Boris Kagarlitsky - Political Activities

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 Levy Povorot (Left Turn) from 1978 to 1982, and contributions to the samizdat journal Varianty (Variants) 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, 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.

Currently Kagarlitsky is the director of Institute of Globalisation Studies and Social Movements (IGSO) and editor in chief of Levaya Politika (Left Politics) quarterly in Moscow.