Moscow. Considered one of the most prominent Marxist thinkers in contemporary Russia, the author of numerous publications in the fields of sociology and political science from left-wing positions, Boris Kagarlitsky, 64, is in a prison in the city of Syktyvkar. –capital of the Republic of Komi, located in the northwest of the country near the Arctic Circle, 1,300 kilometers from the Russian capital by road–, awaiting trial for justifying “terrorism” due to a brief comment he released via the Internet in October of last year.
The also director of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements can be sentenced to up to five years in prison, according to his lawyer, Serguei Yerojov, for stating on his Telegram channel (on October 8, 2022) that “from the point of view military, the bomb attack on the Kerch bridge (which links the Crimean peninsula with the Krasnodar region) is understood: it will create problems with supplies”.
The subsidiary of the FSB (Federal Security Service, for its acronym in Russian) in the Republic of Komi considered that, with this phrase, Kagarlitsky “urged to commit terrorist attacks with the use of the Internet”, which is why he was taken away. Moscow to Syktykvar to stand trial.
The defendant himself feels proud of having been in prison “as a dissident” in the time of Leonid Brezhnev, of having been beaten and threatened with death in Boris Yeltsin’s period and of being behind bars now with Vladimir Putin at the head of the Kremlin. This is how he made it known from prison in a letter to his relatives and followers that he spread his lawyer, whom he asked to make it public.
“This is not the first time this has happened to me in my life. Even in Brezhnev’s time I knew what it is to be imprisoned. With Yeltsin, they just beat me up and threatened to kill me. And now with Putin I am detained for the second time. Those who hold power change, but unfortunately the custom of locking political opponents behind bars remains. However, the willingness of many people to sacrifice themselves for their convictions, their freedom and their social rights also remains invariable ”, he notes in the letter.
And he concludes: “Of course, we must obtain the release of all political prisoners. Sooner or later it will be so. And I don’t know why I think it will be sooner rather than later.
Kagarlitsky, who at the end of the seventies of the last century, in his early twenties, founded the circle of young socialists who, according to a report to the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union by the then president of the KGB (predecessor of the FSB), Yuri Andropov , they wanted to “build a socialism with a human face for the benefit of the workers”, in 1982 he spent thirteen months in the Lefortovo Moscow prison, after being expelled from the Moscow Institute of Theater Arts.
In 1993, he defended the Russian Parliament, which was ultimately dissolved by tank cannon fire and machine gun bursts from armored vehicles on Yeltsin’s orders, which led to him being beaten in a police station, where he was threatened with death if he continued to protest.
Kagarlitsky was first declared a “foreign agent” last year by his comments online, a label attached to anyone who has received money from another country, be it a fee for a magazine article or a scholarship or grant, which that complicates their existence with an infinity of procedures that they must comply with; then, on August 7, he was included in the list of “terrorists and extremists”; and now he is awaiting trial in the Komi Republic.
Although in 2014 he supported the creation of the so-called Donietsk and Lugansk people’s republics, believing that he saw in it the origin of a “socialist revolution” there, he was later disappointed and, paradoxically, Kagarlitsky is imprisoned just like the initiator of the uprising. against Kiev from the population of Russian origin, Igor Guirkin, known by his pseudonym “Strelkov” (Shooter).
Both, from antagonistic ideological positions, face charges for criticizing the Kremlin’s “special military operation”.
