Boris Kagarlitsky
Boris Yulyevich Kagarlitsky is a Russian Marxist theoretician and sociologist who has been a political dissident in the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. He is an associate of the Transnational Institute. Kagarlitsky is the director of Institute of Globalisation Studies and Social Movements and editor in chief of Levaya Politika quarterly in Moscow. Kagarlitsky founded online platform Rabkor which has a YouTube channel and an online newspaper of the same name.
Political activities
Soviet Union
In the 1970s, he studied theatre criticism at the State Institute of Theatrical Art (GITIS), before being expelled for dissident activities in 1980. His editorship of the samizdat journal Levy Povorot from 1978 to 1982, and contributions to the samizdat journal Varianty during the same period, led to his arrest for 'anti-Soviet' activities in 1982. He was pardoned and released in 1983.In 1988 he published his book, Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State from 1917 to the Present, which won the Deutscher Memorial Prize.
In 1988, after the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and perestroika, he was permitted to resume his studies at the GITIS, graduating in the same year, and became coordinator of the. In 1990, he was elected to the Moscow City Soviet and to the Executive of the.
Russian Federation
He co-founded the in October 1992. In October 1993, the former Soviet dissident was arrested, with two other members of his party, for his opposition to President Boris Yeltsin during the September–October constitutional crisis, but was released the next day after international protests. Later that year, his job and the Moscow City Soviet were abolished under Yeltsin's new constitution. He documents the events and his experiences during this period in his book Square Wheels: How Russian Democracy Got Derailed. His 2005 historical essay Marxism: Not Recommended for Teaching was criticized by Mikhail Vasilyevich Popov.In 2022, Kagalitsky condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In 2022, Russian authorities designated Kagarlitsky as a foreign agent. On 25 July 2023, Russia's Federal Security Service opened a criminal case against Kagarlitsky. He was arrested on charges of "justifying terrorism" on 26 July 2023 according to Russian state agencies, as part of a wider crackdown on outspoken critics of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. In December 2023, he was charged 600,000 rubles fine on this charge.
In February 2024, his sentence was changed to five years' detention in a prison colony.
After his arrest in 2023 the Kagarlitsky Solidarity Committee was formed and signed by public and political figures around the world: Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Jeremy Corbyn, Slavoj Žižek, Nadya Tolokonnikova and many others.
Academic career
From 1994 to 2002, he was a senior research fellow at the Institute for Comparative Political Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was awarded his Doctorate degree for his thesis, "Collective Actions and Labour Policies in Russia in the 90s," in 1995, and has taught political science at Moscow State University, the Moscow School for Social and Economic Sciences, and the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.Rabkor
In 2008, Kagarlitsky was co-founder of the Russian online leftist media platform Rabkor, short for "Rabochiy Korrespondent". It is a Russian multimedia platform that advocates for progressive democratic views, and is characterised as an intersection between academic research and political activism. The platform encompasses a website, YouTube channel, and Telegram channel.Rabkor has been influential in uniting individuals with diverse left-wing and pro-democratic perspectives. Rabkor's stance on the Ukraine war shifted significantly over time. Initially, it supported Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the Donbas separatist movements, viewing them as progressive and anti-imperialist. However, after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Rabkor strongly opposed the war, criticizing Russia’s military actions and calling for anti-war agitation. This shift reflects a major ideological realignment in its editorial stance. In 2022, Kagarlitsky and Rabkor convened the Anti-War Round Table of the Left Forces, which unequivocally condemned the invasion and called for anti-war agitation among Russian citizens.