INTRODUCTION

I am Fiona Dove, Director of the Transnational Institute. It is my privilege to moderate this last session of this conference dedicated to Boris Kagarlitsky. In this session, we will be discussing Repression and the Threat to Intellectual Freedom, Russia and Beyond. The session is being recorded and will be live-streamed by Rabkor. One of our speakers will speak in Russian, so please use the translation facility on the panel at the bottom of your screen or turn on English captions. Please mute yourself unless you have been given the floor to speak.

At the end of this session, the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign will launch the Kagarlitsky Network for Intellectual Freedom! If you are unable to stay for that, and would like to be part of the network, please leave your email in the chat so we can get in touch with you.

I first met Boris some 35 years ago in Johannesburg when he came to speak at a trade union event there. He must have made an impression because in the late 1990s, I nominated him to become a Fellow of the Transnational Institute. He has remained a member of our fellowship since. I asked Boris quite some years back whether he was not concerned about his own safety, and I asked him that again soon after the invasion of Ukraine. On both occasions, he said no. I think this was because he could not imagine that he would lose his freedom for a thought crime, for an analysis or an opinion. When he was first arrested, we worked hard behind the scenes to get him released, and were overjoyed to get to meet him online when he was briefly free – rendering a great analysis of the state of Russian politics sprinkled with many a joke, as only Boris can make them. And then 2 months later, his sentence was extended to 5 years in a penal colony. The very least we could do was to ensure that his book was published and are grateful to Pluto Press that they did so against the odds.

While we have focused today on Boris as our friend and comrade, in Russia there are many others – not as known internationally – whose liberty has been removed for expressing dissent with the regime. We see a similar pattern in other countries too. I think of Arundhati Roy being prosecuted by the Indian government for expressing opinions about Kashmir, and I think about how expressions of support for Palestinians or criticism of Israel for its genocidal actions have been censored and suppressed and worse.

Freedom of thought and freedom of expression have been enshrined as basic human rights to be protected by all UN member states since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed by the General Assembly in 1948. I agree with Jayati Ghosh, who said in an earlier session the left has to defend universal human rights, basic liberties. They are the lowest common denominator for us all. And this liberty above all -- as when we lose the right to freely express our opinions, to dissent, to speak truth to power -- we enter the dark tunnel of totalitarianism. This is what we will be talking about in this session.

We have a great line-up of speakers. Patrick Bond, who is distinguished Professor in the Sociology Department of the University of Johannesburg, where he directs the Centre for Social Change. Trevor Ngwane, a socialist and anti-apartheid activist, author and also a teacher at the University of Johannesburg. Both old comrades of mine from South Africa. And we are specially privileged to have Anna Oschkina and Pavel Kudyukin as part of our panel. They both still live in Russia and are obviously at risk of repression themselves. Anna is a sociologist, working with Rabkor and formerly as deputy director to Boris at the now dissolved Institute for Global Research and Social Movements. Pavel is co-chair of the University Solidarity Trade Union, a member of the Council of the Confederation of Labour of Russia, and he served as Deputy Minister of Labour from 1991 to 1993. I will also give the floor very briefly to Dmitri Glinski, an old friend of Boris’, based in the USA for many years where he works with the Russian diaspora on questions of civil and human rights.

I will now give the floor to our panel, in this order: Pavel, Patrick, Anna and Trevor. You will each have 20 minutes to speak, and then I will give Dmitri the floor for 2 minutes, and then I will open it up to questions and comments from all you.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Many thanks to our speakers and to all of you for your insightful and inspiring thoughts.

We are all acutely conscious that this is a time for solidarity with Boris, all Russian anti-war political prisoners, and people everywhere who are repressed for expressing their views.

In this spirit, and in our last few minutes, it is my pleasure now to formally launch the Kagarlitsky Network for Intellectual Freedom.

It will seek to be an alliance of educators, researchers and others committed to defending the fundamental values of freedom of thought and investigation. Its initial focus will be the growing threat to intellectual freedom in the Russian Federation and those territories it occupies, exemplified by the incarceration of figures such as sociologist, Boris Kagarlitsky; mathematician Azat Miftakhov and other educators and researchers who have been labelled “foreign agents”, jailed or punished in other ways for daring to think differently. The network will also strive to strengthen solidarity with those fighting for the fundamental right to intellectual freedom in all countries where this comes under threat.

Please also sign the petition on freeboris.info calling for Boris’ release, if you haven’t already. And please donate via the same site, and encourage others you know to do so too, so we can continue supporting Boris and other Russian anti-war political prisoners. We shall soon publicise the campaigns for other anti-war political prisoners on the site, with links to support provided.

And do buy Boris’ books, that is also a way to contribute financially as Boris can earn royalties on sales! You can find it on the Pluto Press site.

I would like to say heartfelt thank you to our hosts – Pluto Press, the Daniel Singer Millenium Prize Foundation and the Centre for Social Change at the University of Johannesburg; all 23 of the sponsoring organisations – which reflect a broad spectrum of publishers of left materials; our techies in the background making sure everything went smoothly today, and Rabkor for the livestream. And last, but certainly not least, everyone in the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign for all the work in bringing us together today, and putting together this really stimulating conference. Special thanks are due to Dick Nichols, who coordinated everything with such incredible commitment and diligence!

And thank you to all of you for being here.