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Russia’s Boris Kagarlitsky, from pro-war hawk to anti-war prisoner [1]
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Date: 2023-08
Leading left-wing Russian thinker Boris Kagarlitsky is facing up to seven years in prison on charges of “justifying terrorism” even though it is clear to everyone – including supporters of Vladimir Putin and his aggression in Ukraine – that he was arrested for his anti-war views.
Kagarlitsky is perhaps the most prominent Marxist thinker in the post-Soviet space, known in academic and political circles inside Russia and beyond. He was arrested on 25 July after stating in a social media post that the attack on Russia’s Crimean Bridge in October 2022, believed to be the work of Ukraine, was understandable “from a military point of view”. His case is just one of hundreds of police investigations into anti-war Russians.
His arrest has provoked a heated debate about solidarity – and whether Kagarlitsky deserves it, given his previous statements.
Starting out in the late Soviet Union as a left-wing dissident and underground Marxist, Kagarlitsky, now 64, was perhaps the only person from this community to achieve widespread recognition in Russia and the wider region following the fall of the USSR while retaining his socialist convictions. Several generations grew up on Kagarlitsky’s books and lectures, and his assessments of political events in post-Soviet countries became a guide for observers in the West. He became a symbolic figure for the Russian left.
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Kagarlitsky’s public rejection of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was therefore bound to irritate the Russian authorities. His arrest shows that even internationally famous public intellectuals, who have connections in high political circles, are no longer safe from repression.
Support for Russia’s annexation of Crimea
But Kagarlitsky’s views on the war in Ukraine have not always been the same. Following Ukraine’s Euromaidan revolution, he was an enthusiastic supporter of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the pro-Russian separatist movements in the Donbas, seeing some progressive ‘anti-imperialist’ features in those events.
As he put it in 2015: “Novorossiya [New Russia] is not a project, but a movement, a dream, a public goal.” The website he ran, Rabkor, followed suit, arguing that “the way to end the civil war in Ukraine lies through… [Kyiv’s recognition of] defeat in its war against the rebellious south-east”, meaning the so-called ‘people’s republics’ in the Donbas.
Many who grew up on his work found it difficult to read such articles – it felt as if the author had been replaced by someone completely different.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/russia-ukraine-boris-kagarlitsky-arrest-solidarity-anti-war/
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