The Boeing 777: can Putin back down?

This article by ILYA BUDRAITSKIS, a Russian historian, researcher and socialist activist, was published on Friday 18 July, on Openleft.ru in Russian and on LeftEast in English.

We can say with confidence that the tragedy of Boeing 777, which took the lives of 298 people, has brought the conflict in Eastern Ukraine to a principally new level. Now the main centers of power – Russia, the US, and the EU – must make themselves known and must take

The crash, seen from a nearby village

the responsibility for stopping the war or, conversely, for its practical legitimation and expansion.  Even considering the possibility that the plane was shot down by mistake, it is events of such magnitude that divide history into “before” and “after.” “After” such an event the possibilities of “strange,” “hybrid,” and other “wars without war” have been exhausted.

Over the past several months, as an endless supply of people and weapons has passed through the gaping hole in the Russo-Ukrainian border [to support the separatist forces], the nerve centre of the diplomatic

‘A gangster-police putsch, presented in “people’s” wrapping’

This interview with VT, an anarchist based in Donetsk, was conducted by the Russian anarchist group Avtonomnoe Deistvie, in early May – that is, before the intensification of military conflict and the Kyiv government’s “anti terrorist operation”. So VT comments not on the effect of the conflict, but on the character of the separatist movement and its relationship to the working-class community – and that is why I publish it here. GL.

Are there anarchist groups in the Donbas?

Anarchist activity is low, there isn’t much of it. So its influence on the political situation is small. There are “unorganised” anarchist groups in several cities in the Donbas: Donetsk, Avdiyivka, Kramatorsk, Horlivka, Mariupol, and Yasynuvata. Each group probably includes less than ten people. There is also a Revolutionary Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists

The ideologue who tried to make environmentalism mean population control

Review of The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon and our gamble over Earth’s future, by Paul Sabin (Yale University Press, 2013).

It was the Indian food crisis of the mid 1960s that turned the biologist Paul Ehrlich from a field researcher on butterflies into one of the USA’s most vocal environmentalists and population control advocates.

Ehrlich published his best-seller The Population Bomb – which warned that “mankind will

Pete Seeger, the folk singer, at Earth Day 1970. See “About the photo”, below.

breed itself into oblivion” and called for “radical surgery” to excise the “cancer” of population growth – in the summer of 1968.

The American elite was receptive to Ehrlich’s “grim predictions about the future”, Paul Sabin writes in The Bet. That year, violent revolt swept through American cities; the USA was mired in the Vietnam war and faced opposition to it at home; and student and worker protests swept through the rich countries and culminated in the French general strike.

Ehrlich became a media superstar, doing more than 100 public lectures and 200 radio and TV shows in 1970 alone. The Population Bomb was reprinted 22 times in three years. In the

Ukraine: Russian White Guards in the Donbass

Here ZBIGNIEW MARCIN KOWALEWSKI challenges the myth that the separatists in eastern Ukraine are leaders of a workers’ uprising. Kowalewski is deputy editor of the Polish edition of Le Monde Diplomatique and author of several works on the history of Ukraine. This article appears here with his permission; it was also published in English by International Viewpoint, in French by Mediapart, and in Russian by the Praxis Centre.

There is no revolution in the Donbass, not even a mass movement. They exist only in the propaganda of the supporters of an armed separatist movement, led by far-right nationalists. Imported from Russia, they seek the

A border post in Luhansk, through a shot-up truck windscreen. Photo: uainfo.org

restoration of the Tsarist Empire. The Kremlin supports this reincarnation of the White Guards and the Black Hundreds[1] who are destabilising Ukraine; but it seems that it is also afraid of them.

On April 22, Boris Kagarlitsky affirmed (here, Russian original here) that “the successful uprising of hundreds of thousands (and perhaps millions) of people in eastern Ukraine is not to be explained on the basis of Russian interference”. An uprising of hundreds of thousands, even millions? Even the propaganda of the Russian regime aimed at people abroad, with the channel Russia Today in the forefront, is a thousand times more measured.

On the international left, almost nobody knows Russian, and even less Ukrainian; so when the left wants to know what is happening in Ukraine, it finds itself in a catastrophic situation. So as not to depend on the Western media, it is condemned to have recourse to the English-language propaganda of the Putin regime and to that of the so-called “anti-imperialist networks” which are pro-Russian (often “red-brown” or downright brown) as well as what is