Boris Yuliyevich Kagarlitsky

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Boris Kagarlitsky
Boris Kagarlitsky

Boris Yuliyevich Kagarlitsky (Russian: Борис Юльевич Кагарлицкий) (born 29 August 1958 in Moscow) 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 (IGSO) in Moscow.

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[edit] Political activities

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 Leviy povorot from 1978 to 1982, and contributions to the samizdat journal Varianty during the same period, led to his two year imprisonment for 'anti-Soviet' activities in 1982. After his release, he published his first book, The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State From 1917 to the Present, which won the Deutscher Memorial Prize in 1988.

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, he 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.

In recent years, Kagarlitsky has become closely associated with the Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee), and has regularly written articles on the politics and economics of contemporary Russia and the state of the country's left and trade union movements for the CPGB (PCC)'s newspaper the Weekly Worker. He is a supporter of Garry Kasparov's United Civil Front opposition to President Vladimir Putin. [1]

[edit] 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 (ISPRAN). He was awarded his Ph.D. 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.

[edit] Books

  • The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State from 1917 to the Present (1988)
  • The Dialectic of Change (1989)
  • Farewell Perestroika: A Soviet Chronicle (1990)
  • Disintegration of the Monolith (1993)
  • Square Wheels: How Russian Democracy Got Derailed (1994)
  • The Mirage of Modernization (1995)
  • Restoration in Russia (1995)
  • Globalization and Its Discontents: The Rise of Postmodern Socialisms (1996, with Roger Burbach and Orlando Nuñez)
  • New Realism, New Barbarism: Socialist Theory in the Era of Globalization (1999)
  • The Twilight of Globalization: Property, State and Capitalism (1999)
  • The Return of Radicalism: Reshaping the Left Institutions (2000)
  • Russia under Yeltsin and Putin: Neo-liberal Autocracy (2002)
  • The Politics of Empire: Globalisation in Crisis (2004, co-edited by Alan Freeman)
  • The Revolt of the Middle Class (2006)
  • Empire of the Periphery: Russia and the World System (2008)

[edit] Political commentary

He writes regularly for The Moscow Times and ZNet, and has contributed articles to Novaya Gazeta, The Progressive, Red Pepper and Green Left Weekly.

[edit] External links

[edit] Biographical

[edit] Articles

[edit] Interviews

[edit] Papers and essays