Boris Kagarlitsky is a professor of sociology at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences and an editor at Rabkor. His publications include Between Class and Discourse: Left Intellectuals in Defence of Capitalism (Routledge, 2020), Empire of the Periphery: Russia and the World System (Pluto, 2007) and Restoration in Russia: Why Capitalism Failed (Verso, 1995).
Russian political prisoner Boris Kagarlitsky writes in Jacobin from his jail cell at Zelenograd SIZO-12. He discusses the need for an alternative to the “individualist logic of modern liberalism and the totalitarian aggressiveness of the new conservatism.”
In February, judges sentenced the Russian Marxist Boris Kagarlitsky to five years in prison under trumped-up charges of “justifying terrorism.” He wrote to Jacobin from his cell about the conditions that he and thousands of other Russian prisoners face.
The Russian public response to the invasion of Ukraine has been muted with antiwar protests quickly repressed. But the slow progress of the war is feeding a series of other crises, leaving Vladimir Putin’s inner circle increasingly isolated.