Freedom for Boris Kagarlitsky!

Juli 29, 2023

League for the Fifth International Sat, 29. July 2023

On 25 July, Russian Marxist, sociologist and left critic of the Putin regime Boris Kagarlitsky was arrested and detained by the Russian secret service FSB. The court in Syktyvkar ordered pre-trial detention until 24 September. According to reports from the leftist internet portal Rabkor (Workers‘ Correspondence) he is accused of justifying terrorism, and propaganda for it, for which he faces up to five years in prison.

The charge is far-fetched but it throws a harsh light on the methods of the Russian regime, which are reminiscent of the fabrications of Tsarism and Stalinism. The pretext for his arrest is a Telegram post Kagarlitsky published on 8 October 2022 after the attack on the Crimean bridge. In it, he describes the bridge as a strategic and symbolic object meant to manifest the greatness and power of the Putin regime; a prestige project to show the Russian state’s ability to achieve „great things“ despite its ineffectiveness, corruption and looting of masses.

The attack on one of the best-guarded buildings in the world was therefore, according to Kagarlitsky, also a blow that revealed the weaknesses and vulnerability of Russian despotism.

That was enough of a pretext for arrest and indictment. It is no coincidence that one of the few remaining open critics of the Putin regime and its reactionary imperialist war of aggression in the country has now been arrested. Since the Wagner coup, the state apparatus has intensified its persecution of oppositionists of all stripes, including right-wing, monarchist, but also left-wing forces.

This is undoubtedly a political act designed not only to silence Boris Kagarlitsky, but to further intimidate the entire left and socialist opposition. Kagarlitsky himself is not only a Marxist sociologist and analyst, but was also one of the few known left oppositionists who, from the beginning, clearly opposed the Russian attack on Ukraine, calling the „special military operation“ what it was, war. From the beginning, he made particularly strong references to the internal contradictions of Russian capitalism that led to the war. In doing so, he paid too little attention, in our opinion, to other causes of war, especially the struggle for the re-division of the world between old and new great powers, which manifested itself precisely in Ukraine. But this was and is undoubtedly beside the point for Putin and his regime. For him, all opponents of the war are traitors to the fatherland.

Unlike many more liberal-minded Russian leftists, in 2014 Kagarlitsky sharply criticised the pro-Western reactionary regime in Kiev that emerged from the Maidan, and was based on right-wing and fascist forces. He rightly showed solidarity with the trade unionists murdered in Odessa and showed solidarity with the resistance in Donetsk and Luhansk. However, this did not blind him to Russia’s reactionary imperialist attack, which he strongly condemned from the beginning.

It was precisely this attitude that made him a target of the Putin regime – and long before the war. In 2018, the Institute for Globalisation and Social Movements, which he heads, was classified as a foreign agency, and in April 2022, he personally was also categorised as a „foreign agent“ by the Russian state, drastically restricting his work.

Even though Kagarlitsky, after initial sympathies for Trotskyism, moved away from revolutionary Marxism in the 1980s and 1990s and rejected the Marxist theory of the state and revolution, especially the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat, he always remained an analyst and militant worth reading and thinking about. He was already active in opposition under Stalinism, which led to arrests and imprisonment even under Brezhnev. He suffered a similar fate during the Yeltsin era. In 2021, he served 10 days in prison for protesting against the Duma elections. Obviously, he did not make peace with the Putin regime either.

The arrest and indictment of Boris Kagarlitsky has led to a broad international solidarity, which all left, communist, socialist and all organisations of the workers‘ movement should join. But it is not only Boris, the whole Russian anti-war movement and especially all left forces opposing Putin’s dictatorship, terror and repression at home and the war against Ukraine, need our support!