Sasha Talaver, a PhD candidate in gender studies at the Central European University in Vienna, is a left-wing and feminist activist from Russia.
Four years into Russia’s invasion, Taras Bilous — a socialist serving in the Ukrainian army — reflects on exhaustion, negotiations, and why a bad ceasefire could be a boon for the far right.
For decades, Vladimir Putin has warned that Russia is on the path to extinction. His war has killed untold numbers of people — but it’s also an attempt to force millions of people into Russian citizenship.
After a liberalization period following the Russian Revolution, the Stalin-era Soviet Union drastically restricted women’s right to abortion. But in the 1950s Soviet women won free and legal terminations — achieving the right to choose before almost all of their sisters in the West.