By Robert Emberger
In the dark early morning hours of Oct. 4, 1993, Moscow city councilman Boris Kagarlitsky found himself surrounded by Russian tanks and riot police as the sound of gunfire echoed through the air. Opposed to President Boris Yeltsin’s eradication of the legislature, Kagarlitsky was beaten and incarcerated as artillery shells pounded the Parliament.
This October Dr. Kagarlitsky found himself in the more amicable company of RVCC faculty and students at Raritan Valley’s inaugural World Affairs Lecture.
With close to 200 students in total attendance, Kagarlitsky captivated his audience with revelations on the current state of Russian affairs and the effects of globalization throughout the world. Organized by RVCC Professor Jeff Sommers, the event kicked off an effort to bring world-renowned speakers to the college.
RVCC history professor Dr. Kevin Reilly said “Boris Kagarlitsky is the most profound critic of the Russian regime I have heard. His visit to the college was a real coup — if that word is not too Putinesque.”
A dissident in the former Soviet Union, Kagarlitsky was imprisoned from 1982-1983 for his contributions to the oppositional journal “Left Turn” at the age of 24. While in prison, Kagarlitsky authored his first book, “The Thinking Reed,” which won the Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize in 1988. He is an internationally renowned social justice activist and scholar, and is currently the Director of the Institute for Globalization Studies and a senior research fellow at the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Kagarlitsky is also a frequent contributor to ZNet, which features the work of leading intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, along with RVCC’s Jeff Sommers. Kagarlitsky has been a featured orator at many distinguished institutions including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and NYU and he began his most recent lecture circuit by speaking to the students here at RVCC.
“It is rare for students in the United States or Russia to hear such an important, insightful, and influential voice,” Reilly said. “This is the kind of thing that puts RVCC on the map.”
In terms of the current Russian government, Kagarlitsky speaks of the “deficit of democracy” that plagues social reform, explaining that the transition of the Soviet Union into the Russian federation did not create true democracy. Rather, he says, it shifted power from an overarching government to corporations run by the same oligarchs. He does concede that under President Vladimir Putin Russia has reached a level of economic stability unknown during the Yeltsin years.
Herein lies an essential question: is this model of globalization a necessary evil? As Kagarlitsky states, “that depends on whether you accept the very logic of our economic system in the first place. If you desire to live according to the same logic as much the rest of the world economy, then you have to accept this kind of non-democratic, despotic, and bureaucratic government. There are some social democratic exceptions, but far too few.”
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