuries ago, their loss has become naturalized, sedimented into common sense. In Russia, the memory is living: it is carried in the bodies and practices of people who themselves used the factory canteen, who themselves were ‘possessed’ by the encompassing domain of the Soviet enterprise. The phantom limb aches because the amputation happened recently enough that the nervous system has not yet adapted. This is what makes the Russia case still valuable for a global left: the trace of the desire for collective social reproduction is still damp, still excavatable. It has not yet fossilized.

Wartime and the Intensification of Contradiction

The invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and the mobilization that followed in September of that year did not introduce new structural contradictions into Russian social life but merely intensified contradictions that were already operative. The most immediate structural effect was demographic. The combination of mobilization, emigration (roughly a million people, predominantly educated and economically active, left Russia in 2022 alone, though many have since returned), and the ongoing secular decline in the working-age population produced an acute labour shortage in precisely the sectors where the pre-war economy had already been strained. These included transport and logistics, and later the service industries and municipal workers. Shortages also crept into the industrial sectors, as skilled workers who could move were ‘stolen’ by the military industrial complex which could offer higher wages. At least before 2026, the result was something that workers with any structural bargaining power could begin, cautiously, to exploit. Wages in some sectors rose significantly in some industrial locations and in big cities. The social bargaining power of labour, in purely structural terms, strengthened. Workers can and do vote with their feet in ways that were less available to them before.

And yet this apparent structural strengthening takes place within a social and political context that prevents its translation into associational power. The organized labour movement in Russia has been co-opted for decades. The concept of ‘illusory corporatism’ that David Ost applied to the post-communist transitions of Central and Eastern Europe describes the Russian case aptly: unionism is institutional theatre, absent as genuine representation. There’s a post-communist labour paradox — strong structural position, weak associational capacity and in the Russian war this paradox only intensifies.

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The implications for social reproduction tend to be passed over. The inability of workers to convert structural into associational strength is not merely a product of state repression, though it is certainly that. It is also a product of the way social reproduction is organized — or rather, disorganized. A workforce that must devote enormous energy to the hustle of survival, to navigating the informal economy of childcare and healthcare and housing, is a workforce with diminished capacity for collective organization. Silvia Federici’s insight about the political function of primitive accumulation applies here: the fragmentation of reproductive life into individual household struggles is not just an economic consequence of neoliberalism but a political one. Exhausted, isolated, without the time or space to develop solidarity beyond the household, workers can rarely mobilize even when their structural position objectively warrants it.

Simultaneously, the wartime state extends significant financial incentives to those willing to fight — contracts worth hundreds of thousands of rubles, payments to families of the fallen — while simultaneously cutting social expenditure in healthcare and education. The offer is explicit: the state cares (in mercenary terms) for those willing to die; for those who are not, the market remains. This double movement — expanding the monetary incentive for death, contracting the social infrastructure for life — is the care crisis in its most cynical wartime form. This creates a perverse moral economy in which those soldiers unlucky enough not to die-for-hire are constructed as unworthy of care, which produces its own social friction: businesses refuse to hire returning fighters; demobilized soldiers face social sanctions from below even as they are lionized from above. While programmes exist to try to support veterans and also integrate them into the workforce there are two barriers. Firstly, the demographic profile of men willing to sign up for the war often aligns with those who didn’t want to or couldn’t hold down formal employment, or matched the profile of regions that were economically depressed. Secondly, the stigma is significant: employers suspect soldiers of having unmanageable mental health disorders and substance abuse as a result of service; they ‘typologize’ them sociologically as unreliable for ‘normal’ work; they doubt, given their previously high pay (perhaps triple or quadruple normal blue-collar pay) that these workers will remain long in their jobs; they deduce that these workers will lack necessary skills, given they took the ‘extreme’ decision in the first place to go to fight rather than pursue a civilian career.

The Corporate Family: Fictive Kinship as Social Reproduction

In my work I try to tie this together to describe a constellation of social forces — the absent presence of collective personhood, the intensification of the care crisis, the structural strength of labour — but under wartimes, I am interested in the emergence of a social phenomenon that deserves serious analytical attention: ‘devolved corporatism’ articulated through the idiom of fictive kinship at the level of employment relationships.

Fictive kinship in anthropology refers to the recognition that social bonds of obligation, solidarity, and mutual recognition exceed the biological relation. In corporate contexts, this is generally treated as a management ideology: the firm as family is a well-documented feature of Japanese corporate culture, of certain forms of American evangelical capitalism, and of what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello called the ‘connexionist’ spirit of contemporary capitalism, in which belonging to a team substitutes for the lost securities of Fordist employment. But the Russian case suggests something more than ideological manipulation from above, or at least something more complicated.

Caroline Humphrey’s 1970s (and later) ethnography on Soviet collective farms identified the ‘collective’ as a specific Soviet institutional form whose genius — if it can be called that — was to organize not just production but the entire social existence of its members. The collective was not merely an employer; it was a ‘domain’ in her terms, a zone of encompassing social incorporation within which the self was constituted. People were, in a precise sense, possessed by their collective: their identity, their social recognition, their access to social goods, their sense of purpose and belonging were all organized through and by the collective’s incorporation of them. The loss of this — ‘double dispossession’ — was therefore not just a material loss but an ontological one.

What is now visible in the provincial factories and metalworking plants of post-2022 Russia is, I argue, an attempt to reconstruct something functionally analogous — not by the state but by individual firms, not through the mechanisms of Soviet paternalism but through an uneasy combination of Soviet idiom and neoliberal discipline. My good friend Nikita, always lounging with me at home in his blue overalls, or sitting over a barbeque in his jerrybuilt garage, is employed in a metal fastenings firm in Kaluga’s Special Economic Zone. When I see him again in 2023 he’s ‘proud’ to announce that he no longer fears being called because he is protected by his employer from mobilization — a ‘reserved’ category worker whose draft deferral depends on maintaining his employment. In return, he performs a new kind of corporate loyalty: he stays late, works hard, and participates in the firm’s social media culture of team videos and collective self-presentation. The exchange is transactional, but it is also inflected by a historical trace of feeling. Nikita and workers like him develop what appears to be genuine affective attachment to the firm: incorporation into a ‘corporate extended family’. An HR manager expresses surprise at its success to me, even embarrassment; he had not predicted that workers would take the family metaphor so seriously.

Incorporation draws heavily on the Soviet vocabulary and idioms of paternalism. The general director of a new (wartime) ventilation plant in Kaluga describes himself as responsible for social ‘infrastructure’ in terms that echo the Soviet enterprise director as patron. Workers come to him as ‘supplicants’ — the word is precise and important — for social projects, sporting sponsorships, the maintenance of urban life that the state no longer provides. Boris, a skilled technician at this firm who also escapes mobilization describes this employer as a khoziain — a word that Xenia Cherkaev recently wrote about in her book on Soviet property forms. This is a term for a master of a domain whose authority is at once despotic, contingent, paternalist, and collective. Boris, who was born in 1990, compares his boss (admiringly) to Elon Musk, but the word he uses is very Soviet, in the way it is used today.

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Scepticism and the Limits of Incorporation

It would be a mistake to read this emergent fictive kinship as simply ideological domination — as false consciousness that prevents workers from seeing their true interests. The third figure in this analysis is wiley Misha. Misha is a technician in the energy sector that should, by wartime logic, be thriving. But his enterprise suffers from labour shortages. As a result, his boss must accommodate his demands for flexible hours because the risk of losing him is real. Misha monitors job boards, calculates carefully, distinguishes between headline wages and the ‘hidden conditions’. He has left better-paying jobs because the greater self-exploitation they required was not worth it. He is a ‘realist sceptic’: someone who reads the offer of corporate paternalism clearly, who neither rejects it romantically nor accepts it uncritically, but calibrates it while building a kind of historical materialist DIY history of capitalism in Russia since 1991.

He knows, from lived experience, that wages in Russia have nominal and discretionary and ‘personal’ components, that what is offered and what is delivered are not the same thing, that the ‘norm’ gets quietly doubled while the pay increases by a fraction of the work increase, that working harder beyond a threshold is dangerous. His parting comment — that he might go to work for a Chinese automotive firm ‘but only if the conditions are right: a normal five-two schedule, plus lunch, and the proper corporate trinkets befitting the scale of production’ — is a precise, knowing articulation of the labour compact he is willing to enter and the terms on which he is willing to enter it.

This sceptical realism is, in E. P. Thompson’s terms, a form of moral economy: an operative understanding of what is fair and what is not, what obligations employers owe to workers, what the minimum terms of dignified employment consist in. It draws on the Soviet legacy not as nostalgia but as a set of standards — imperfectly realized, often betrayed, but remembered — against which present conditions are assessed and found wanting. The vernacular socialism that others have traced in Russian working-class culture is not gone; it is simply subterranean, surfacing in the calibrations of people like Misha rather than in explicit political contestation.

The labour paradox that structures Russian workers’ lives — structural strength, associational weakness — is therefore not simply a product of fear or false consciousness. It is a product of the specific configuration of social reproduction under wartime neoliberalism: the absence of the collective forms that would allow structural power to be converted into organized action; the exhaustion of reproductive labour that consumes the time and energy that organization requires; the genuine, not manufactured, need for protection that the firm’s paternalism partially addresses; and the accurate, not ideologically distorted, assessment that the available forms of collective action are likely to be crushed before they can succeed. Nonetheless, a valid question is to doubt that Russia is significantly different from other places - equally repressive - where collective forms of resistance did occur. What is less clear is how new forms of protest and political action based on the real and increasing grievances the war has caused will start and what political entrepreneurs will ‘ride’ their wave.

Absent Presence as Political Resource

There is a strand in social reproduction theory, visible in Federici’s work on commons and commoning and in Fraser’s concept of non-market forms of social cooperation, that insists the reproduction of life under capitalism always exceeds and partially escapes the commodity form. People feed each other, care for each other, maintain networks of mutual aid that are not fully captured by either market exchange or state provision. These practices are not merely survival strategies. They are the seeds of a different social logic, traces of a commons that is always being both enclosed and reconstituted.

The absent presence of Soviet collective sociality in Russia is something like this: a trace, a remaining sediment, of a different way of organizing social reproduction that capital has not fully succeeded in expunging. It manifests in middle-aged man’s spontaneous decision to cut firewood for an elderly neighbour in my village and sit on her bench for an hour in conversation – even though he doesn’t really want to; in my neighbour Tamara’s cherishing of a broken Soviet vacuum flask her mother used to take to work, and her articulation of a sensibility of ‘social justice and responsibility’ that she identifies as an unthought inheritance from the Soviet education system. The significance of this trace is not nostalgic but prospective: it is evidence that the desire for collective social reproduction is not extinguished, only displaced. Many of the practices I observe also find their origin in a tradition of mutual aid, which is socialist, if not necessarily Soviet.

The politics of this situation is not simple or comfortable. The devolved corporatism of the post-2022 Russian enterprise is not an embryo of socialist self-organization. It is a form of social incorporation that, as Gramsci would have recognized, generates consent to existing relations of production by partially addressing the social needs that those relations create. Hegemony is still born in the factory. The worker who is protected from mobilization by his employer, who participates in team-building videos, who feels the firm as a second family, is not simply duped; he is incorporated. His consent is won through real concessions, however limited and conditional, that address real needs that the state and market have otherwise left unmet.

But incorporation is not permanent, and its contradictions are visible. The firm’s care is contingent and revocable; the boss’s paternalism is power distance dressed as warmth; the protection from mobilization lasts only as long as the firm needs it and the state permits it. The structural power of labour that the demographic crisis has created does not disappear simply because workers feel familial loyalty to their employers. As the war eats into the leftovers – human, infrastructural, otherwise material – it becomes more and more likely that structural power of ordinary working Russians will be activated, at first in supplications to the boss, then to the regional government, and then to ‘the good Tsar’. But even now people are beginning to realise the biggest khozain in the country has no ear, and no reverse gear.

In the meantime, in a slightly different modality of thinking among the people whose lives I inhabit, the absent presence makes itself felt: the phantom limb’s ache: renewing the life of the village, the town, the country, was once more than the individual hustle; the factory was once more than a labour market; the state was a mobilizer and frankly a monstrous thing, but it also encompassed all for what seemed like a future commonwealth. That knowledge is a resource. It is not yet fully visible as ‘political’. But it is not nothing.

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Jeremy Morris is Global Studies Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark. His book on wartime social reproduction in Russia Everyday Politics in Russia: From Resentment to Resistance was published by Bloomsbury in 2025.

Mark Carney’s speech at Davos in January 2026 has sparked a frenzy of truth-telling, which gives one the opportunity to assess the current state of politics and to reflect on the unified meaning of the transition to capitalism for the West and for the former socialist bloc of Eastern Europe, using the particular case of Romania.

Carney has brought the hard truth from his vast experience at the commanding heights of world economy, not only as Canada’s current prime-minister, but as the former governor of the Bank of Canada (2008-2013), who has faced the crash of capitalism in 2008 in such manner that he was appointed the first ever non-British governor of the Bank of England (2013-2020), having to deal in his mandate with the consequences of Brexit and with the quick succession of the failing governments of David Cameron, Theresa May, and Boris Johnson. Yet the speech itself, as remarkable as it is, is not the real turning point: the hard truth has come to the surface from within a historical process of denudation of the modern world. What seems to be chaos, the objective turbulence of the world-system at bifurcation, is only the result of hard truths being revealed the hard way, after the damage has been done.

The fracture within the Western world has widened so much that it has allowed Carney to say at Davos the quiet part out loud:

For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. …We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and we knew that international law applied with varied rigour, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. This fiction was useful, and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes. So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.

The Canadian banker thus explained that the elites of the Western world have simulated democracy for the rest of the world because they were complicit with the imperial hegemon and they were making money in the process. Deep down, it was all a lie. Carney also willingly admits in his speech that the Western powers have firstly lied to themselves that even though the game is rigged, it is good for the capitalist elites, and perhaps it was good enough for the lower masses and for the rest of the non-Western world.

Well, it was not. The turbulence shaking the world is precisely the result of the inflated lie bursting out. Carney’s speech may have been motivated by the desire to show that the emperor is naked, but that was not possible because these days the emperor goes out fully armored and weaponized. In his frustrated desire of denudation, Carney turned against the game he himself has been playing and pronounced the naked truth.

Carney’s speech made official the cracking into pieces of the dominant ideology of Eurocentrism and has a particularly important meaning for East Europeans because it spells out the unified sense of the post-socialist transition to capitalism for Eastern Europe and for the Western world. Carney emphasized his point by making a reference to Vaclav Havel’s essay “The Power of the Powerless” (1978), thus making a comparison between the state of late “communism” in the 1970s-80s and the state of global capitalism in the late 2020s. The comparison revealed more than it intended. For one, it recognized just how important the turn of 1989 for the capitalist elites of the world-system has been. Namely, from the Western standpoint, the dismantling of the East European socialist bloc has been a turning point and a victory for the rich and powerful. And indeed, whatever it was that happened in 1989 was turned from the 1990s into a frenzy of capitalist accumulation: the greedy win of the ruling classes of the world-system. Instead of an “end of history”, it was a new start of ruthless accumulation after the recession and stagflation of the Western world in the 1970s-1980s. As it turns out, the transition of Eastern Europe, therefore, was not as much about democracy as about obedience to and alignment with the moneyed and the powerful in the global class struggle. All the rest was secondary smoke and mirrors, with some crumbs left falling from the big table. One can surmise that, in the underbellies of the world powers, there was an underlying consensus between the liberal and the conservative tendencies within the Western representative democracy. Liberal democracy was the carrot to the conservatives’ stick, the shine given to the gearbox, in order to maintain superficial but acceptable appearances, and to decide who gets the acceptable crumbs feeding the same digestive organism. The historical period of the 1990s to 2020s reveals itself to be indeed the times of fake it ‘til you make it.

As it turns out, that meant creating the reign of the few over the many, beautified with the human face of liberal democracy. In the euphemistic terms of the liberal language, the period of transition has been for the countries of Eastern Europe the passage from the lowest inequality group to significant income inequality. “Weakening the scope of collective action” is another euphemistic term used for the adopted anti-social philosophy of the post-socialist governance, quite understandably for an economy based on the “privatization of gains but socialization of losses”. Such an unchallenged rule of the rich over the world is not sustainable, which would explain why it has to be weaponized. Even with a financial sector deregulated and set free from the embeddedness in the industrial sector, capitalism cannot keep on inventing itself and falls into bigger crises, compensated by ever bigger interventions from above, which in turn are reducing the state to a militarized coercive instrument. At the global level, the unchallenged rule of the rich and powerful has unleashed three decades of wars of colonial invasions, which have enticed the global empire to fall into hyperimperialism. It has devastated entire countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, creating millions of refugees, and has polarized domestic societies. It has taken liberalism to absurd extremes, bringing the regression of proto-fascism at the center of politics and the return of fascist violence used by the repressive apparatus of the democratic capitalist states. The post-socialist rule of the imperial, rich, and powerful has only aggravated the dangerous rivalry with the pretenders seeking the status of the imperial, rich, and powerful. The superficial shine of liberal democracy has only served to establish the unprecedented rule of the richest 1%, who are possessing more wealth than 95% of the population of the entire world. Even the personal computer and the internet, hailed in the 1990s as irrepressible drivers of democratization, have been taken over by monopolies and turned into means of capitalized surveillance. On top of it all, the unchallenged rule of consumerist and extractivist capitalism has revealed itself to be a war on life that produces uncontrollable waste and has brought the world to the brink of ecological disaster. Now would be a good time to remember that the shiniest Western promises of the 1990s were that capitalism equals efficiency and that capitalism equals democracy; in reality, the world is overwhelmed by waste and war. Thus far, these hard truths have only been learned the hard way, after the damage has already been done.

The time of rupture announced by Carney would mean that the former socialist bloc is also facing the revealed necessity of re-orientation, which confuses the hell out of its Euro-centrics. What social order would give an answer to the reign of the few over the many, and would be able to centralize ecological restoration? And who could be the international partners looking for real transnational democracy instead of dependency under imperial and colonial supremacy? In the great transition of the world-system, the East could keep on learning the hard way, forced by external circumstances beyond control, or with some semblance of planning and preparation. For its part, Romania has paid already a heavy price through the radical austerity measures imposed by the regime in the 1980s in order to align the whole economy to the absolute priority of paying the debt to the Western lenders, and then it has paid another heavy price in the post-socialist transition in order to align itself obediently into the position of a semi-periphery of the world system. For a semi-peripheral country like Romania, this moment of truth of the world-system puts into question the whole process of democratization, and in particular the form of representative democracy established after 1989. In this sense, the chaos of the Romanian presidential elections of 2024-2025 can be understood as a moment of clarification: a sign of popular anticipation rather than confusion. The discontent and distrust expressed by the majority of the people are pointing at historical truths that are getting revealed as we speak. We are witnessing a re-orientation of historical consciousness that has yet to find its political expression, because the political forces traditionally fighting and building against capitalism and colonialism have been unfairly eliminated after 1989 from the game of representative democracy. Even the year 2026 has begun in Romania with yet a new legislative initiative coming from the zealot drive of the establishment of post-socialist anticommunism, which seeks carceral and financial punishment for the public use of communist names and symbols, as well as ideas and concepts (!). The drive does remind one of the 1930s hunt in Europe to eradicate any root of communism and anarchism – and of who launched that hunt. Yet what is clear is that the popular discontent has been asking Romanians for an altogether different political form.

However, the formal political sphere continues to be occupied by the same normative binomial split between the liberal tendency and the conservative tendency. The social democrats have never really threatened it, playing in the middle, with facets of both tendencies. Currently, they are in decline, riding on institutional inertia and the power of clans, seemingly without direction. The current carriers of the liberal tendency, the Presidency of Nicuşor Dan and the mono-European government of Bolojan, are the latest caretakers of the fundamental lie. They are governing by pretending that everything will be alright after hurting the people, by trying to maintain the status quo that is only to the advantage of the big capital and the upper middle-class, while implementing no less than three waves of brutal austerity measures over one year. Thus, they are conforming yet again to the dividing and brutalizing logic of the transition to capitalism. As one should know, the tendency of a lie is only to inflate; accordingly, the extraordinary measures taken against the rise of the far-right, which directly contradicted their own principles of liberal democracy, have only strengthened the liberals’ belief in their moral supremacy and have turned into the blind fury of a radicalized and authoritarian Eurocentrism. Nothing else matters now except following even closer the same “European” directive line. The waves of neoliberal measures of austerity taken by the Bolojan government in 2025-2026 are nothing else but a mini-transition, compressing the period of sacrifices of the post-socialist transition into one more sacrificial year that “does not matter”, until the submission of the new budget of Romania to the European Commission in October 2026, looking forward to the end of the EU financial framework 2020-2027 and the beginning of the next one in 2028. Thus, in order to produce some good numbers needed for an acceptable report to the European Commission and for the rating agencies of global financial capitalism, the structural target of the neoliberal measures of austerity taken by the Bolojan government in 2025-2026 proved to be the individual consumer, the small and medium businesses and, prominently, the public employee. The big capital and the big funds are spared of being affected by the austerity cuts in the name of “prioritizing investments”, which is the direct inheritor of the term “strategic investors” used in the 1990s-2000s for the incoming capitalists who received favors giving them a leg up above the market realities. Prime-minister Bolojan refused to increase the state revenues by returning to the progressive tax or by going after the wealthy non-payers or by limiting the costs of militarization, yet has gone ham into the masses by increasing significantly the value-added tax (VAT), by increasing the annual road tax paid by individual car owners and other individual taxes, by increasing the normative number of working hours for teachers for the same pay (!) – a measure justified by saying it means “alignment to the European standards”, by freezing the minimal wage, the wages of the public sector and the pensions (!!) in the context of producing the rise of prices, by cutting the bonus for working in hazardous or harmful conditions (!!!), and even by cutting the pay for the first day of every paid medical leave (!!!!).

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The pettiness of some of these measures is not just an indicator of sociopathic sadism but the structural characteristic of a new generation of politicians who know nothing about political ideologies and state matters, let alone about economic alternatives, but are mentally suffused instead in the corporatist “culture”. The current carriers of the liberal tendency in Romania are under the full delusion that the state is a corporation, namely a “badly managed corporation”, and are simply applying the capitalist definition of corporate “efficiency” to the state, without understanding the basic difference that the state has to work for the people, not for profit. They are cutting costs regardless of the interest of workers, always targeting work, not capital, down to the pettiest details hurting the common folk, and are proud of their own sociopathic version of Eliminating One Olive from First Class Salads, completely indifferent to or unaware that context is everything. These Eurocentric carriers of the liberal tendency are simply proud to be the middle management of the dependency of a semi-periphery, unaware that this is the meaning of “Europe” that they are actually conveying to the people. As in every harmful episode of the post-socialist transition to capitalism, the principle of dishing out “tough love” only applies to the masses and not to the capital or to the directing Western institutions. The tougher the love for the people, the sweeter the deal for the wealthy patrons. The real-world meaning of the word “sacrifice”, which has been predicated in the post-socialist transition to capitalism exclusively with reference to the “people”, and which has been softened and rationalized by adding the word “efficiency”, is revealed thus to be simply: exploitation. It is only common sense to expect that the current disenchantment of the people with this exploitative meaning of Europe will only continue to grow and to be capitalized by the opposition represented by the far-right pretenders to the conservative tendency. In spite of their tough posturing as “men who do what needs to be done”, the current Romanian carriers of the liberal tendency cannot avoid being seen for what they are: hapless mid-level managers who are obeying other political masters, who in turn are outside the national game of electoral democracy. They are only the latest carriers of the Western lie divulged by Carney, willingly taking the first hits of the internal distrust and division that they themselves have sowed while managing exploitation and dependency. Their only way forward is to keep on inflating the lie, blaming either an external or an internal threat.

Meanwhile, the rising right-wing pretenders to the conservative tendency are gaining popular support by pretending to address the truth. In reality, they are part of the same lie that completes the binomial and their answers are symbolic. The currently rising form of populist sovereignism is only the radicalization of the conservative tendency within the same normative political binomial of post-socialism. The radicalization itself is the direct result of trying to overcompensate the crisis and bankruptcy of neoliberalism. The sovereignist “patriots” are not a priori spared of popular distrust, which applies to the entire political class, and can be understood as the awakening consciousness or popular consensus that the post-socialist transition has been indeed a process of colonization, i.e., a loss of popular sovereignty, and that the historical time after socialism has been governed by social injustice: by lies, thefts and exploitation resulting in the ruling clique (cîrdăşie) of a few big winners and their faithful servants.

Thus, the external denudation of the world has been accompanied by internal revelations. Liberal democracy has been used in Romania to the benefit of the few. Captured Justice, the most popular investigative documentary of 2025 from Romania has shown how the justice system has been “captured” in the aftermath of the famous anti-corruption campaign led by the National Anticorruption Directorate of Romania between 2006-2012 and 2013-2018. The investigative journalists focused on the corrupt adaptation and reorganization of the justice system, particularly after 2022, and found today a “captive justice system”. The presented evidence is clear: the ultimate beneficiaries of the reorganization have been people who have enriched themselves in the post-socialist transition through theft, abuse, and fraud. The rich and powerful have been exonerated and acquitted along this corrupt process, not in the least by way of an ingeniously orchestrated expiration of liability under the existing statute of limitations. In other words, the investigation showed that the class war of the post-socialist transition has been won, some three decades later, by the rich and powerful. They are the ones who have become free with impunity after 1989, not in the least by privatizing the state and turning the justice institutions into their clients. I would add that this victory had been officially announced already through the controversial decision of the Romanian Constitutional Court from May 2025, which ruled in favor of limiting the transparency of the wealth statements of politicians.

Rather than chaos, the exposé evidences an organized order, but an order that requires increased control, militarization and surveillance, otherwise it is not sustainable. Corruption is not a local disease but a structural feature that upholds the logic of the transition. The semi-peripheral state reveals itself to be cracked, instrumented against collective action and privatized by the combined pressures of the world system and of the rich and powerful, piling up on top of the man-made climate calamities. This is the common clarity that keeps on emerging both at closer range and in the wider horizon of the world, amidst all the violence. While the liberal elites keep on pretending that there is nothing wrong with the direction of the transition, the sovereignists are reacting to the popular consensus, supported by evidence, that the transition to capitalism has been a theft, but only with vague promises of doing justice that sound like the threats of thugs, without talking at all about the gap produced and maintained between the enriched and the impoverished.

The objective reality is that the elimination of the socialist option from the East European semi-periphery has turned it into a war zone and into an area of plunder. Even the emergent right-wingers are saying out loud half of this truth. Their sovereignism is a predictable right-wing political expression that has emerged at this particular historical conjuncture out of the structural crisis of the semi-peripheral state: the right-wing responds to the deep popular discontent with mirroring indignation and the superficial means of a broken, privatized and weaponized state. At its best, the right wing looks at the cracks created by the loss of popular sovereignty through military and militia lenses, talking only about state symbols and the loss of state sovereignty. That does not make it less of a client of the world-system, or less of a servant of the rich and powerful. The elite political figures of sovereignism are just the part of middle-management who dream of promotion. I would advance this: the current form of Romanian sovereignism is the domain of the self-colonized who have temporarily lost the master and are trying to move into the void of an imagined future hegemon. The sovereignists simply cannot get rid of the dark energy of the void, which they bring wherever they show up. They must feel it themselves; otherwise, there would be no need to cover it up with pseudo-messianic rallying cries and strident promises of a golden age.

The void is the result of the objective fracture of the world-system and of the perpetual state of half-awakening of the right-wing from the state of self-colonization. Yet the only existing sovereignty belongs to the political community, otherwise called the people. Real politics would be based on the popular sovereignty which precedes any colonization or domination and provides the forces of liberation. In other times, that was the ideal meaning of work.

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To sum up, the clarity emerging in the wider horizons of a turbulent world comes from the admission that the rulers of the Western world have lied and committed violence in order to maintain their advantages within the world order of colonial and imperial supremacy. Whether it was inadvertently or not, the result is the same. The global lie has given the direction of the post-socialist transition to capitalism, which has been implemented with disciplined obedience by the local managers of the lie. The lure of the coalition of “middle powers” invoked by the Canadian prime minister is, therefore, the superficial answer that tries to respond to the truth of the fractured world without correcting the course, without responding to the need for transnational democracy of the whole world, without addressing the constituency that listens to the far-right, and without actually addressing the tendency of the currently diminished Europe to slip itself into the semi-peripheral status itself. It is a weak appeal to mobilization addressed to the mid-managers of the world, who have never been known for their rebellious spirit. It is remarkable and revealing that Carney’s speech recognized the inflated lie of the Western world, but did not make an appeal for taking responsibility for its consequences! As it turns out, the banker is not even an Ivan Ilych character. Recognizing the lie does not lead to an awakened consciousness. On the contrary, the banker who recognized having managed a life of lies just pleaded for a tactical change that would keep up the charade of the status and power of the European and Canadian capitalist elites. Carney’s recognition of “the end of pleasant fictions and beginning of harsh reality” is not a return to realism, but the reaction of the coterie who has been left out of the latest scheme and realizes it has to concoct a new one. The discrepancy is striking between the “mid” range and select club of his appeal for mobilization, and the gigantic size of the lie that he has just revealed. One can contemplate, thus, the character and limits of an adult person in a position of power who has never spoken out against the lies and war crimes that were profitable for him, yet cannot accept what he perceived to be a rupture within the ranks of the Western elite. This crack within the monolith of Eurocentrism puts the middle-managers of dependency from the semi-periphery in a waiting game that is only to the advantage of the far-right.

The denudation of the world is a temporary phenomenon that encourages politicization and allows re-orientation. The politicization towards the half-baked, conservative solution of barbarism is already here, with all its dark energies. Yet we already know that in spite of claims about sovereignty, they are just future clients of the empire. The politicization toward corporate liberalism remains attractive for opportunists looking to maintain the status quo. Yet the larger world is changing, and the liberal game of complicity with the colonial and imperial forces has lost its moral pretense and it runs mostly on money. We already know that in terms of policy, all it does is to demand more sacrifices from the common folk while dishing out austerity. Within this impoverished landscape, Eastern Europe has its own resources for re-orientation in the world because it has actually experienced transformation and it has come to a point of popular disenchantment. For all its faults, real socialism has actually produced in record time social mobility at the level of the entire population, homes for everybody and an entire infrastructure for education, culture, health, energy, production and transport, adequate for the world of the 2^nd industrial revolution. In comparison, after more than three decades and for all the influx of global capital, the governance of the post-socialist transition has built some roads, real estate riches and many local images to be sold to tourists, and a profuse network of supermarkets and malls, while it keeps on relying on the socialist infrastructure and on socialist-educated people. The option that would be offered by a process of socialist renewal based on the characteristics of this time and place and on the collective intelligence of East Europeans is only forbidden by the current ideological constraints. The anti-democratic nature of this interdiction should be clear by now even for the local managers of the big lie.

When even the leaders of the capitalist world are signaling the end of the post-socialist transition, it is not too late to look seriously towards the third option of a transformative left. Animated by the vision of clarity in times of turbulence, new energies of re-organizing the left have come to a common expression found in the Manifesto of the Initiative for the Right to the Future. However, one has to recognize that this is only the beginning of a beginning, which needs to be strengthened and needs a culture of solidarity and appreciation. The existing collective intelligence will have to focus on identifying and mobilizing the local and transnational resources of re-orientation that are answering the concerns of the people and are able to anchor a vision for the future. It has to be said here that not everybody has learned these truths the hard way, and that the current denudation of the world has been confirming many particular points and even the burgeoning consensus from the growing body of East European critical theory that has been expressed organically in local groups of social justice activism, in the voluminous body of work of the independent journals of leftist tendencies, and in major academic conferences such as Capitalist Transformations in Eastern and Central Europe or the four editions of the Urban Inequalities Forum from Sofia, as well as across professional associations such as the Black Sheep Society of the Association for Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies and others. The hapless choice of learning only the hard way evidences the discrepancy between power and knowledge in neoliberal times, which has been pointed prominently in the recent blockade of the Rectorate of the University of Belgrade, organized by what is still the largest social movement in Europe.

Something is brewing in Eastern Europe, but the political space that remains to be articulated from the critical cumulation of knowledge and social mobilization would have to be able to break through the binomial reign of mediocrity of the mid-level managers of the semi-periphery. Outside this option, the much darker clarity emerging in the process of denudation of the world is that the new TINA is simply the duel to the death of the resource wars.

Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu is a Romanian philosopher, translator, and culture theorist, writing on critical social theory, decolonial thought, international politics, and the cultural history of socialism and post-socialism. His work in many independent collectives foregrounds cultural activism and political journalism in transnational, transperipheral and intercultural connections.

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Red Threads Editorial Note: Three weeks ago, the US and Israel launched an aerial war of aggression against Iran, accompanied by a new round of Israeli violence in Lebanon and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, leading to thousands of deaths throughout the region. Following months of protests in Iran and their bloody repression, many expected the regime to suffer a swift defeat. However, despite the decapitation of its leadership, the regime has proved remarkably resilient and even taken the initiative, establishing a chokehold on one of global capitalism’s arteries, the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of global oil passes, and striking back powerfully at Israel and US allies in the Gulf.

On March 13, 2026, a week into the assault on Iran, Matan Kaminer of Red Threads conducted this interview with writer and journalist Shora Esmailian, based in Malmö, Sweden. Esmailian places the protests that sparked the recent state crackdown in continuity with waves of protest since the 1979 revolution. She points out that these waves have incorporated a wide range of demands around political freedom as well as economic, gender and environmental justice.

Esmailian highlights that resource extraction, and dependence on oil, gas, and steel production at the expense of working people, make the Islamic Republic a capitalist society, one in which the leadership enriches itself on the backs of the working class. Our conversation broaches - without being able to answer - that most difficult of questions: what should the left’s relationship be to regimes that may support liberation struggles externally while remaining oppressive internally , especially in a context where there is no alternative on the horizon?

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Red Threads (RT) Thank you for agreeing to this conversation. Could you introduce yourself to our readers?

Shora Esmailian (SE) I was born in Tehran in 1981 and I came to Sweden as a nine-year-old refugee with my mother. My immediate family were all involved in the Revolution of 1979. I grew up in a leftist home, where I heard about everything from Palestine to Iran to US imperialism. My family never said much about what they did during the revolution, but they were secularists, leftists.

I started working as a journalist around 2004, when I went to Iran to report on the awakening labour movement together with Andreas Malm. We wrote a book, Iran on the Brink. Since then, I’ve covered Iran, Palestine, the Middle East, but also climate change and climate justice. I wrote a book on climate refugees in Pakistan, Egypt and Kenya back in 2010-11. My most recent book is in on Gaza and the genocide. I also work as a cultural journalist and writer.

RT Could you begin by telling us about the dynamic between internal resistance and repression in Iran on one hand and external aggression on the other in the lead-up to the current war?

SE During the protests in December and January, when a lot of protesters were massacred by the regime, Mossad was saying [its agents] are on the streets. Israel was saying, “do whatever you can to free yourself from the Islamic Republic.” And I saw a lot of leftists in Sweden just saying, “You know, these are not popular protests.” But protests have been bubbling up in Iranian society for twenty-five years. We had the students in the late ‘90s. They were crushed. We had the labour movement in the early 2000s. They were crushed. We had the feminist movement, who tried different ways, not only protest, but also reforming family law; they were crushed. We had the elections of 2009 and the reformist Green Movement. They were crushed. The leaders of the reformist movement that came out of the Islamic Republic itself were put under house arrest.

Then we had protests about water, corrupt banks, farmers who lost their land and moved into the cities and had some small savings in 2017, and the banks just disappeared and all their savings were gone, and now they didn’t have land because there’s been a thirty-year drought in Iran. And then 2019 again.

You can see all these protests for twenty-five years coming every second or third year or so. We have to see the protests in December-January as a part of all these protests. The promise of the Revolution of 1979 was that Iran would be a free Iran, free from oppression, both internally and externally, but also an equal society. That was what both the left and the Islamists said in ‘79.

These promises were never granted to people. They never saw the light of day. That’s why we see people go out now and then and protesting. And during all these protests, some of the demands have been political, like: Women want freedom. I want to dress as I want. I want to vote as I want. And then a lot of demands that are economic, like we want to actually be paid for our jobs. We want social insurance. We want pensions, we want better working conditions.

All these came together during the December-January protest when people went out because of high prices. But this time, very soon they started to say “Death to the Islamic Republic.” And it doesn’t matter that Mossad were on the streets of Iran, because we have been hearing these slogans for years, including during Woman Life Freedom [in 2022]. That was one of the biggest protest movements. Then you could hear “down with the regime,” but moreover, to question the veil is a revolutionary demand in the Islamic Republic, because that one the pillars that it stands on is forcing the veil on women. When some leftists are saying these protests were ignited by Mossad, I think it’s bullshit, because these are the Iranian people, going out saying what they’ve been saying for twenty-five years.

RT You mentioned the economic question. I’ve seen arguments recently that the sanctions regime has not only made life hard for ordinary Iranians, but has also enabled regime corruption. Do you agree with that analysis?

SE What we’ve been seeing for thirty or thirty-five years, since right after the death of Khomeini, is the Islamic Republic’s elite trying to enrich themselves. Once the Republic was established, it started executing leftists and Mojahedin at once. And then they had this war with Iraq that saved Khomeini for many years.
Nobody could protest anything during eight years of war.

I grew up during that war: it was daily bombings. Just before the war, on the 8th of March 1979, women went out to say no to the compulsory hijab. And then we had war for eight years and nobody could say anything. And when the war ended and Khomeini died, a new leadership took over and opened up the Islamic Republic, becoming a classic capitalist society where the leadership would enrich themselves on the backs of the working people. A decade later, when the labour movement started again, they said “look, we are seeing that people tied to the regime are running factories into the ground to be able to sell the lands.” That’s what the workers told Andreas [Malm] and me when we were in Iran. Or “they’re making us work and they’re not paying us for eight or ten months.”

So ordinary people in Iran, working-class or middle-class, had to work two or three jobs to live. And that, of course, has to do with the sanctions, because sanctions and the isolation of the Iranian regime, especially since the invasion of Iraq, have been crippling the economy. But at the same time, a small part of the elite, tied to the Islamic Republic, have been enriching themselves, living in luxury, building malls and talking “consumption is the way out of this crisis,” and so on.

The sanctions have been really bad on people and the government, but the Islamic Republic’s leadership could have done things very differently, at least paying workers. Instead of holding all the money, and then you see their kids living in luxury, you see their Instagram posts and what cars they have or what big weddings they have, and so on. That is not a leadership that takes care of its own [people].

RT It’s interesting what you say about the Iran-Iraq war. I hadn’t realized before that this use of external aggression to strengthen internal power is something that the regime is already very practiced at. Do you see a parallel to today?

SE I really do. During the Iran-Iraq war, nobody could go out and say no to the war, because Iraq had attacked Iran. So Khomeini could say “we are defending ourselves.” But how did they defend themselves? They sent millions and millions of young boys to the front, and they were killed in the most devastating ways, you know, just running and having a key around their neck signifying that they would go to heaven. But they were just running towards mines. It was a horrible war, and I remember the only way we had to protest. We used to get bags from school, with a note that would say something like: “2 pairs of men’s underwear, 2 pairs of socks, 3 cans of food.” So that the families would fill them and send them to the front.

And I was living alone with my mother and she was like, “no way, I don’t even have a man at home with men’s underwear. And even if I did, I wouldn’t.” So she let me go back to school with the bag empty. That was the only way to protest. During those years, thousands of leftists were executed in prisons, and people could not even protest against that, because the lid was on so hard.

The war was kind of a saviour for Khomeini. And that is, I think, what is going to happen today. When I saw the protests start again after forty days of mourning in February, I became hopeful. All these students going out. We had students praising the son of the Shah, but we had also students saying “Woman Life Freedom” or “behind every killed comrade, there are hundreds of comrades,” and so on. So I had a lot of hope, because it was four or five days of continuous protest at the universities, even though the Basij, the paramilitary force, would really beat them, try to arrest them. But they kept going out and it felt like what I had read about the revolution in 1979, that revolution is not something that happens from one day to another. It’s a process.

When the students keep going out after they’ve been massacred, and they’re being attacked by the Basij, it means something. It means that the will is still there. And I was thinking maybe I could go back to Iran this year. But what shut them up was not the Basij. It was not the Islamic Republic. Maybe if it had continued, it would be them, like it had been with all the other protest movements, because the Islamic Republic’s only language towards protests is repression, and hard repression. They don’t have any other sort of language.

But this time it was the war. That totally silenced the students and their demands for change. We don’t know how long this war will go on. We don’t know what country they will even have to protest for, but what I know is that after a war, it’s not easy going out and saying we want the end of the Islamic Republic. It is like these bombs really threw back everything in Iran, from infrastructure to social organizing and political organizing, at least ten or fifteen years back.

RT Can you describe the internal composition of the opposition in Iran before the war? I know it’s much more complex than what is portrayed on the outside, either by the liberal media or the campist left.

SE Iran is a very diverse society. It’s difficult to know how much of the population supports the Islamic Republic. Some figures say 15%, some 20%. But what we know is that these different attempts to organize, the students, the labour movement, the women’s movement, have all been crushed by severe repression. They literally silenced workers’ leaders by cutting out their tongues in 2006, when the bus drivers were trying to unionise, or all the imprisonment of [participants in] the women’s movement during 2007-8, or all the killings after the Green Movement 2009 in the prisons.

It’s difficult to say that there is an organized political opposition in this country, because it’s been impossible. And since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the US and Israel have been threatening Iran with war. For twenty-something years, every time people went out, the regime represses them, takes their leaders and accuses them of running errands for the empire. It’s also very difficult to have something ongoing for years. Really, the labour movements tried in the beginning of the 2000s, but a lot of them were imprisoned and the labour movement died out. But we have intellectuals who came out during the war this summer, [from] the writers’ union, They came out with statements saying “no to war and no to the Islamic Republic.” And they were all imprisoned.

RT Another way of approaching this question is that we’ve seen different epicentres of the explosions over the last few years, right? Feminist movements, environmentalist movements – what are the different kinds of fault lines that the resistance has taken in recent years?

SE The Woman Life Freedom movement is very interesting because for the first time since the revolution in ‘79, the movement spread all over Iran in just a few days. It started in [Iranian] Kurdistan, but then you suddenly saw women in Baluchistan, that is a Sunni minority area and very religious, very traditional. Women, fully veiled, not the Tehrani style where veil starts in the middle of your head, walking in big demonstrations saying “Woman Life Freedom,” and for them, the compulsory hijab was not the most important thing. For them, the drought that has been going on in Baluchistan for the past thirty years and affecting their lives was the most important issue and they chanted about water.

The Baluchi minority have been so repressed, not only because of the drought. The regime hadn’t done anything for them. Their children go to schools that don’t have heating in the winter or cooling in the summer. They don’t have hospitals, water pipelines. So it was interesting to see that during Woman Life Freedom, all these questions about environmental disasters came together. And all this other baggage of being repressed in different ways came out in that movement. So that was also why that movement was very hopeful.

But then you have a capital, Tehran, lying below a mountain chain, and suddenly you don’t have enough water. Last October President Pezeshkian was saying ”if it doesn’t rain this autumn, we have to move the capital.” How do you even move a capital with 10-14 million people? A country like Iran is vulnerable to climate chaos, especially when it comes to droughts.

But it’s also important to remember that water management in Iran has to do with these “millionaire mullahs,” as we called them in the book. Look at Zayanderud, it’s the biggest river in Isfahan. Some years ago Zayanderud was totally dry for the first time in history. Of course, that has to do with the drought, because it’s not raining enough in Iran, but it’s also because around Isfahan there are a lot of steel factories, and those factories are owned by people with connections to the Revolutionary Guard, and there was total mismanagement. Steel production requires a lot of water, and they were not using it in a sustainable way, they were totally emptying all the aquifers under Isfahan, Kerman and other cities.

It says a lot about how this regime has not tried to fulfil any of the promises of ‘79, that they would take care of the poor who had suffered during the rule of the Shah; they just enriched themselves. They don’t care. They didn’t manage anything in a sustainable way. Climate change really meets the mismanagement of a corrupt leadership in a very bad way. And all these crises coming together are making life really, really hard.

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RT Does this analysis also extend to the way oil has been managed? Levels of renewable energy use in Iran are among the lowest in the world. There doesn’t seem to have been any attempt to wean the economy off dependence on oil.

SE No. And that is very strange, because when you’ve been living under sanctions for thirty years, did you ever think about shifting your economy to something that works for you? You have a lot of sun, you have a lot of desert. You have a lot of wind. It’s a really big country with different sorts of nature, but they never tried to pursue that. Instead, they made rivers and lakes totally dry up.

The environmental movement hasn’t been so big in Iran, but you had some both old and new activists that tried to raise these questions and link them to climate change as well as mismanagement by the leadership. And you know, they just disappeared. People don’t even know where they are. When it came to the labour movement or the women’s movement or the student movement, people were imprisoned and maybe killed in prison, but people knew where they were. When it came to environmental activists, they just disappeared.

I think that has a lot to do with the threat they posed to the Islamic Republic, because [the regime] really wanted to silence them. They didn’t want these activists to put political thoughts in the minds of the people and have them make the analysis. But they have a lot of oil; now they have more gas. I don’t understand how this this regime thought that, after all these years of sanctions and isolation, maybe they were hopeful that they could start selling gas – but no, there is not much going on when it comes to wind or water or sun.

Water and droughts are important in Iran because it has a lot of aquifers, but it’s fossil water. When you use it, it runs out and when it’s finished, it needs a lot of years of rain to fill up again, and the rains are not coming. I think that’s the most important mismanagement that has been going on.

RT There’s also this ancient technology of irrigation with qanats, right?

SE Yes. That is how people, even in arid places like Kerman where my father’s family is from, have been able to farm. My grandfather and his brother bought a piece of land where they had pistachio trees. It’s very arid there, they don’t have much water, but with the help of the qanats, they’ve been managing for generations. But then, in the past twenty years, my father’s family lost half the land and the trees because of the drought. And my uncle was saying some years ago that when they try to pump up water from these aquifers, there is none any more. You know, the qanats were exported throughout the Middle East because they were a sufficient way of using the land in this very arid part of the world.

RT And this infrastructure has been allowed to disintegrate?

SE Yeah, because when it doesn’t rain into the qanats, you cannot pump up the water, you cannot use the qanat.

RT I’d like to return to the international questions. Before the war, I would have said that it looked like the militarized strategy of resistance [to the US and Israel] had failed over the last two years. Hizballah had been beaten back, the Assad regime in Syria fell, Hamas lost control over most of Gaza, the Iranian regime looked very weak. And they were all weakened by deep unpopularity at home. But I’ve been surprised by the way that Iran and Hizballah have managed to hold up and fight back.

We don’t live in the kind of world that we would like to live in, and there are all sorts of difficult choices that people living under oppression have to make. Given what we’ve seen over the last two weeks, what’s your appraisal of the way forward for progressive or liberatory movements in the Middle East? In terms of the question of armed struggle, and also of the relationship to regimes that might be supportive of liberation struggles in one area, but also oppressive in another?

SE It’s a very difficult question. I can start with this: I’m very sad that we don’t have a left anti-war movement in Europe like we did in 2003, and it is really making it difficult to go to the squares and to say “no to war, no to the Islamic Republic, and no to the Shah.” That is what I want to scream. I’ve been protesting for Iraq, Kurds, Palestinians for so many decades now, and I would like to take my kids to a demonstration for Iran against all oppression. But it’s really difficult to do that because if we do, either we would be accused of being on the side of the Islamic Republic by the royalists – and they are crazy aggressive, they are fascists, really fascists, at least here in Sweden – or we would kind of be played, the Zionists would say, “oh, so now you are against the Islamic Republic: here is an Israeli flag for you!”

It’s so confusing right now, and it’s so difficult to do something. I read testimonies coming out of Iran. It’s horrible. And they’re saying, “just do something, go out and be our voice and say no to the war and say no to the Islamic Republic.” It shouldn’t be that difficult, but it is. You have to go back in the modern history of Iran about 120 years, to the Constitutional Revolution, to see what this is and what is happening in Iran now. Every time we had a movement by the people that threatened the state, some empire, whether Russia or Britain or the US, came in, stopped it and put in their own puppets. That happened during the Constitutional Revolution in 1905-06 and during the 1953 coup against Mosaddegh. And the only conjuncture in in this history when people actually said no both to the dictatorship and to imperialist intervention was the Revolution of 1979.

The Islamic Republic has destroyed everything, but [back] then the left and the Islamists were saying the same thing. They were saying Iran should be free and independent. So when we think about today, interventions have never been good for the ordinary population in Iran, whether you’re a worker, a women’s rights activist or a minority.

I agree that if Israel and the US win this war, and if they are the ones taking down the Islamic Republic, then we have a Middle East where for the first time US and Israeli hegemony is total. So it’s a very frightening time. And I think Netanyahu is trying to do this because he doesn’t know what would come out of a popular revolution in Iran. Sure, for the past few years you have been hearing inside Iran, “don’t put the money in Gaza, don’t put the money in Lebanon, don’t put the money in Syria, put it in us.” That’s not so progressive, but people are saying this because they don’t have food on the table for their kids. Still, I don’t think that the memory of the Iranian people is so short. I think if you had a change in the regime that came from within Iranian society, it wouldn’t be a totally Israel-friendly or US-friendly regime. It would be more independent than that. I think that is also why Netanyahu is really pushing up the son of the Shah; we saw Haaretz’s investigation of the social media accounts helping the Shah and so on.

RT That reminds me of something that then-Israeli Foreign Minister Lieberman said in 2012 during the Arab Spring, that if the revolutions in the Arab world are allowed to win, if Egypt becomes a democratic country, then it’ll be more dangerous to Israel than the Iranian regime.

SE That is true, actually. It’s important to remember that this narrative that the Islamic Republic has about itself, that it’s supporting the Axis of Resistance, and of course October 7^th would never have happened if we didn’t have Iran. But also, what the fuck did they do after October 7^th? Iran could have done something to avoid a full genocide in Gaza. I really think they could have, but they didn’t. They even stopped Hizballah from doing more. I don’t see this regime as a protector of Palestinian people, or a protector of the oppressed in this region. They want their power and their hegemony, and they want to be able to enrich themselves. But on the other hand, what do we do when we have a fully Israeli-US-controlled Middle East? Then we have fascism from India to the Sahel region and nobody undertaking any resistance.

I still want to claim that progressive leftists in the West should say no to war and no to the Islamic Republic, and also no to a puppet, whether it’s a Shah or Maryam Rajavi or whoever that the empire wants to put in that place. And I think it’s important to hold this line and not to defend the Islamic Republic on the pretence that they support Palestinian liberation, because I don’t see them being close to doing that.

RT You mentioned the anti-Iraq war movement. Then I think it was pretty easy for most people to say they don’t support the Saddam Hussein regime in any way, but they also don’t support the war. It was somehow much easier then to make that distinction.

SE Yeah. But at that point the left was also much stronger in Europe. We had years and years, with the World Social Forum and the summit protests, and Ya Basta in Italy. Today we don’t have that, we live in fascist times. Sweden is one country that is really running towards fascism. It’s another world order. But you’re right. We didn’t support Saddam Hussein when we went out in our millions and said no to the war.

RT At Red Threads we’re very interested in thinking about connections between world regions that don’t run through Western Europe or North America. Is there anything about these regional connections that you think we should be looking at?

SE I don’t know much about Eastern Europe, but the other day I saw a Bosnian friend posting that people were putting flowers outside the Iranian embassy in Sarajevo. Of course that has a lot to do with what Iran did during the genocide in Bosnia, but that regime was a totally different regime than it is today. I don’t know what more to say, other than that it seems like Russia is going to be the big winner in all this because suddenly they can sell their oil and gas again.

RT But Russia’s also been supporting Iran militarily, right?

SE Yeah, of course, and Iran has been supporting Russia with drone technology in Ukraine. But I was just listening to the news this morning and Trump is saying, “you have thirty days where you can buy Russian oil.” Suddenly it’s okay. No sanctions for the next thirty days.

RT Ideologically, the Russian and Iranian regimes don’t seem to have much in common, but they have forged a strong alliance over the last decade or two. Is there anything that we should be paying attention to in that relationship?

SE You know, we don’t have an official Cold War, but we still have a country in the Middle East that is talking about anti-imperialism. And so they are the only ones that Russia could support.

RT And what about China’s role?

SE That is so strange. I don’t know much about China either, but I’m fascinated with their complicity and silence, when it came to the genocide in Palestine or now this war. A lot of the markets in Asia are affected because of the closure of Hormuz, and they’re silent. What are they doing under the table all the time? Because they keep being a strong power. They seem not to ever lose anything. I don’t know much about it, but I’m fascinated, especially now that they rely on a lot of Iranian oil, and how will that affect such a big country with so much production?

RT They have been making a lot of investment in renewables, so they’re less dependent on oil than they were.

SE Yeah, but China has also seen Iran as a backyard for selling products. The past twenty years, because of the isolation, you find almost only Chinese products in the bazaars. So I think Iran is very important for them, but I haven’t heard them say much about this war.

RT Given that the discourse of the regime is so strongly Islamist, how does it present its relationship with these two countries that are not Islamic or even Muslim? Is this completely pragmatic, or is anti-imperialism, a Third World kind of position, still involved in any way?

SE Yeah, I think it’s more about anti-imperialism than anything else. Because look at the Muslims in China and how they’re being treated. Has Iran ever said anything about that? No. They just keep buying stuff from China without ever protesting anything.

RT Yeah. And Russia has its own share of Islamophobia.

One last question on the politics of the Iranian diaspora. Right now the monarchist ideology is extremely strong there. As a member of the Iranian diaspora who’s obviously very opposed to this ideology, can you tell us about diaspora networks that are leftist or progressive?

SE This is such a sad question. What you have to know about the Iranian diaspora after ‘79 is that it’s very traumatized. The Iranian left had a lot to do with organizing a whole revolution, with the downfall of the Shah, with organizing unions and all these different movements, councils in workplaces, neighbourhoods and so on. When they lost the revolution to a despot like Khomeini, they were scattered all around the world and totally traumatized. So all these years, 47 years, they haven’t been able to organize because they’ve been just fighting each other. That is the left.

Then we have the royalists, a lot of people that fled at the end of the Shah’s rule with a lot of money. Many of them went to the US and ended up in Los Angeles.

And then we have the Mujahedin, a sect that fought with Saddam Hussein and turned their weapons against their own, and will never again ever be respected in Iran in any way. The US took away their classification as terrorists just a few years ago. Now their base is no longer in Iraq, but in Albania. But they’re very sect-like: people that go into Mujahedin have to give up their kids and go and fight for the cause and stuff like that.

So these are the three big exile groups and unfortunately none of these groups has come up with anything that is good or progressive, or something that could be used in a transformation after a popular revolution in Iran. So I don’t have any faith at all in the diaspora. We tried to show our solidarity with Woman Life Freedom, and during 2009, we had some demonstrations for the workers in 2004-6. But it’s not a power that you can rely on, I think, and especially the royalists, they are very toxic and they are really a product of MAGA and the right-wing and fascist movements in the US, and they have a lot of money and they pump it into TV channels and social media accounts.

And they’ve been really revisionist when it comes to the rule of the Shah . They have these documentaries where people who worked for SAVAK, who tortured Iranians in prison, are saying, “oh wow, it was so good under the Shah. Women could wear short skirts,” and pushing this nostalgia. So they’ve been really whitewashing the Shah and SAVAK. And they are very dangerous. So it’s a very sad story. I wouldn’t rely on any diaspora when it comes to change in Iran. I really hope that on the day that the people in Iran manage to do a revolution and to take down the Islamic Republic on their own, that the diaspora can hold itself and not get involved and destroy it.

RT It’s a very depressing situation, but I don’t think the US and Israel will win this war. And even if they do, they don’t really win. It’s a symptom of decline, of real collapse. And yeah, I don’t think China is going to be saving us, but I have this messianic side. I think sometimes things need to collapse for something new to emerge.

SE I hope so. What the students did just before the bombs started to fall was really, really hopeful. That the people keep going [out to protest] even though they know the level of repression. For thirty years, they’ve been seeing their comrades, their parents, their family members imprisoned, hanged, sitting in front of cameras on state television [after being tortured], saying, “I did wrong.” They still kept going out. And that means a lot when it comes to hoping for real change.

RT There’s a good chance that the moment the war ends, and it will end, then they’ll be back.

SE Yeah, but I think we’ll have to wait some years for that. The regime is sending threats to people right now saying “don’t come out, if you do then you’re on the side of the US and Israel.” And even socially, to be accused of being an Israeli spy, that is devastating for you, not only for going to prison, but also for your neighbours, for your workplace.

RT Yeah, and it really helps the regime that it’s not entirely made-up.

SE Yeah, no. All these Mossad and CIA posts in Farsi. It’s really, well, it’s fucked up.

RT I really agree with what you were saying before. We need to be careful about getting too conspiratorial about this stuff, but it does seem that, at the very least, Israel and the US know that they’re discrediting the opposition and they don’t give a damn about that. They don’t mind.

SE Yeah. And Trump is saying that this Pahlavi, he’s a nice guy, but he’s not cheering for him as much as Netanyahu is.

RT It’s the same as he did with the Venezuelan opposition, right? He doesn’t respect these people.

SE Yeah. Reza Pahlavi is really a clown. How have you been spending so many years of your life in exile with so much money? And you cannot even start, I don’t know, a simple human rights organization? And suddenly he wants to be the leader.

RT I don’t think that’s what bothers Trump about him. That’s very similar to Trump himself in a lot of ways, but no, Trump likes dictators. He likes strong men.

SE Maybe. But it’s really scary to read his document on Transformation Day in Iran. He is going to be the decision-maker in everything. Not the law, not the people’s court, nothing like that, he will make all the necessary decisions. Just like his father.

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This interview with LevFem was conducted by Burcu Ayan and published in Turkish in Çatlakzemin. Red Threads is grateful to them for letting us publish it in English.

Burcu Ayan: How did LevFem emerge, and what political and social context shaped its beginnings? In relation to this, how would you describe the broader landscape of feminist organising in Bulgaria today, and what strategies or tensions define the work of feminist organisations in the country?

LevFem emerged in 2018 in a very specific moment of upsurge and renewal in the history of the Bulgarian feminist movement. This was the year in which we experienced a massive, well-organized reactionary wave against the adoption of the Istanbul Convention (aka “Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence”, which reactionaries in Eastern Europe have accused of introducing “gender ideology”). Religious and conservative organisations, parties, and political actors were leading this campaign, and within only a couple of months, they managed to dramatically shift the public narrative around gender justice, women’s rights, and the rights of LGBTQI+ people. The campaign was deeply homophobic, transphobic, and misogynistic in its nature and specifically attacked the definition of gender as a social construct that is rooted in the Istanbul Convention. As a result, even the Constitutional court of the country declared that gender in Bulgaria is, apparently, a biological dichotomy, which makes it very hard to talk about gender, gender roles, gendered division of labor, gender specific policies, etc. As a direct aftermath of this reactionary wave, feminist and especially LGBTQI+ rights have been under a massive attack in the years since, and the lives of queer and trans people have been increasingly put in danger.

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However, also as a result of this backlash, since 2018, there has been a surge in newly founded feminist organisations because we saw how organised and powerful the reactionary movements were, and still are. LevFem is part of this “new feminist wave” in Bulgaria in the aftermath of the lost battle for the adoption of the convention. LevFem was initiated as an informal group that included a handful of women and queer people from a few New Left groups that formed around the social centres, left-leaning publications, and movements in the 2010s. Its first action was a small online campaign that we issued around November 25th, 2018 - the International Day Against Violence against Women. We called on comrades to write short articles on violence against women. Our goal was to broaden the public discussion around the topic and thematise structural violence as gender-based violence: a topic and aspect that was ostensibly lacking from the public discussion. In the modern history of the Bulgarian feminist movement after 1989, violence against women has been very narrowly defined as domestic violence in a romantic relationship, and most of the efforts of the big women’s organisations in the past have been focused on lobbying and providing social services for survivors of domestic abuse. However, we know violence against women is much more than that. The exploitation in the capitalist system is a form of violence against women; racial capitalism adds the layer of racist policies and racist border regimes, which are also forms of violence against women; poverty is a form of violence; and so on. The issue is much bigger, and we knew that if we wanted to address it, we needed to address the systems that enable all aspects of gender-based violence - patriarchy, capitalism, and racism. This is the context in which we emerged and the message we have been trying to convey ever since.

Burcu Ayan: You bring feminist, socialist, and anti-racist perspectives together in your work. In a country with a socialist past and a complex post-socialist transformation, why is it important for you to hold these struggles jointly? What specific tensions or challenges arise from working across these perspectives in such a context?

We see our organisation as part of a lineage of especially autonomist Marxist feminism where patriarchy, capitalism, and racism are seen as systems of oppression that have been intersecting historically, socially, and politically to shape the specific forms of subordination that women and other marginalized groups experience. We see this tradition as important within the post-socialist New Left, because it allows us to both keep a deeply structural analysis, acknowledge structural advancements in the socialist past, as well as recognise some of the structural limitations of ‘really existing socialism’ in which actual policies and practices fell short of necessary deep structural change to combat capitalism, patriarchy, and racism. For us, then, naturally, as part of this political tradition, not acknowledging the complex ways in which these systems interact means that we would never be able to understand the roots of the problems and effectively fight them. For instance, it is impossible to fight for the liberation of women from patriarchal expectations and stereotypes if we don’t acknowledge how capitalism requires free labor of women (e.g., child care, cooking, cleaning, etc.) to guarantee the social reproduction of the workforce, which puts a double shift on the shoulders of the women workers. Similarly, it is futile to just fight for women’s rights without understanding how institutional racism guarantees that there is a supply of racialised workers who have worse chances to get a decent job and are thus easier to exploit - especially if they are women.

Basing our political activism on such a theoretical standpoint poses some challenges to navigating the present-day Bulgarian feminist field. The dominant political alignment among feminist organisations in Bulgaria in the last 30 years has been liberal feminism. We acknowledge and respect what these organisations have achieved, especially when it comes to legislative reforms against gender-based violence. Yet, we also see how this worldview limits the potential for a more daring feminist agenda that goes beyond fighting domestic violence and being on friendly terms with those in power to lobby for minor legal changes. Moreover, we are an openly socialist feminist organisation - this brings many negative associations because of the widespread cliche that socialism necessarily and always means repression and lack of democratic initiative. Anti-communist sentiments are very prevalent among the Bulgarian liberal middle class; this also affects some of the feminist organisations (especially the ones active before the 2018 wave of feminist mobilising around the Istanbul convention). In their reading, socialism achieved certain positive changes for women, but they were introduced from the top down, thus the “real” feminist movement (e.g. one that is similar to Western European feminism) started in the 90s. We dare to disagree. Socialism in Bulgaria (and elsewhere) is anything but a monolithic block of 45 years - there were more liberatory and progressive periods, as well as more conservative ones. The decision-making process within the Bulgarian Communist Party was much more complex and nuanced, and women were actively fighting within the ranks of the party for one or another feminist achievement. To completely erase these struggles is disrespectful to the work and achievements of generations of women.

However, our socialist identity does not mean that we have it easy with the contemporary left-wing political actors either. Bulgaria’s only prominent nominally left-wing party - the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) - has taken a very conservative course since 2016 and was among the parties who were most vocally against the Istanbul convention. The ideological development of the BSP mirrors to an extent the development of SMER in Slovakia, even if the electoral results of the BSP in Bulgaria are tragic (currently polling between 5-7%), while SMER is governing Slovakia. It is easier for us to communicate with some members and factions within the BSP on the anti-capitalist axis and about women’s rights, however, the moment we mention LGBTQI+ justice, things get very ugly. The non-party left is small, fragmented and not very powerful: at the moment, LevFem is among the bigger, better-recognised, and organised collectives in this context.

Finally, as you can imagine, we are a target for different sorts of reactionary and conservative actors as we represent everything they hate - class-conscious feminists and anti-racists, who fight for queer liberation.

So we need to be smart and resourceful when navigating the field and searching for allies, but it is not mission impossible and we have had our successes - among some more progressive (feminist) organisations, politicians, unions, workers and younger activists.

Burcu Ayan: How do you understand the feminist labour struggle in Bulgaria today? What challenges do women workers face? As a feminist organisation, what has your engagement with trade unions and labour organisations been like? How have feminist perspectives been received in those spaces?

The feminist movement and the labour movement are fighting their battles separately, which is a dangerous development with long-lasting consequences in our reading. This is a direct result of the liberal understanding of the world that separates “human rights” (where feminism is usually positioned) from labour rights and tries to convince us that equality is achievable without challenging capitalist exploitation. For example, around March 2019, there were the March 8th feminist protests, nurses went on a national protest to fight for better labour conditions, and mothers of children with disabilities were taking to the streets the demands for better public care for their children. All these struggles were fought separately; there wasn’t a big joint demonstration. Now, some feminist organisations approached the nurses and the mothers of children with disabilities, but the latter decided not to join forces, as key actors in the nurses’ mobilisation were also affected by the ongoing conservative anti-gender wave that emerged around the adoption of the Istanbul Convention and saw the feminists as a threat. Here we clearly push for a feminist-and-labour movement that is able to see that beyond the liberal notion of separation between struggles. However, we also feel like the powerful reactionary agenda contributes ever more towards dividing the working class and weakening our power.

The lack of feminist reading within the contemporary organised labour movement in Bulgaria makes it harder for workers to understand the specific ways in which gender affects their experience at the workplace. For instance, very often we hear from women workers statements like “we have achieved equality, we have all the rights that men have, why should we bother about feminism”. Behind such statements, however, there is the same old story of invisible, underrecognised and poorly remunerated women’s labour: women predominantly work in fields that are badly paid; their salaries stagnate after maternity leave; discrimination is rampant towards women with small children during the jobhunt period (“she is a woman with small children, they get sick, she will be constantly taking leave to care for them, I can’t deal with this”); women shoulder the burden of the domestic, child care and elderly care labour at home and in their extended families and neighbourhoods; women’s pensions are lower than those of men because of the persistent gender pay gap and as pensions are calculated on the basis of lower salaries they got throughout their active years; and of course, sexual harassment at the workplace is a gendered experience that usually affects women.

In this context, Levfem is trying to act as the political agent that actively introduces labour issues and class consciousness within the feminist movement and pushes the feminist viewpoint within the labour movement. While our union organisations are usually acting as enclosed environments that solely focus on their specific agenda, we have managed to establish connections and have sporadic joint events and initiatives with some more progressive unions or feminised unions, which represent social and public workers, nurses and medical staff, and agricultural workers. We often invite their representatives as speakers to our events, and participate in their protests, and they have shared some of our content and have connected us to workers for interviews. Yet, while we see some increased sensitivity towards feminist viewpoints among some of the union members and workers, for the time being, the effects are predominantly on an individual level. We recognise, of course, that this is a long process and requires a lot of trust-building and work alongside the unions and movements. Our dream is that one day we will have a big feminist workers’ movement in Bulgaria that challenges the patriarchal capitalist system. But it is a rocky road ahead of us if we are serious about achieving this goal.

Burcu Ayan: Your report “Who Cares? Feminised Care Labour and the Crisis of Social Reproduction in Post-Socialist Bulgaria” offers a strong analysis of paid care labour in the country. Based on this work, where do you see the key sites of struggle around care today? And what practical steps do you think are needed to move toward public, accessible, and dignified care?

Given what we spoke about earlier, our report on the care sector in Bulgaria, based on 40 interviews with care sector workers, was published in a vacuum of political and public discourse and awareness about what we see as absolute core topics in the feminist and labour movement: care work and social reproduction, and their deficit and dire conditions in Bulgaria. First of all, we define the paid care sector rather broadly by including the systems of social reproduction - pre-clinical healthcare, early years, primary education, and social services. Very often, care work is defined even among feminists as the act of taking care of someone physically, but in our understanding care needs to be seen through the lens of social reproduction - the systems that make life possible. Having this theoretical understanding is useful to see the connections between seemingly very different sectors, but it also makes it very hard to highlight specific recommendations, as the situation in the healthcare system is different than the one in the education system, and elderly care takes many formal and informal forms.

Still, there are certain common traits that can be observed in all spheres of the care sector in Bulgaria. For instance, all of these spheres have a very feminised workforce and moreover - it is usually older women (50+) who predominantly find occupation in the care domain. Young people rarely choose these professions as the salaries are usually very low. In addition, many care workers choose to migrate to Western and Southern Europe in search of better pay, where they usually continue to perform care labour and are once again subject to harsh working conditions and racialised discrimination. These two processes result in a massive workforce shortage in Bulgaria, putting additional stress on the workers who remain in the system and creating a severe care deficit. As a consequence, people in Bulgaria have less and less access to decent care, as women working in the sector have all but decent working conditions. The lack of access to decent public care puts additional pressure on individual families (and specifically on women) to perform further unpaid care labour at home, while private providers are also invited to “fill in the gaps”, thus making access to decent care dependent on the financial situation of those in need. These aren’t problems specific to Bulgaria; many other Eastern European and Balkan countries face similar issues, while the deficit of care workers is a global phenomena. Yet, Bulgaria is specific as it shares some of the vices of both core and peripheral countries in the global economy. As a peripheral country, it sends care workers abroad. Yet, while it has the ageing population of a core country, currently it also has a particularly restrictive migrant labour regime which does not allow it to fill in the gap of emigrant care workers with immigrants.

Beyond this, we see two other major challenges ahead of us. First of all, there is no collective understanding of the care sector, except as ‘humane professions’ in which women’s ‘altruistic’ self-denial or even self-sacrifice is taken for granted. Equally absent is a shared public recognition of care as a human right and as a public good/interest. Furthermore, within a very re-traditionalising discourse that has soared since the conservative mobilisation around the Istanbul Convention, women are seen as possessing ‘natural qualities’ that make them more suited to providing care. These notions are not just prejudices, but have an impact on the material conditions of care work in both the workplace and the home. The result is, firstly, the feminisation of care professions and a shortage of male workers; secondly, low pay and low status, as well as poor working conditions in these sectors; and last but not least, the unequal distribution of care work at home, which is mainly performed by women.

There isn’t a silver bullet solution to address all these complex issues, but we need to start somewhere. In our analysis, we identify a number of steps that need to be taken in the short-term, middle-term and long-term for progress on this complex situation to be achieved. First of all, there is a need for a widespread information campaign that raises awareness of the challenges faced by care workers. It should address the links between ‘naturalised’ female care work, the poor conditions of pay and work in the care sector, and the nation-wide care deficit, and articulate concrete demands for financial remuneration and public recognition of work in this field. To this effect, one of our units is now engaged in the presentation of the report across the country and tailoring such demands together with members of feminist groups and labour unions in the care sector. Secondly, it is imperative to increase the pay of care workers as a whole, but also to reduce the differences between the private and public sectors and the differences in job hierarchies in certain sectors, particularly healthcare. We see it as unacceptable that the powers-that-be vote budgets that heavily subsidise military production and securitisation, not least as this is a direct pathway to austerity in all other sectors, including the care sector. And specifically for Bulgaria, there is a need for taxation reform, as we have suffered under a flat tax policy for the good part of two decades. We need a progressive taxation that puts the tax burden on the shoulders of businesses and economic elites instead of the working poor, as it is now. So a feminist initiative that wants to promote care as the basis that makes society possible should also engage with political demands for an economy that at least puts militarised capitalism in check (and at a later stage dismantles it entirely, of course). Third, there is also a need for effective policies, agreed upon by those working in the sector and their representative associations, aimed at tackling discrimination based on gender, age, ethnicity, etc. Finally, in our analysis, on an international level, there is a need for a solidarity care tax paid by wealthier countries attracting care workers to poorer countries like Bulgaria which send care workers in migration and experience a massive care deficit. We need to close the care work gap. We would like to oversee such a campaign first developing within the European Union, where Bulgarian trade unions, NGOs, and politicians have the opportunity to make this issue central to their mobilisation and lobbying efforts. Yet, if successful on the EU level, such a campaign should also be scaled up on a global level, within a larger struggle for reparation within colonial capitalism: we dream big.

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Burcu Ayan: When you think about feminist organising in the Balkans, what shared challenges and possibilities come to mind? And how do you imagine solidarity and collaboration between movements in neighbouring countries such as Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece, which often face similar political and social backlashes?

The Balkans is a very specific place with 12 countries (depending on how you count), at least 4 different language groups, and diverse ethnic and religious communities spread across a very small territory. We don’t even share a common language the way, say, Latin Americans do, and coordinating and organising among ourselves needs to happen in English. At the same time, we have countries with vastly different political pasts: imperial projects, anti-imperial struggles, former Eastern Bloc countries with diverse experiences with socialism, former Western Bloc countries, military dictatorships and coup d’état, genocides, wars and ethnic cleansing among neighbors, and more recently divisions across the lines of NATO and EU membership. Every 200 km, you have buried skeletons from past violent conflicts, which makes political organising incredibly challenging and nationalist sentiments very prevalent. All that being said, we can clearly see that we face some very similar threats - conservative waves that practically copy the same anti-gender narratives from Croatia through Bulgaria to Türkiye; increasingly more right-wing and even authoritarian governments; increased state violence on the borders to counter migration; deeply rooted corruption and oligarchic capitalist structures capturing the states.

The Balkans is also a place that has produced some powerful mobilisation waves in the last years - the Serbian students and their movement; the Romanian and Bulgarian anti-corruption protests; the Greek farmers strikes; the Turkish anti-Erdogan protests as well as the workers and feminist mobilisations around the withdraw of the country from the Istanbul convention; the Slovenian (and pan-European) My body, my choice campaign that took Europe by storm. There have been initiatives in the past that try to connect the struggles we face, most notably the migrant solidarity campaign across the Balkan route that has been active for about a decade, and more recently - the feminist network Essential Autonomous Struggles Transnational (EAST). EAST is a project that LevFem was heavily involved in as one of the coordinating collectives. It was an attempt to connect feminist, labour, and migrant organisations from Eastern Europe and beyond in the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, so that we have a space for exchange on the struggles in the social reproduction sector that we face. It was a common infrastructure via which we were able to better understand what was going on in different countries in the region, to show solidarity with each other, and learn from the strategic experiences of others. Unfortunately, the network is no longer active, but this type of common coordination and exchange space is clearly needed in our region. So we should probably start there.

Finally, in the last 30 years, at least in many post-communist countries, we have been convinced that we need to “catch up” with the West and be more (Western) European to have a decent life. However, the current protests in Bulgaria show a shift in this notion. While calls for Bulgaria to become a “decent European country” are popular among many of the protestors, there is something beyond this. For instance, we see how the protests are being described as “Gen Z” protests. While this description is in itself highly problematic and not at all representative of what is going on in the streets (where Gen Z is definitely not the most populous group among the protestors), it is an attempt to create and mobilise a collective identity that goes beyond the national and the European and ties Bulgaria to a global wave of protests among young people mostly in the Global South. We think that this shift in the collective imagination might be productive for the region more broadly. Maybe we can start thinking of identities that go beyond the national and the (white) European and tie us not so much to the hegemons and the powerful, but rather to the struggles of other ‘wretched of the Earth’ - the same way the Soviet Union was supporting the anti-imperialist and anticolonial struggles worldwide. Maybe a more productive way forward could entail building a collective Balkan identity that is rooted in our experience with historical complexities and traumas, but goes beyond the past and searches for connections with other pariahs of the world whose pain we can relate to and fight together.

Burcu Ayan: Looking ahead, what are LevFem’s main priorities? What kinds of political and organisational efforts do you hope to focus on in the coming period?

We would want to continue expanding our work on the care economy and possibly do a campaign with demands for better conditions in the care sectors around March 8th, hopefully in coordination with a bigger coalition of organisations. March 8th is usually a small demonstration in Sofia done by urban activists - this is a good starting point, but it needs to be much, much bigger, with women from all walks of life (care workers, office workers, self-employed, poor women, etc.) joining and demanding the dismantling of oppressive patriarchal, capitalist, and racist systems. We don’t have experience with bigger, more recognisable campaigns, so this will be challenging and exciting at the same time. Also, we would like to expand our capacities to fight against the anti-feminist and anti-gender movement: this has always been a priority of ours, but we have rather been reactive - the conservatives attack us, and we respond. We need to think about proactive strategies, too - and part of a proactive strategy needs to include political education that allows us to enlarge our base and convince more previously not politically active people to join the movement.

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Red Threads is born at a moment when the present cannot presume superiority over the past. The reintegration of the postsocialist region into global capitalism has materialized not as liberation, but as poverty, ecological destruction, racism, and war. The false promises of the 1990s now pale before the transformative and universal aspirations of the socialist projects of the twentieth century. Their contradictions have left unfulfilled potentials for the future.

Red Threads calls on the legacy of twentieth-century socialism in all its complexity: its achievements, failures, and unrealized futures. In the face of denial stand its world-historical accomplishments: the raising of living and educational standards throughout the region; the skilling of millions of workers; the inspiration of revolutionary and reformist movements throughout the world; the construction of physical and social infrastructure, which still, despite decades of neglect, enables survival; and, above all, the victory over fascism. What were for the socialist project its own contradictions, to be resolved dialectically towards the horizon of communism, became easy indictments of the entire project in the postsocialist period: enduring and new social inequalities, flailing political mobilization that eventually required harking back on nationalist tropes, continued use of state violence, the routinized forms of socialist democracy. Red Threads maintains that these contradictions of the socialist project must be faced militantly, not apologetically. Our commitment is to immanent criticism, one that holds the socialist project up to its own demanding criteria, while reaffirming its aspirations. This is also the way to reckon with the bitter disappointment and material losses of the region’s working classes, which are expressed sometimes in the politics of resentment and other times in nostalgia for an alternative.

In a salute to the socialist legacy, Red Threads takes its name from the Petrograd textile factory «Красная нить», where women workers stood at the forefront of revolution, and from the “red thread” invoked by Luxemburg and Lenin as a through-line of history. A thread weaves and binds; it is in constant motion. Our threads are multiple and open-ended; we seek to weave together the realized and interrupted horizons of the revolutionary legacy into our daily reality and our visions of future political forms.

Universalism from the East

We conceive of our distinctive contribution as a Universalism from the East. This is at once a geographical and a political-theoretical position, a reclaiming of the struggles for and within twentieth-century socialism. Both proximate to the capitalist heartlands of Western Europe and subordinated to its imperial power, the revolutionary protagonists of our region sought to produce universally valuable knowledge from their contradictory conditions. Their position enabled them to engage with and intervene in Marxist debates with utmost seriousness and to recognize that the very process of capital accumulation reproduces unevenness and that capital’s false universality itself produces heterogeneity. That insight generated home-grown vocabularies and creative revolutionary practices and institutions that the world still has much to learn from. We proudly inherit from them this task.

The task of universalism from the East is a practice in concrete universalism, which requires that deep political principles are not abstracted from but are concretely conceived within the history, experience, and reflections “from the region to the world.”

Actually existing socialism and socialist aspiration belong to one historical field of struggle. To split them too neatly and treat one as an alien deviation from the other serves to protect present-day desire for a communist future from the burden of life itself: from contradiction and complicity, from the messy and bleeding conditions in which collective futures are made. If one part of the courage to make history under conditions not of our own choosing is to admit that history is never pure, another part is to admit that responsibility, accountability, and learning must be shared as well.

Our political principles here reflect this dialectical relationship between theory and history.

As socialists committed to a communist horizon, we believe in the creative power of ordinary people to shape history, and in their capacity to undertake a democratic organization of material production, social reproduction, and cultural and intellectual life.

Taking reality as a totality in which parts and whole are mutually constituted through internal relations, we hold that the struggle against capitalism cannot be divorced from the fight against racism, imperialism, colonialism, and hetero-patriarchy.

Capitalist production of surplus value is antagonistic to the reproduction of life. This antagonism is not merely a logical contradiction: the totality of ecological-material relations and life processes on the planet is the precondition of all social relations, and sets natural limits on human activity.

We, thus, understand class in an expansive sense, one that encompasses relations to the means of reproduction as well as production. We reject any rigid distinction between exploitation and oppression and offer unconditional support for the liberation of all oppressed groups.

The primary enforcer of capitalist violence is the capitalist state, and at the global scale, the imperial state. We reaffirm the need to analyze imperialism, a category central to the political thought of revolutionaries in our region. As we witness the precipitous decline of the American Empire, we commit to the renewed task of understanding imperialism, and to solidarity with all peoples subjected to occupation, colonization, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Recognizing the right of such peoples to armed liberation struggle, we also note that militarism reinforces capitalist violence, and that the price of war is always paid by the most vulnerable and least guilty. We thus affirm the internationalist value of peace.

We recognize state-socialist achievements in the fight against imperial, patriarchal, racial, and colonial oppression. And this requires us to take seriously the problem of how the criticism of oppression has been de-materialized and instrumentalized for imperialist, anti-communist, and nationalist purposes in the post-socialist era.

In contrast to the liberation struggles of the early 20^th century and the anti-colonial movements in the post-war period, today, in the context of deep neoliberal reforms and erasure of legacies of socialist knowledge production, nationalism in our region has played not a liberatory or anti-imperialist role, but a reactionary and imperialist one. There is a lot to learn from this phenomenon in the East for the global left.

Finally, these trajectories are rooted in the intentional repression of communism in the post-socialist region and the outright criminalization of socialist histories and ideas in the name of national sovereignty, as well as the integration of many successor Communist parties into right-wing regimes and their appropriation of communist symbols, images, and slogans. As a result, the level of theoretical debate and engagement with communist ideas—as ideas for social progress and liberation for all—has suffered immensely. We celebrate and support the rediscovery and reappropriation of communism by the younger generation of intellectuals and workers in the region.

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Our invitation

As a successor project of LeftEast, Red Threads is a multi-tendency left collective: less than a party, but more than a magazine. We publish together in order to think together, to reflect on evolving questions, and to maintain dialogue between distinct left traditions. We aspire to a socialist politics together that is attuned to the current moment while drawing lessons from the past. However, we invite a demanding, comradely, collective conversation that begins from common principles and arrives at collective action.

As a publication, we welcome contributions from anyone who shares our political orientation. In furtherance of a universalism from the East, we invite contributions relevant to socialist political analysis and strategy, theory and history, past, present, and future. We provide our linguistic and editorial skills in support of perspectives from the ground that require more than translation, but the careful rearticulation of the academic and political language to which they are addressed. We are committed to working closely with contributors to sharpen political clarity and improve textual quality.

We intend to give pride of place to the post-socialist world, as well as to the socialist traditions of the Global South, which are still little known in Eastern Europe despite the deep links between our histories and present struggles. That said, we will also continue conversations with comrades in the West, including with diasporic socialists who had to leave our region.

In order to facilitate communication across post-socialist contexts, we will begin by publishing in English, but we aspire to expand into other languages in the near future. We welcome submissions by non-English speakers in their own languages, which we can appraise for translation and publication. Please see our Submissions page for more details, and never hesitate to get in touch with us with questions or feedback.

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Проект Red Threads появился в тот момент, когда настоящее не может претендовать на превосходство над прошлым. Реинтеграция постсоциалистического региона в глобальную капиталистическую систему не принесла обещанной свободы, а привела к нищете, экологическим разрушениям, расизму и войнам. Ложные обещания 1990-х меркнут перед преобразующими и универсалистскими устремлениями социалистических проектов двадцатого века. В их противоречиях мы видим нереализованный потенциал, которым необходимо воспользоваться в борьбе за лучшее будущее.

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Red Threads обращаются к наследию социализма двадцатого века со всеми его сложностями, достижениями, неудачами, и несбывшимися надеждами на будущее. Всемирно-исторические достижения социализма выдерживают потенциальную критику: при социализме повысился уровень жизни и образования в регионе; миллионы рабочих получили профессиональную подготовку; возникли революционные и реформистские движения по всему миру; были построены материальные и социальные инфраструктуры, которые до сих пор, будучи заброшенными десятилетиями, обеспечивают существование и выживание; и, превыше всего, был побежден фашизм. Противоречия социалистического проекта, которые предполагалось диалектически разрешить в ходе построения коммунизма, в постсоциалистический период стали объектом критики, направленной на дискредитацию социализма в целом: сохранение и усиление социального неравенства, неудачная политическая мобилизация (которая в итоге привела к возвращению националистической риторики), продолжающееся использование насилия государством, шаблонные приемы социалистической демократии. Мы утверждаем, что нужно усиленно бороться за разрешения этих и других противоречий социалистического проекта. Мы обязуемся критически оценивать свою работу—и для того, чтобы оценивать социалистический проект по его же строгим меркам, и для того, чтобы постоянно сверяться с нашими устремлениями. Самокритика важна в том числе и как способ осмыслить разочарование и падение уровня жизни рабочего класса в регионе, которые порой находят выражение в политике ресентимента, а порой – в ностальгии по альтернативе.

В знак уважения к социалистическому наследию, мы назвали свой проект в честь Петроградской текстильной фабрики «Красная нить», работницы которой стояли в авангарде революционного движения. Мы также вдохновляемся образом нити, который Люксембург и Ленин использовали для описания исторического процесса. Нить сплетает и связывает; она находится в постоянном движении. Наши нити многочисленны и не имеют конца. Мы стремимся сплести воедино реализованные и прерванные нити революционного наследия в ткань нашей повседневности и наших представлений о будущих политических формах.

Универсализм с Востока

Включаясь в идущие сегодня дискуссии о формах будущего, мы предлагаем ориентироваться на универсализм с Востока. Это одновременно и географическая, и политико-теоретическая позиция — акт возвращения к борьбе за социалистическое наследие XX века и проработка его противоречий. Находясь в непосредственной близости от капиталистических центров Западной Европы и испытывая на себе давление империалистических сил, революционеры из нашего региона стремились создать универсально ценные теоретические концепции—исходя из своих противоречивых условий. В силу своего противоречивого положения они могли с предельной серьезностью участвовать в марксистских дебатах, а также осознавать, что сам процесс накопления капитала воспроизводит неравенство и что ложная универсальность капитала сама по себе порождает гетерогенность. Им удалось разработать собственные словари и терминологии, творческие революционные практики и институты, которые и по сей день сохраняют свою актуальность. Мы с гордостью продолжаем их дело.

В соответствии с идеей универсализма с Востока, мы формулируем свою задачу следующим образом: мы формулируем политические требования с учетом конкретного исторического опыта регионов и осмысляем их внутри региональных контекстов, и затем переходим от региона — к миру.

Реально существующие социалистические режимы и более широкие социалистические движения исторически неразрывно связаны между собой. Полностью отрывать одно от другого и рассматривать существующие и существовавшие социалистические режимы как отклонения от идей социализма — значит ограждать современное стремление к коммунистическому будущему от бремени самой жизни, от полной противоречий и жертв освободительной борьбы, в ходе которой и формируются представления о будущем.

Мужество действовать в условиях, которые мы не выбирали, заключается, во-первых, в признании того, что история никогда не бывает безупречной, а во-вторых в понимании, что готовность отвечать за свои действия и способность учиться на ошибках не может лежать на плечах одного человека; эту ответственность должны разделять все участники движения.

Наши политические принципы отражают эту диалектическую связь между теорией и историей. Как социалисты, ориентированные на коммунистический горизонт, мы верим в в потенциал обычных людей: их способность творить историю и демократизировать формы материального производства и социального воспроизводства, а также культурную и интеллектуальную жизнь.

Рассматривая реальность как тотальность, в которой части и целое взаимно определяю друг друга, мы считаем, что борьба против капитализма невозможна в отрыве от борьбы против расизма, империализма, колониализма и гетеропатриархата.

Капиталистическое производство прибавочной стоимости вступает в противоречие с воспроизводством жизни. Это противоречие не просто логическое; совокупность экологических и материальных отношений и жизненных процессов на планете является предпосылкой всех социальных отношений и устанавливает естественные пределы человеческой деятельности.

Таким образом, мы понимаем класс широко, как категорию, определяющуюся как отношеними к средства воспроизводства, так и к средствам производства. Мы отвергаем любое жесткое разграничение между эксплуатацией и угнетением и безусловно поддерживаем все угнетенные группы, борющиеся за освобождение.

Основным актором капиталистического насилия является капиталистическое государство, а в глобальном масштабе — империалистическое государство. Мы подчеркиваем, что империализм — это центральная категория в работах революционных теоретиков из нашего региона. В ситуации стремительного кризиса Американской империи, мы снова ставим вопрос о необходимости изучения империализм и солидаризируемся со всеми народами, страдающими от оккупации, колонизации, этнических чисток и геноцидов. Признавая право угнетенных народов на вооруженную освободительную борьбу, мы тем не менее отдаем себе отчет в том, что милитаризация приводит к усилению капиталистического насилия, а основные расходы, связанные с ведением войны, всегда ложился на плечи наиболее уязвимых и наименее ответственных за развязывание конфликта социальных групп. Поэтому мы считаем борьбу за мир интернациональной ценностью.

Мы признаем достижения государственного социализма в борьбе против империалистического, патриархального, расового и колониального угнетения. Поэтому мы серьезно относимся к проблеме дематериализации и инструментализации угнетения в империалистических, антикоммунистических и националистических целях в постсоциалистическую эпоху.

В отличие от освободительных движений начала 20-го века и антиколониальных движений послевоенного периода, сегодня, когда по всему миру проводятся неолиберальные реформы и уничтожаются наследия социалистических проектов, национализм в нашем регионе не способствует освободительной борьбе с империалистическими силами, а, напротив, играет реакционную роль. Мировому левому движению следует внимательно изучить опыт нашего региона и извлечь из него уроки.

Такая ситуация сложилась в результате подавления коммунистических движений в постсоциалистических странах и криминализации социалистический истории и идей во имя национального суверенитета. Свою роль сыграло и встраивание многих партий, позиционирующих себя как наследниц коммунистических партий прошлого, в правые политические режимы с присвоением себе коммунистических символов, образов и лозунгов. В результате уровень теоретической дискуссии о коммунизме ощутимо снизился, а взаимодействие с коммунистическими идеями — такими как социальных прогресс и борьбы за всеобщее освобождение — стало проблематичным. Мы рады, что сегодня все больше молодых интеллектуалов и трудящихся из нашего региона возвращаются к коммунистическим идеям и поддерживаем их начинания.

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Наше приглашение

Red Threads продолжает дело издания LeftEast. В наш коллектив входят люди с разными мнениями; мы меньше, чем политическая партия, но больше, чем просто журнал. Мы видим задачу нашего журнала в том, чтобы вместе размышлять над возникающими вопросами и поддерживать диалог между различными левыми традициями. Мы стремимся к всеобщей социалистической политике, которая бы отвечала на вызовы настоящего и одновременно извлекала уроки из прошлого. В духе этого плюрализма, мы приглашаем читателей к требовательному и товарищескому разговору—начинающегося с выработки общих принципов и приводящего к коллективным действиям.

Как издание, мы приветствуем сотрудничество со всеми, кто разделяет нашу политическую позицию. В целях продвижения универсализма с Востока, мы приглашаем к сотрудничеству авторов, авторов, пишущих о политике из социалистической перспективы и анализирующих стратегии, теорию и историю социалистического движения; тех, кто связывает свою интеллектуальную работу с прошлым, настоящим и будущем социализма. Как редакторский коллектив, владеющий несколькими региональными языками, мы готовы работать с авторами, чьи тексты требуют не просто переложения на другой язык, но тщательного концептуального перевода с одного академического и политического языка на другой. Мы стремимся тесно сотрудничать с авторами, чтобы вместе повышать политическую ясность и качество текстов.

Мы будем уделять особое внимание постсоциалистическому миру, а также социалистическим традициям Глобального Юга, которые до сих пор мало известны в Восточной Европе, несмотря на глубокие связи между нашей историей и нынешними освободительными движениями на современном Глобальном Юге. При этом мы также продолжим диалог с нашими единомышленниками на Западе, в том числе с социалистами из диаспоры, которые были вынуждены покинуть наш регион. Чтобы облегчить коммуникацию между постсоциалистическими контекстами, мы начнем с публикаций на английском языке, но в ближайшем будущем планируем расширить спектр языков. Мы приветствуем материалы от авторов, не владеющих английским языком, на их родных языках — мы готовы рассмотреть их на предмет перевода и публикации. Не стесняйтесь обращаться к нам с предложениями по статьям и сотрудничеству, с вопросами или комментариями по адресу нашей электронной почты: editors@redthreads.media.

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