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On October 20th 2024, Moldova held a presidential election and a referendum, supposedly on the question of integration into the EU. The referendum passed with a slight majority – 50.35% vs 49.65%. Two rounds of a presidential election were also held in the country, with the EU favored candidate Maia Sandu winning.
While many observers have interpreted the results as indicative of the country being divided between a pro-EU and pro-Russian faction and Russia’s meddling in the elections, the situation is far more complex.
Vitalie Sprînceană is a sociologist, journalist and urban activist based in Chisinau. Moldova. He is also a co-editor at PLATZFORMA.MD, a web platform for social, economic and political criticism. He is interested in and argues for inclusive democratic public spaces, social justice, free knowledge, plurality of worldviews and practices. His research interests are: sociology, globalization, history of ideas, literary and cultural criticism, history of Soviet Moldova.
Read his recent article on the EU Referendum in Moldova here:
https://transform-network.net/blog/commentary/moldovas-referendum-on-what/
Check out the Moldova based web platform Platzforma here:
https://platzforma.md/
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Since the collapse of the USSR and Georgia's independence in 1991, anti-soviet memory politics have played an intractable role in Georgian politics. On the one hand, they are a rhetorical allegory without limits - nearly anything and everything negative can be associated with the soviet past. Yet on the other hand, they also played a crucial role in nation building, becoming especially institutionalized after the 2003 Rose Revolution. In the lead up to the parliamentary elections on October 26th 2024, politicians still make regular reference to the USSR. But where do anti-soviet memory politics in Georgia come from? Why do they persist? How exactly are they reproduced? And for what? Is the USSR simply a metaphor for Russia? Or a means to demonize socialism and reinforce market orthodoxy? Or both?
To discuss all this and more, we sat down with frequent co-host and guest, Beka Natsvlishvili.
Beka Natsvlishvili is a director of the Institute for a Fair Economy. He is also the Georgian team lead for a platform economy research project in collaboration with the University of Oxford. His teaching experience includes lectures on political economy, globalization, and political sociology at the Georgian-American University, and previous engagements at Caucasus University and the University of Georgia. Beka previously served as a Member of Parliament and Deputy Chair of the Committee for European Integration, and as a Member of the Tbilisi Municipal Council, where he chaired the land legalization commission. With over two decades of academic and professional experience, he holds a Master of Arts (Magister Artium) from Wilhelm University of Münster and has extensive expertise in political economy, trade unions, and social research.
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Georgia’s trade dynamics with the EU have not improved, even though it signed a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) in 2014. The Georgian export basket deteriorated qualitatively since that time. Specifically, Georgia’s export basket sophistication has decreased, and the share of low-tech and resource-based products hasincreased. Moreover, Georgia’s exports to the EU have become more concentrated.
Georgia's economy is marked by jobless growth, deindustrialization and other unyielding structural weaknesses. How and why did Georgia find itself in this "neoliberal lock in"? And what does the DCFTA have to do with it?
On today's episode, we discuss EU-Georgia trade ties, how a peculiar form of neoliberalism developed in the country since 1992 and the political implications of it all with political economist Tato Khundadze.
Check out the study "Neoliberal lock-in: Why Georgia-EU free trade does not work" co-authored by Tato Khundadze and Salome Topuria:
https://southcaucasus.fes.de/news-list/e/neoliberal-lock-in-why-georgia-eu-free-trade-does-not-work.html
Tato Khundadze is a PhD candidate at the New School for Social Research in New York, where he also teaches multiple courses and works as a research assistant. He received his MA in Economics from the New School for Social Research. He has extensive research experience in public policy and economic development. He was the head of the Analytical Division at the Georgian Public Broadcaster and a research fellow at the Centre for Social Studies of Georgia. His research interests include economic development, statistical learning, and economic growth models. His latest publications refer to the potential of introducing progressive taxation, Georgia’s history of industrial development, and public debt sustainability.
(episode photo courtesy of: https://www.creativeboom.com/inspiration/photographs-of-abandoned-factories-and-industry-in-the-former-soviet-state-of-georgia/)
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On today's episode we discuss how Ukraine's market oriented war economy is affecting the population, war time class divisions, post-Soviet Ukraine's economic development and how History and memory politics fit into the picture. Our guest to discuss all this and more is Peter Korotaev.
Peter Korotaev is a researcher who has worked on class dynamics and war for Jacobin, Arena and The Canada Files. He writes regularly at Events in Ukraine.
https://eventsinukraine.substack.com/
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Helena Sheehan has spent decades involved in working class and Left struggles across the globe. She is an accomplished writer and academic who never lost or loses sight of her Marxist convictions. Her life brought her from America, as a devout Catholic entering the convent, to embracing revolutionary Marxism and participating in the Irish Republican struggle and the global communist movement. She also explains what it was like to visit the Soviet Union as a communist living in Ireland.
In this episode we discuss her life in the global left, the development of her political views, first hand accounts of political struggles and debates, as well as lessons she has for Left wing politics today.
She has recently written the book Until "We Fall: Long Distance Life on the Left". Here's a description:
"Offers vivid first hand accounts of encounters with fellow socialists following the fall of the Soviet Union
Most westerners glimpsed the breakup of the Soviet Union at a great distance, through a highly distorted lens which equated the expansion of capitalism with the rise of global democracy. But there were those, like Helena Sheehan, who watched more keenly and saw a world turning upside down. In her new autobiographical history from below, Until We Fall, Sheehan shares what she witnessed first-hand and close-up, as hopes were raised by glasnost and perestroika, only to be swept away in the bitter and brutal counterrevolutions that followed.
In Until We Fall, we come along on Sheehan’s travels as she tracks the fallout from the transition from flawed forms of socialism to a particularly predatory form of capitalism. As a sequel to Navigating the Zeitgeist — which captured 1950s cold-war America, the 1960s new left, the 1970s social movements and communist parties of Europe — Until We Fall takes us through Eastern Europe from the 1980s onward and moves on to offer vivid accounts of encounters with fellow socialists in many other places, such as Britain, Greece, and Mexico. It includes an entire chapter on South Africa, where Sheehan participated in its political and intellectual life for extended intervals of the post-apartheid period. And it offers her unique take on her birthplace, the United States, along with the unfolding realities confronting her chosen home, Ireland. She also reveals major changes in the culture of academe in the decades she has taught in universities.
As a philosopher, she scrutinizes the various intellectual currents prevailing, particularly positivism and postmodernism, and makes a persuasive case for the explanatory and ethical superiority of Marxism. As she moves through time and space, Sheehan pursues the perspectives of the vanquished in a world where the triumphalist narratives of the victors hold sway. The central storyline of the book is her political activism as waves of history swept through the left and challenged it in ever more formidable ways, bringing some victories but many defeats. She raises questions of how to keep going in this time of monsters, when the old is dying and the new cannot be born, when capitalism is decadent yet still dominant."
Helena Sheehan is Professor Emerita at Dublin City University, where she taught philosophy of science, history of ideas and media studies. She is author of many publications on philosophy, politics and culture, including such books as Marxism and the Philosophy of Science, The Syriza Wave and Navigating the Zeitgeist. She has been active on the left for many decades.
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On today's episode, we discuss The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union's Anticolonial Empire with the book's author, historian Masha Kirasirova
Book description:
"In the first few years after the Russian Revolution, an ideological project coalesced to link the development of what Stalin demarcated as the internal "East"--primarily Central Asia and the Caucasus--with nation-building, the overthrow of colonialism, and progress toward socialism in the "foreign East"--the Third World. Support for anti-colonial movements abroad was part of the Communist Party platform and shaped Soviet foreign policy to varying degrees thereafter. The Eastern International explores how the concept of "the East" was used by the world's first communist state and its mediators to project, channel, and contest power across Eurasia. Masha Kirasirova traces how this policy was conceptualized and carried out by students, comrades, and activists--Arab, Jewish, and Central Asian. It drew on their personal motivations and gave them considerable access to state authority and agency to shape Soviet ideology, inform concrete decisions, and allocate resources. Contextualizing these Eastern mediators within a global frame, this book historicizes the circulation of peoples and ideas between the socialist and decolonizing world and reinscribes"
Masha Kirasirova is Assistant Professor of History at New York University Abu Dhabi. She is an editor of Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History (OUP, 2023) and The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties Between Protest and Nation-Building.
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This is a special TWO PART episode with Historian and Jacobin Europe editor David Broder.
In Part I (recorded July 10th 2024), we discuss recent European Parliamentary and French election results, how both the right and left fared in the outcome, and the implications of these results for Europe, EU expansion and more.
In Part II (starts at 50:45), through a discussion of David's 2023 book Mussolini's Grandchildren: Fascism in Contemporary Italy we explore how the current right wing political imagination in Italy and Europe at large are mobilized through historical memory. We also examine how anti-communist memory politics in Western Europe relate to anti-communist memory politics in post-communist countries.
David Broder is a historian, writer, translator and editor of Jacobin Europe.
Check out David's book Mussolini's Grandchildren here:
https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745348025/mussolinis-grandchildren/
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On this episode we discuss how Baku oil shaped Bolshevism, Sovietization, and the structuring of the Soviet state between 1920-1929 in the South Caucasus. Our guest is Sara Brinegar, historian and author of the book Power and the Politics of Oil in the Soviet South Caucasus: Periphery Unbound 1920-1929.
Book description and author bio below:
The book shows how the politics of oil intersected with the establishment of Soviet power in the Caucasus; it reveals how the Soviets cooperated and negotiated with the local elite, rather than merely subsuming them. More broadly, Power and the Politics of Oil in the Soviet South Caucasus demonstrates not only how the Bolsheviks understood and exploited oil, but how the needs of the industry shaped Bolshevik policy.
Brinegar reflects on the huge geopolitical importance of oil at the end of World War I and the Russian Civil War. She discusses how the reserves sitting idle in the oil fields of Baku, the capital of the newly independent Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, and the center of the fallen empire's oil reserves were no exception to this. With the Soviet leadership in Moscow intent on capturing the fields in the first few months of 1920, this book examines the Soviet project to rebuild Baku's oil industry in the aftermath of these wars and the political significance of oil in the formation of the Soviet Union.Sara Brinegar is historian of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She held a two¬-year faculty fellowship at Yale University’s European Studies Council and was previously a Digital Pedagogy Fellow at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. She is an independent scholar with a full-time non-academic job and is based in the Washington, D.C. area.
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This episode was recorded on May 8th/9th 2024 - the situation is still unfolding.
A political crisis is currently underway in Georgia. Sparked by the ruling Georgian Dream party's proposed law on the "transparency of foreign influence", the stand off between the government, NGOs, protestors - both those of the formal opposition and not - and even some within the European Union, has deeper roots and a far from clear trajectory.
Today's episode begins with an outline of the tensions surrounding the proposed law, some informative aspects of Georgia's recent history, and both how domestic dynamics and a dramatically changing geopolitical situation are animating the crisis.
Then we have a discussion with Anatol Lieven and Almut Rochonawski on a range of topics related to the current crisis including the peculiar role of NGOs in Georgia, the European Union, Georgian political economy, a proposed "offshore bill", and how a shifting geopolitical picture is shaping the political calculus of elites in Georgia, the EU and beyond.
Anatol Lieven is Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He was formerly a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar and in the War Studies Department of King’s College London.
Almut Rochowanski is an activist who specializes in resource mobilization for civil society in the former Soviet Union, including in Georgia and Russia. Her writing about this issue can be found at https://discomfortzone.substack.com/.
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The collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union unleashed an unprecedented mortality crisis. In the years following, the region endured upwards of 7.5 million excess (and thus preventable) deaths. This post-socialist mortality crisis was not only the result of the economic devastation and social fracturing caused by socialism's end, but was exacerbated by the political-economic commitment to market orthodoxy and austerity of post-socialist elites, leading to wide spread socio-economic, physical and mental immiseration.
On today's episode we welcome Gábor Scheiring to discuss how this post-socialist mortality crisis emerged, its political implications for today, and what types of methodologies are most effective for researching these topics and more in post-socialist countries.
Gabor is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics at Georgetown University Qatar, currently on sabbatical as a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University, Center for European Studies. His research addresses the lived experience and political economy of contemporary capitalist transformations using quantitative, qualitative, and comparative methods. His work analyzes how economic shocks fuel precarity, leading to mental and physical suffering, and how these processes affect the stability of democracy. As a member of the Hungarian Parliament (2010-2014), he advocated for a socially just transition to sustainability.
Gabor's website:
https://www.gaborscheiring.com/
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One of Georgia's most exciting contemporary filmmakers is Levan Koguashvili. His films are as comedic as they are tragic, focusing on the intricacies (both beautiful and heartbreaking) of the day to day struggles Georgians live through today.
In this discussion, we explore Levan's approach to filmmaking, stories behind the scripts, and the way his films reflect economic and social realities both in Georgia and of those Georgians who have emigrated abroad.
Levan is a film director from Tbilisi and his films include Brighton 4th (2021), Gogitas New Life (2016), Blind Dates (2013) and Street Days (2010).
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On today's episode we discuss the emergence of the Georgian tea industry and how its development interacted with processes of economic, political and national consolidation in the first decades of the Georgian SSR.
Our guest is Camille Neufville. Camille is a PhD student at Strasbourg university, France. She is interested in the entangled histories of exotic commodities, their production and consumption in northern Eurasia. She's currently writing her PhD on tea consumption and tea production in Imperial and Soviet Georgia. Her main research questions include land and labor issues, the limits of state control, and subsistence economics in the Western Caucasus.
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On today's episode we sit down with political economist Ia Eradze to discuss how extreme rates of dollarization in Georgia emerged after the Soviet Union's demise, why dollarization persists, as well as how the dominance of neoliberal economic policies and exclusion of socio-economic issues from the public and political discourse in post-Soviet Georgia came to be.
Below is a description of Eradze's 2023 book Unraveling Dollarization Persistence: The Case of Georgia followed by a link to an article which summarizes the book's main arguments:
The book engages with the persistence of foreign currency domination at the example of Georgia. Unofficial dollarization remains a challenge for developing countries, as it increases the vulnerability of households, firms and governments with foreign currency debt, limits monetary sovereignty, threatens financial and political stability and hinders economic development. These issues have become even more evident during the Covid 19 pandemic through the increasing debt in foreign currency. This monograph provides a political economic analysis of dollarization and conceptualises dollarization through a state theory, in which Georgia is framed as a peripheral hybrid state. The book is structured around three themes: genesis of dollarization (1991-2003), dollarization persistence (2003-2012) and politicization of dollarization (2012-2019). Thus, the history and persistence of foreign currency domination is explained through embedding dollarization into political debates, governance tactics, policies and institutions, economic interests, accumulation regime, civil society, global processes and interests of international actors.
https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/unraveling-dollarization/
Ia Eradze is an associate professor at the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs and a CERGE-EI Foundation teaching fellow. She is also a researcher at the Institute for Social and Cultural Studies at the Ilia State University. Ia holds a PhD in social and economic sciences from the University of Kassel. She is a political economist with research interest in finance and state formation in the post-socialist space. Ia has worked as a researcher at ZZF Potsdam and was an invited scholar at Harvard University, Sciences Po, Trinity College and University of Vienna.
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On today's episode we sit down with journalist and author Vincent Bevins to discuss his recent book If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. This wide reaching conversation reviews the main themes and topics of his book, and the broader political lessons and reflections that the global social movements between 2010-2020, with an emphasis on those outside of the global North, can provide today.
Here's a description of If We Burn
"From 2010 to 2020, more people participated in protests than at any other point in human history. Yet we are not living in more just and democratic societies as a result. IF WE BURN is a stirring work of history built around a single, vital question: How did so many mass protests lead to the opposite of what they asked for?
From the so-called Arab Spring to Gezi Park in Turkey, from Ukraine’s Euromaidan to student rebellions in Chile and Hong Kong, acclaimed journalist Vincent Bevins provides a blow-by-blow account of street movements and their consequences, recounted in gripping detail. He draws on four years of research and hundreds of interviews conducted around the world, as well as his own strange experiences in Brazil, where a progressive-led protest explosion led to an extreme-right government that torched the Amazon.
Careful investigation reveals that conventional wisdom on revolutionary change is gravely misguided. In this groundbreaking study of an extraordinary chain of events, protesters and major actors look back on successes and defeats, offering urgent lessons for the future."Bevins is also the author of The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
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On today's episode we sit down with historian Yiannis Kokosalakis to discuss his new book Building Socialism: The Communist Party and the Making of the Soviet System 1921-1941
Book description:
"By placing the party grassroots at the centre of its focus, Building Socialism presents an original account of the formative first two decades of the Soviet system. Assembled in a large network of primary party organisations (PPO), the Bolshevik rank-and-file was an army of activists made up of ordinary people. While far removed from the levers of power, they were nevertheless charged with promoting the Party's programme of revolutionary social transformation in their workplaces, neighbourhoods, and households. Their regular meetings, conferences and campaigns have generated a voluminous source base. This rich material provides a unique view of the practical manifestation of the Party's revolutionary mission and forms the basis of this insightful new narrative of how the Soviet republic functioned in the period from the end of the Russian Civil War in 1921 to its invasion by Nazi Germany in 1941."
Yiannis Kokosalakis is currently a research fellow at Bielefeld University.
Check out his website here:
https://ykokosalakis.com/
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On today's episode we put the specific yet shared experiences of healthcare systems in Socialist Yugoslavia, the German Democratic Republic and the Georgian SSR into conversation. Through the discussion we bring to light both the similarities and differences in three distinct forms of socialism, as well as how the transition to capitalism dramatically changed health and healthcare in each society.
Our guests are:
Ana Vračar is a Zagreb based researcher and activist with the People's Health Movement and the Organization for Worker's Initiative and Democratization. She researches healthcare in the transition from socialism to capitalism in former Yugoslavia and writes on healthcare related issues today.
Matthew Read is a researcher with IF DDR, a research institute focused on investigating the history of socialism in the German Democratic Republic to help draw political lessons for the present.
Read more here:
https://ifddr.org/en/studies/studies-on-the-ddr/socialism-is-the-best-prophylaxis/
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/04/21/a-brutal-system-replaced-socialist-health-care-in-europe/
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In the 1920s and 1930s, Bolshevik historians actively took part in building Soviet socialism. As militant scholars, one of their main tasks was (broadly speaking) to reconceptualize and rearticulate the history of the political entity they had just overthrown - the Russian Empire.
The multinational Bolsheviks were not only committed to building a socialist state, but believed this must be done through the dismantling of what Lenin called the Russian "prison house of nations". Writing History was a critical tool in this process. Through the analytical lens of Marxism and a political commitment to anti-imperialism, Bolshevik historians from across Eurasia spent the 1920s and 1930s writing new materialist histories of imperial Russia. Historians like Mikhail Pokrovskii sought to wholly overturn the narratives of Imperial historians by explaining Russian colonization and imperial expansion as material processes, subject to forces like capital, class conflict and the quest for raw materials rather than the abstract notions of imperial rights, religion or civilizational benevolence. Militant historians from Central Asia, the Caucasus and elsewhere also began rewriting national histories, using materialist explanations of national development and colonialism in areas of Eurasia often for the first time.
Because the writings of early Soviet historians critically engaged with nationhood, imperialism, capital and colonialism, they offer many lessons about writing History today. Currently, many studies and discussions about Eurasia are focused on the concept of "decolonization". However, unlike early anti-colonial Bolshevik historiography, the current decolonial discourse about post-Soviet countries tends to reinforce narrow national-historical narratives and nationalisms, and are entirely divorced from the revolutionary modernization, internationalism, universalism and socialist construction that were key features of anti-colonial Bolshevik historiography in the early 20th century.
On today's episode we discuss all this and more with historian Alexey Golubev.
Alexey recently wrote an article entitled "No natural colonization: the early Soviet school of historical anti-colonialism" which discusses Soviet Marxist historical narratives of the 1920s and early 1930s that sought to reframe Russian history as a process driven by commercial capital and analyzed Russian territorial expansion and its historical scholarship in terms such as settler colonialism and indigenous erasure.
Alexey is a professor of History at the University of Houston.
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The history of Marxism in the 20th century, both as a means to interpret the world and as the basis of a politics to transform it, is marked by a profound intellectual and political diversity. Some of this can be attributed to individuals and their specific readings of Marx's thought. Yet other forms of Marxism - such as that which emerged in the global South during the era of decolonization - can trace their origins to particular applications of Marx's ideas and Marxist predecessors (such as Lenin), as well as the historical experience of really existing socialist states to concrete historical and political contexts.
Many different actors and thinkers have historically held up the banner of Marxism and used its ideas to make sense of the world and mobilize people to create a different one.
Anti-communism has a similar history. A range of actors and thinkers have historically sought to oppose Marxism as both a real movement and set of ideas. Various forms of nationalism and liberalism (though not only) as the guiding ideals of nation states, empires and even grassroots movements, have presented Marxism, communism and socialism as their anti-thesis.
Yet History has no fidelity to simple binaries. In the aftermath of World War II, some Marxists in Europe and North America sought to base their theoretical articulation of the world in critiques of "really existing socialism" through a synthesis of Marxism and anti-communism. Who were these people and what were they arguing for? And what material and political foundations guided and shaped them?
On today's episode, we welcome critical theorist, philosopher, and professor Gabriel Rockhill to interrogate the relationship between post-WW2 Western Marxism, the Frankfurt School and anti-communism.
For background on the topic, here is Rockhill's article in the LA Review of Books from 2022 entitled "The CIA and the Frankfurt School's Anti-Communism"
https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-the-frankfurt-schools-anti-communism/
Professor Rockhill currently teaches at Villanova, and his extended bio and bibliography can be found here:
https://gabrielrockhill.com/about/
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On this episode we discuss the ins and outs of decolonization - as a set of historical revolutionary politics, intellectual tradition, contemporary framework of analysis as well the limitations and misuses of "decolonization" in the context of Ukraine and Russia today.
To do this we have invited two distinct yet complimentary thinkers to put their ideas into conversation with one another.
Geo Maher is a teacher, political theorist and author of Anti-Colonial Eruptions: Racial Hubris and the Cunning of Resistance and Decolonizing Dialectics.
Volodymyr Ishchenko is a sociologist and writes on contemporary Ukraine, civil society, revolution, nationalism and more. In December 2022 he wrote an article entitled "Ukrainian Voices?" in the New Left Review. Check out the article here:
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii138/articles/volodymyr-ishchenko-ukrainian-voices
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