It takes enormous courage and principle to publicly oppose war by one’s own country. Think of the tiny group of Marxist internationalists who, en route to Zimmerwald in 1915 to denounce the imperialist war, joked they could be squeezed into four carriages. Dr Boris Kagarlitsky, the renowned, left-wing, Russian sociologist and political scientist, a vocal opponent of President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine since it was unleashed in February 2022, has now paid the price for doing so, twice: On 26 July 2023, Kagarlitsky was detained by the Russian federal security service, the FSB, charged with the alleged crime of ‘justifying terrorism’ based on an innocuous, jocular observation that he had made online back in October 2022, soon after the first Crimean Kerch Bridge explosion, that it could be understood ‘from a military perspective’; an absurd charge he vehemently denied. He was immediately transported from his hometown of Moscow to the remote northern city of Syktyvkar where he was detained awaiting trial and the prospect of up to seven years’ jail. In fact, on 12 December 2023, he was found guilty as charged by a military court, but, instead of jail, he was fined 609,000 roubles (6,337 Euro) and then released. Unfortunately, that was not the end of the now 65-year old’s tribulations. The prosecution appealed the fine as ‘unjust due to its excessive leniency,’ alleging that Kagarlitsky was bankrupt and that he had failed to cooperate with the court. This was a fabrication: While still insisting on his innocence, Kagarlitsky had paid the fine and cooperated with all the court’s requirements.[1] Nevertheless, on 13 February 2024, a military appeal court sentenced him to five years in a penal colony and banned him from administering any website for two years once his sentence is served. Immediately arrested, he has reportedly been detained in the Tver region neighbouring Moscow, although his precise whereabouts are undisclosed, standard Russian penal practice pending his appeal against the latest judgement which is scheduled for 5 June 2024.
Kagarlitsky has long known that he was a marked man. Already, in May 2022, he had been officially declared a ‘foreign agent’ under a notoriously repressive law adopted in July 2012, and since widened to encompass individual Russian citizens. Thousands of Russian citizens have been detained for simply calling Putin’s so-called ‘special military operation’ a ‘war’, an ‘invasion’ or even for silently protesting against it. Thousands of others have fled to avoid prosecution. Kagarlitsky, to his enormous credit, has stood his ground, defiantly remaining in Moscow. Even after his initial release, he refused to leave Russia: ‘If you are involved in politics then you risk imprisonment,’ he insisted to his daughter Kseniya Kagarlitskaya. ‘It is an occupational hazard you must take if you are seriously engaged.’[2] He has a long history of forthrightly ‘speaking truth to power’, Soviet and post-Soviet.
A Marxist dissident
It should not be forgotten that Kagarlitsky was a resolute Marxist dissident well before the Soviet Union unravelled and when other liberal dissidents were repudiating the entire Soviet experience and cravenly embracing Western capitalism under the banner of ‘human rights.’ In 1977, while a student at GITS (The State Institute of Theatrical Art), he joined a tiny group called the Young Socialists based in the Historical Faculty of the prestigious Moscow State University. They published the underground journals Levy Povorot (Left Turn), which Kagarlitsky edited, and then Sotsializm i budushchee (Socialism and the Future), until the KGB shut down the Young Socialists in 1982 and jailed Kagarlitsky for ‘anti-Soviet’ activities. In the meantime, Kagarlitsky had been expelled from GITS. The Young Socialists engaged with largely forbidden Marxist thinkers, past and present, Soviet, East-European and Western, from Leon Trotsky and Rudolf Bahro to Immanuel Wallerstein and his ‘world-systems’ theory; radical thought that has clearly informed Kagarlitsky until the present day.[3]
Kagarlitsky’s immersion in Left theoretical and political thought is reflected in his prolific, influential scholarship and his sustained political activism, Soviet and post-Soviet. Inter alia, he was elected a Moscow City Soviet councillor (1992-93) and was co-founder in October 1992 of the Party of Labour (Russia). Exactly one year later, he was briefly arrested and harshly beaten for opposing President Boris Yeltsin’s literal destruction of the Supreme Soviet on his path to installing an autocratic presidency, which Vladimir Putin would inherit. In this daunting environment, Kagarlitsky went on to establish and edit the online journal Rabkor (Worker Correspondent) in 2008, to found the Institute for Globalization Studies and Social Movements, and to become a professor at the Moscow Higher School for Social and Economic Sciences. A staunch critic of Putin’s ‘neo-liberal autocracy’ since its installation, in 2021 he was detained for 10 days for supporting protests against State Duma electoral fraud.[4] Five years jail in a penal colony is far more chilling, clearly a warning to other anti-war voices, prominent or otherwise.
Volte face?
From day one of Russia’s invasion, Kagarlitsky, in the name of Rabkor, unequivocally ‘condemned’ Putin’s ‘armed aggression.’ He was a joint signatory to the ‘Resolution of the Anti-War Round Table of the Left Forces’ which demanded that ‘the Russian leadership immediately cease its aggression against our brothers and sisters of the Ukrainian people.’ The Resolution did so on the grounds of mass deaths and the ‘economic’ degradation of workers’ conditions ‘on both sides.’ It called for mass ‘anti-war agitation’ against an ‘invasion … only intended to satisfy the odious ambitions of a narrow circle of Russian foreign policy leaders’ and ‘to divert attention from the Russian government’s domestic policy failures.’[5]
Was Kagarlitsky’s denunciation of Putin’s invasion a volte face, having previously supported Russian military action against Ukraine, as some on the Left have suggested? After all, he tacitly acquiesced in Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 after the US-supported Euromaidan uprising ousted the Russian-leaning President Yanukovych in March 2014 and vehemently supported the so-called People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk established in the Donbass, May 2014. His pro-People’s Republics stance, fiercely criticised by some other leftists,[6] reveals a great deal about his Weltanschauung. It has not always been consistent. At that time, he manifested a kind of left-wing, patriotic populism. But close scrutiny of his thinking on the 2014 Donbass autonomy movements shows he was not simply pro-Russian, let alone a ‘war hawk’ or ‘war monger.’[7]
Since the 1990s, Kagarlitsky has seriously embraced ‘world-systems’ theory. In this perspective, post-Soviet Russia is a semi-peripheral capitalist state seeking to ensconce itself in the world capitalist system.[8] But, in the 21st century, whatever Moscow’s aspirations, the core neoliberal capitalist states, the USA in particular, adopted an increasingly hostile stance towards Russia, and other developing peripheral states such as China, especially after the 2008 financial crisis. In his ‘world-systems’ framework, as Ukrainian socialist Andriy Movchan incisively observes, ‘Russia became (even unwittingly) a kind of vanguard of anti-imperialist struggle, supposedly helping the Global South to free itself from the hegemony of the West.’[9]
It is disconcerting therefore to read the 24 March 2014 editorial Kagarlitsky wrote in Rabkor that, less than a week earlier, ‘Crimea annexed Russia’, when Putin signed the annexation into law, not vice versa! Essentially, he reduced Russia’s annexation to the machinations of local Crimean elites to get access to Moscow financial resources, with no mention of the threat of NATO or its implications for Russia’s Sebastopol naval base in the wake of Yanukovych’s ousting. ‘No [Russian] imperial ambitions’ were at stake, and he confidently asserts, there ‘will not be and cannot be’ war. Hence too no need for ‘anti-imperialist “defeatism”,’ which, ironically, he has been advocating since Russia’s 2022 invasion in the belief that defeat will accelerate ‘revolution’ in the ‘old’ Russian ‘tradition.’[10] Far from criticising Putin’s uncharacteristically provocative 2014 annexation, it was Russian domestic opposition, ‘including a significant number of people on the Left’, who were in Kagarlitsky’s sights, in effect voicing the interests of the West, wishing ‘ill to their own country and its people.’[11]
Dalliance with Russian nationalism
Nevertheless, at that time, Kagarlitsky was voicing clear concerns about the challenge of NATO and the EU, Western ‘sponsored regime change’ in Kyiv during the Maidan insurrection, and the serious prospect of war, even ‘nuclear World War.’ The emergent crisis could only be understood, he rightly insisted, in the context of the ‘volatile political economy of imperialism in an age of increasing multipolarity’ and the ‘political economy of the region.’ More specifically, he and his co-thinkers, blamed NATO and EU expansion, and ‘the slide of the West into a new belligerent militarism … exacerbated’ by ‘the 2008 financial crisis,’ for triggering the crisis in Ukraine-Russian relations.[12] In this fraught context, Kagarlitsky shared the view that, while post-Soviet Russia was capitalist, it was not imperialist as even many on the Left have argued, whatever the aspirations of its infant capitalist class. Russia has nothing like the characteristics of the established imperialist powers with their overwhelming economic and military predominance and reach: ‘While Russian capitalists may well be inclined to use their state in order to project their power outwards, the ability of the Russian state to perform this role is constrained.’[13] In keeping with his ‘world-systems’ approach, Kagarlitsky endorsed the perspective that post-Soviet Russia was a ‘contender’ state along with the other BRIC countries, most notably the Peoples Republic of China, challenging the waning predominance of the Western powers. From this perspective, one might expect that he would simply identify with the Russian state against Ukraine and its Western backers. But it was not as simple as this.
With the post-Maidan outbreak of civil war in Ukraine, Kagarlitsky clearly had no confidence in the ability or willingness of the neoliberal Russian oligarchic state to resolve the looming Ukraine-Russian confrontation. In light of his thinly disguised left-patriotic populism, he looked to the emergence of the Peoples Republics in the Donbass as a genuinely ‘anti-bourgeois, people’s revolution’ driving a resurgent ‘Novorossiya [New Russia]’, which he viewed as a ‘a movement, a dream, a public goal’.[14] This seems naïve solidarity with regional, ethnic-Russian autonomy movements, rightly fearful of post-Maidan, Ukrainian violent ethno-nationalism, but which only took republican form with the support of local elites and half-hearted Russian support.[15] For Kagarlitsky, the ‘dream’ was ‘betrayed’ by a ‘preventative counter-revolution’ (terms he took from Leon Trotsky and Herbert Marcuse respectively) conducted by their supposed ally the ‘bourgeois, oligarchic Russian state’. Moscow sought to constrain revolutionary ‘Novorossiya’ as a ‘bargaining chip’ in their negotiations with a hostile West and their Kiev counterparts, in the first instance the Minsk Agreements.[16] In depicting the so-called Peoples’ Republics as ‘revolutionary movements’, he evidently seized on their potential to fuel a ‘progressive, socially oriented coalition going beyond defending Russkiy Mir (Russian world)’ with the promise of ‘social transformation, democratization and cultural equality.’ It was a promise he argued that was embodied in the July 2014 ‘Yalta Declaration’ of a gathering in newly annexed Crimea, that rightly decried Kyiv’s ‘brutal military assault’ on southeast Ukraine, an ‘end to NATO, EU, US military support for the Kiev government’, and ‘direct’ negotiations between Kiev and the ‘Donetsk and Lugansk republics.’[17] Whatever the progressive potential of the Peoples’ Republics, it is disturbing to see that the Marxist Kagarlitsky embraced ‘Novorossiya’, a reactionary, ethno-nationalist conception dating to the era of Catherine the Great invoked by Putin as justification for his invasion of Ukraine.[18] In doing so, he temporarily courted Russian nationalists, even extreme-right ones, on both sides of the Russian-Ukraine border;[19] a risky manoeuvre that suggests he was desperately seeking political progress in a bleak post-Soviet landscape.
Draconian state
Nevertheless, Kagarlitsky had no illusions in Russian oligarchic capitalism or its increasingly draconian state. It is not easy to pinpoint when and why Kagarlitsky returned to his more left-dissident stance. Evidently, however, after witnessing Moscow’s ‘betrayal’ of the Peoples’ Republics in 2014-2015, its deeply unpopular pension reforms in September 2018, and its crackdown on protests against fraud during the September 2021 State Duma elections, detaining Communist Party opposition candidates and Kagarlitsky himself for writing in their support, his critique had hardened. The Kremlin recognised this: in 2018 his ‘Institute of Globalization and Social Movements’ was placed on the register of ‘foreign agents’, a prelude to his own inclusion in May 2022.
Putin’s invasion was a decisive turning point for Kagarlitsky, as he himself admitted in March 2023:
For many years I criticized Western policies towards Ukraine and the media myths about it. We are now in a totally new situation, however, not only in Ukraine but also in Russia where the regime is undergoing a catastrophic evolution from what used to be moderate authoritarian rule to a totalitarian regime. Confusing the analysis of Ukrainian politics with the analysis of this war would be a tremendous mistake.[20]
Kagarlitsky’s latter assertion is correct, but ‘confusion’ is not the same as connecting these phenomena. ‘Ukraine is now a victim of aggression’, he rightly asserted, but whereas, in 2014, he couched the conflict as geopolitical, primarily Russia versus the West, now ‘most of the motives for the war in 2022 were purely domestic. It was an attempt to restore the shattered support for the regime in the face of mounting social and economic crisis… The ruling elite was desperately trying to find a magic solution to reconsolidate the society… A “short victorious war”,’ invoking Russian Minister of the Interior von Plehve on the eve of the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War, ‘seemed to be a way to solve all the problems at once.’[21]
All of this diminished the heightened West-Ukraine-Russia tensions since 2014 that Kagarlitsky himself had documented, and which escalated in the following seven years. Having turned his analysis on its head, from international to domestic determinants of war, Russia was no longer a bulwark of a ‘contender’ block of states confronting a US predatory state but itself a ‘radical nationalist’, state, ‘intent on eliminating the Ukrainian nation not only politically but also physically.’ There is no doubt that Putin has called in question Ukrainian statehood independent of Russia, but no evidence he is prosecuting a genocidal war as Kagarlitsky implied.[22] In these circumstances, he concluded, the inevitable defeat of Russia would be a victory, opening ‘the door to revolutionary change,’ as in 1905 and 1917. In the absence of a rising, militant working class, this was not only ahistorical, wishful thinking; a defeat for Russia, if not state destruction as in Iraq, is a key, explicit objective of the USA and its NATO allies. It would be a victory for them, at Ukraine’s bloody expense, clearing the way for their ultimate goal: confronting China. Furthermore, in advancing such a proposition, Kagarlitsky was marginalising the possibilities of a diplomatic solution, although he did call ‘for a peace settlement, but only on the condition of the retreat of all Putin’s forces from Ukrainian territory occupied after 24 February 2022.’[23] In principle, no progressive could disagree with that proposal, but, clearly, a neutral, non-NATO Ukraine and guarantees for ethnic Russians would also have to be part of any lasting diplomatic settlement.
Notwithstanding the seeming inconsistencies of Kagarlitsky’s initial explanation for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it should be noted that he is not an intellectual who stands still, even in jail. This is apparent in his forthcoming book, The Long Retreat: Strategies to Reverse the Decline of the Left.[24] While not for a moment letting Putin’s ‘irrational and criminal’ aggression off the hook, neither does Kagarlitsky crudely reduce the war to the autocrat’s ‘reckless ambitions.’ Rather, drawing on the precedent of the ‘Great’ inter-imperialist 1914-1918 war, he drills down into the crisis engulfing the neoliberal, capitalist world-system in the 21st century, which has enveloped neoliberal, post-Soviet Russia itself, as the driving force of this war.[25] Inviting as his world-systems approach is, it still seems to downplay the agency of the imperialist core, above all the burgeoning, geopolitical bellicosity of the United States and its NATO arsenal, which does not even get a mention.
Eye of the storm
Whatever the shifts or shortcomings of Kagarlitsky’s perspectives on Russia, Ukraine and NATO, he is in the eye of the storm. The pressures and threats are enormous. Two days after Kagarlitsky was sentenced, arch-oppositionist politician Alexey Navalny died mysteriously in an Arctic prison. Shielded by distance, the Western Left should be the last to throw stones. On the contrary, like the Ukrainian and Russian socialists, now more than ever, it is crucial to support Kagarlitsky and Russian political prisoners more broadly. In his first letter from prison, published on 16 August 2023, Kagarlitsky reflected on his fourth imprisonment in 40 years: ‘The powers that be may have changed’, he wrote, but not their ‘tradition of putting their political opponents behind bars. But equally unchanged,’ he asserted, ‘is the willingness of so many people to make sacrifices for the sake of their convictions, for freedom and social rights.’ Thanking those who had called for his release, he called for the freedom of ‘all political prisoners.’ Despite his circumstances, ‘historical experience’ gave him reason for optimism, citing Shakespeare’s Macbeth:
However dark the night,
It will give way to day.[26]
Confirmation of Kagarlitsky’s tenacious optimism is that, even from his prison cell, he continues to blog. Notable among them, a column on the centenary of Lenin’s death, extolling the ‘revolutionary theorist who became a politician’ … ‘in the darkest hour just before the dawn.’ [27]
This is an updated version of an article first published as ‘Boris Kagarlitzki – im Auge des Orkans,’ in Marxistische Blätter, 5/6_2023, pp. 141-46. Translated from the English by Prof. Dr Joachim Hösler.
[1] ‘Petition: Free Boris Kagarlitsky and all other Russian anti-war political prisoners!’, 15 March 2024.
[2] ‘“On byl nepreklonen”. Pochemu sotsiolog Boris Kagarlitskii ne uexal iz Rossii.’, 19 fevraliya 2024, https://www.severreal.org/a/on-byl-nepreklonen-pochemu-sotsiolog-boris-kagarlitskiy-ne-uehal-iz-rossii/32824848.html
[3] Ilya Budraitskis, Dissidents Among Dissidents. Ideology, Politics and the Left in Post-Soviet Russia, Preface by Tony Wood, translated by Giulano Vivaldi (Verso, London, 2022), pp. 162-63.
[4] ‘Solidarity needed for Russian anti-war socialist Boris Kagarlitsky,’ 31 July 2023, https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/solidarity-needed-for-russian-anti-war-socialist-boris-kagarlitsky; see Kagarlitsky, Russia Under Yeltsin And Putin: Neo-Liberal Autocracy (Pluto Press, 2002).
[5] KPRF, ‘Resolution of the Anti-War Round Table of the Left Forces’, Moscow, February 24, 2022, https://newpol.org/resolution-of-the-anti-war-round-table-of-the-left-forces/
[6] Volodymyr Zadyraka, ‘Kagarlitsky, the War and Political Corruption, Socialist Resistance’, 6 May 2015, https://socialistresistance.org/kagarlitsky-the-war-and-political-corruption/7426; Simon Pirani, ‘Stop calling warmongers “anti-war activists.” An open letter to the Stop the War coalition,’ https://piraniarchive.wordpress.com/investigations-campaigns-and-other-stuff/stop-calling-warmongers-anti-war-activists/
[7] Andriy Movchan, ‘I’m a Ukrainian leftist. This is why I support Boris Kagarlitsky. The left-wing Russian theorist, who has gone from pro-war hawk to anti-war political prisoner, deserves solidarity,’ Open Democracy, 1 August 2023, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/russia-ukraine-boris-kagarlitsky-arrest-solidarity-anti-war/
[8] Boris Kagarlitsky, Empire of the Periphery: Russia and the World System, translated by Renfrey Clarke (Pluto Press, 2008). See, Peter Imbusch, ‘Das moderne Weltsystem’. Eine Kritik der Weltsystemtheorie Immanuel Wallersteins (Verlag Arbeit und Gesellschaft, 1990).
[9] Movchan, ‘I’m a Ukrainian leftist.’
[10] Boris Kagarlitsky, ‘Nationwide Protest of Putin’s War, and Exodus From Putin’s Russia,’ The Nation, October 21, 2022, https://www.thenation.com/article/world/russia-putin-ukraine-war-peace/
[11] ‘Boris Kagarlitsky: Crimea annexes Russia’, Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal, https://links.org.au/boris-kagarlitsky-crimea-annexes-russia
[12] Radhika Desai, Alan Freeman & Boris Kagarlitsky, ‘The Conflict in Ukraine and Contemporary Imperialism,’ International Critical Thought, 2016, 6 (4), 489-512; here: 489-90, 500, 501. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2016.1242338
[13] ‘The Conflict in Ukraine and Contemporary Imperialism,’ 505.
[14] Boris Kagarlitsky, ‘Levaya politika. Rossiya, Ukraina, Novorossiya’, https://knigogid.ru/books/1335332-levaya-politika-rossiya-ukraina-novorossiya/toread/page-4; see also, Movchan, ‘I’m a Ukrainian leftist.’
[15] Nicolai N. Petro, The Tragedy of Ukraine. What Classical Greek Tragedy Can Teach Us About Conflict Resolution (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2023), 208-220; Andrew Wilson, ‘The Donbas in 2014: Explaining Civil Conflict Perhaps, but not Civil War,’ Europe-Asia Studies (2016), 68:4, 631-652.
[16] Boris Kagarlitsky, ‘Levaya politika. Rossiya, Ukraina, Novorossiya’, https://knigogid.ru/books/1335332-levaya-politika-rossiya-ukraina-novorossiya/toread/page-4; see also, Movchan, ‘I’m a Ukrainian leftist.’
[17] ‘The Conflict in Ukraine and Contemporary Imperialism,’ 491; ‘Yalta Declaration of the Assembly of Citizens of Ukraine’, Appendix, International Critical Thought, 2016, 6 (4), 511-12.
[18] Roger D. Markwick, ‘“Orthodoxy, Autocracy, And Nationality”: Putin’s Remaking of Imperial Russia, Arena Quarterly No. 10, June 2022, https://arena.org.au/orthodoxy-autocracy-and-nationality-putins-remaking-imperial-russia/
[19] See, for example, Pirani, ‘Stop calling warmongers “anti-war activists.”’
[20] Boris Kagarlitsky, ‘The tragedy of war.’ Clear-eyed veteran Russian leftist dissident offers a courageous and politically indispensable take on the Russia-Ukraine war, Canadian Dimension, March 21, 2023,
https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/the-tragedy-of-war
[21] Kagarlitsky, ‘The tragedy of war.’
[22] See: David Mandel and Sam Gindin,‘The tragedy of the war in Ukraine: a reply to Kagarlitsky,’ Canadian Dimension, March 21, 2023, https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/the-tragedy-of-the-war-in-ukraine-a-reply-to-kagarlitsky; see also Markwick, ‘“Orthodoxy, Autocracy, And Nationality.
[23] Kagarlitsky, ‘The tragedy of war.’
[24] https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745350288/the-long-retreat/
[25] ‘War, fascism and revolution: Boris Kagarlitsky on why Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine’, in The Long Retreat, forthcoming, https://links.org.au/war-fascism-and-revolution-boris-kagarlitsky-why-putins-russia-invaded-ukraine#footnoteref24_wwxKvvyJkNnq
[26] ‘Pis’mo ot B. Yu. Kagarlitskogo svoim blizkim i storonnikam!’, RABKOR internet-zhurnal, 2023 Avgust 16, https://rabkor.ru/
[27] ‘Boris Kagarlitsky: Again on Lenin,’ 26 April 2024, https://links.org.au/boris-kagarlitsky-again-lenin