A lot of the French and German Left texts get translated into awful English, primarily because they are done by volunteer amateur would-be translators who don't really have the necessary skills; I'm sure the same thing is true of Russian texts, but I don't know Russian, so I don't have personal knowledge of that.
Me: Frankly I don't think that there is very little of a "left" movement in Russia that would be recognizable as such by Westerners. (The only people who come to mind immediately are Kagarlitsky and Glinski.) Russian politics doesn't really break down along left/right boundaries so much as along Slavophile-Nationalist/Westernerizer ones. (For instance, the politics of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and those of Alexander Solzhenitsyn are virtually identical, believe it or not.) --- BTW, on your comment about the insularity of Russians: my son has just gone to the Czech Republic for a few months' stay, and is planning to get an English teaching job. I hope he finds that there are more Czechs interested in studying English than there are Russians interested in the outside world.
--- Me: Czechs HAVE TO be interested in the outside world. The Czech Republic is a tiny country surrounded by other countries in a hugely mulilinguistic environment, whereas Russia is a giant empire several times the size of Europe. It takes the Trans-Siberian train 2 weeks to get from Moscow to Vladivostok, and during all that voyage you will encounter only Russian-speakers. In Europe, if you travel a few hours, you're in a whole other country. (I think the fact that Russia had closed borders for 70 years is also a factor in Russian solipsism.)
(This reminds me of what Imam Shamil, who led the Chechens and the Avars against the Russian Empire in the Caucasus Wars, said after he finally surrendured and went to live in a sumptuous palace by St. Petersburg provided to him by the tsar (so much for the myth of the implacable Shamil). After the two-week-long trip from the Caucasus to St. Pete, he said, "If I had known that all of that was Russia, I would never have fought them." Apparently he thought the Russians were just another mountain tribe.)
--------------------------------- Do you Yahoo!? Friends. Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20040604/a56d67f9/attachment.htm>