Boris Kagarlitsky


Boris Yulyevich Kagarlitsky is a Russian Marxist theoretician and sociologist who has been a political dissident in the Soviet Union and in post-Soviet Russia. He is coordinator of the Transnational Institute Global Crisis project and Director of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements in Moscow.

Political activities

In the 1970s, he studied theatre criticism at the State Institute of Theatrical Art, 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, The 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 Moscow People's Front. In 1990, he was elected to the Moscow City Soviet and to the Executive of the Socialist Party of Russia. He co-founded the Party of Labour 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. The events and his experiences during this momentous period are documented in his book, Square Wheels: How Russian Democracy Got Derailed.
Kagarlitsky is the director of Institute of Globalisation Studies and Social Movements and editor in chief of Levaya Politika quarterly in Moscow.

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.

Books

*
*
*
*
*
*
*