In this special episode of Critical Theory in Context, Robin Celikates is joined by Greg Yudin, a prominent voice of the Russian anti-war protests.
With Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the focus is rightly on what is happening on the ground, in Ukraine, and on the international reaction to the war. At the same time, Russians around the world and in Russia itself have come out to protest against the war and the Putin government.
In the conversation, Robin and Greg discuss the reactions of the Russian population to the war in Ukraine, possible fractures within the Russian elite, the prospects for resistance, and the responses of the Western left to this war.
Greg is professor of political philosophy at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences and a regular contributor to the online platform open democracy https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/ as well as to independent Russian media platforms such as Projekt (which has already been banned) and Republic (that has come under increasing pressure by the state apparatus). Two days before the invasion, on 22 February 2022, Greg predicted that Putin was „about to start the most senseless war in our history“. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/russia-ukraine-most-senseless-war-nato-history/