Alexei Yurchak on a position in-between and the New Left in Russia. I wished to have seen more of such positions among commentators that cut through the friend-foe paradigm. Russia’s new left have been walking a tight line. For them a simple critique of the far-right dominance at Maidan is problematic because it ignores the revolution’s democratic momentum and plays into the hands of the Russian government’s anti-Maidan propaganda. However, refusing to oppose the ultra-right, “pretending, as most Russian and Western liberals do, that they were all an invention of Putin’s television,” means supporting the nationalist theft of a democratic revolution. Both positions are untenable ethically and politically. The same dilemma is repeated in the case of the situation in the Donbas. As Budraitskis puts it: “If in one case, … the analysis of the situation in the Donbas completely ignores the fact of Russia’s direct interference and what goes on there is described simply as a ‘civil war’, in which the government of oligarchs from Kiev is fighting against its own people, and in the other case, on the contrary, everything is reduced to Russia’s covert intervention, and all objective elements of the internal conflict there are consistently ignored—then what we face is another cunning ploy. culanth.org/fieldsights/619-revolutions-and-their-translators-maidan-the-conflict-in-ukraine-and-the-russian-new-left
Posted on: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 07:24:03 +0000
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