Gleb Pavlovsky, the Ukrainian-born former dissident turned “political technologist”, abruptly fell out with the Kremlin in April, reportedly over “indiscreet comments” made about the 2012 presidential elections. In interview with Transit a short while before, Pavlovsky gave a revealing inside view of the workings of political power in the former Soviet Union and in post-Soviet Russia.
History has a long fuse and memory often betrays the past. A journey across borders and through no man’s lands brings that past alive and reminds us of what we have lost, in particular the diversity of the past and the beauty of the “other”.
When Ratko Mladic faces the International Tribunal in the Hague, he is likely to use the defence of superior orders. But when he asks who it was who voted for Milosevic he has a point, comments Slavenka Drakulic. Will trading off Mladic for the EU allow Serbs to avoid the question of collective responsibility?
Herta Müller has publicly criticized Romanian intellectuals for their passivity during the Ceausescu regime. Talking to the publisher and philosopher Gabriel Liiceanu in Bucharest in October 2010, the novelist and Nobel laureate defended her often unpopular view that the preservation of personal intellectual integrity alone was inadequate as a form of political resistance.
Lockean liberalism emphasized toleration of religion and other dissenting social practices. Yet in the Marxian critique of liberal freedoms, dissent was seen solely in terms of class struggle: social harmony could be achieved in a classless society, not a pluralist one. According to Barbara Falk, the severance of dissent and toleration has obscured the liberal roots of eastern European dissidence.
For Adam Michnik, resistance to communism took many forms: reproaching another for their lack of heroism is impossible. Talking to Andrei Plesu in Bucharest in February 2011, he called for an end to the logic of accusation and warned against instrumentalizing the quarrel with communism.
Email, text messaging and social networks have revolutionized the way we communicate. Yet as the magic of instantaneity fades, George Blecher begins to miss some good old-fashioned penmanship.
The Eurozine conference on “Changing Media – Media in Change” from 13-16 May 2011 brought fresh insights to debates on the future of journalism, intellectual property and free speech, and made one thing very clear: independent cultural journals are where reflexion and criticality combine with changing media strategies.
What has emerged in the Arab world is a thoroughly modern mass democratic movement, writes Seyla Benhabib. Speculations that Islamic fundamentalists will hijack the transformation process are motivated by a cultural prejudice that forgets the contentiousness at the historical core of western democracies.
The performance art of the 1960s and ’70s transformed acting into religion, writes Donatien Grau: pain, blood, and semen – they were doing it for real. The younger generation of performance artists are rejecting this heritage: their return to narrative is a way out of the mind-body dualism.
The harsh clampdown on independent reporting in Belarus in the run-up and aftermath of the presidential elections in December 2010 dashed any hopes that might have existed about a “European rapprochement”. A report by the Belarusian Association of Journalists reveals just how far the regime has deviated from any accepted definition of a free press.
In his new book, American atheist Sam Harris argues that science can replace theology as the ultimate moral authority. Kenan Malik is sceptical of any such yearning for moral certainty, be it scientific or divine.
1968 as world revolution and beginning of the end for the twentieth-century superpowers: Immanuel Wallerstein on the logic of global history from the Yalta Conference to the Second Iraq War. Based on a lecture given at The Vienna L’Internationale Conference, 27 October 2010.
Twenty-five years after the Chernobyl disaster, Barys Piatrovich recalls the tension of unknowing during the days that followed, his desperate attempts to contact his relatives in the zone, and the arrival of evacuees during Easter celebrations in his parents’ village. Today, barely any of the Chernobyl evacuees are still alive. Dispersed throughout Belarus, they died alone and unnoticed, statistically insignificant.
The new respectability of renewable energy creates the impression that a consensus on the energy switchover has been reached. Not true, warns the late Hermann Scheer: the fact is that spending on conventional sources is increasing worldwide. Nowhere is the pseudo-consensus exposed more clearly than in ongoing investment in nuclear power.
Forced to ratify the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, Hungarian parliamentarians had planned to demonstrate their opposition through a show of unanimity. For historian Miklós Zeidler, the actions of dissenting MPs illustrate the distinction between a sense of injustice and false patriotism.