Suzi Weissman: I'm Suzi Weissman, and I'm here to represent the Daniel Singer Prize Foundation, which has designated Boris Kagarlitsky as its first recipient of the “Prisoner of Conscience Award.”

Daniel Singer, for those of you who don't know, lived from 1926 to 2000. He was a Polish Jew, an international journalist who lived in France and wrote in English, French, Russian and Italian. He was a committed democratic socialist and a sharp critic of Stalinism and Social Democracy. Daniel was a staunch defender of the ideas of Marx and Luxemburg, and he retained an optimism about the prospects for socialism. His last book was called Whose Millennium?

As a Marxist, Daniel was opposed to any identification of socialism with the Stalinist model, either in the Soviet Union or in its subsequent more diluted versions, as he would say. For those who lamented the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, thinking it represented the demise of socialism, Daniel would say “socialism didn't die in Eastern Europe because you can only die if you have lived.” The so-called existing socialism in these countries with top down authoritarian regimes, with all the power flowing from above had nothing to do with Marx's vision of the freely associated producers collectively gaining mastery over their work and their fate.

The Daniel Singer Foundation, created to support initiatives in the spirit of democratic socialism, will give a $10,000 award each year to a Prisoner of Conscience. Boris Kagarlitsky is our first, our inaugural recipient.

Kagarlitsky, also a writer-activist, is a lifelong democratic socialist and critic of the Soviet Union's anti-socialist, anti-democratic practices, as well as the anti-democratic transition under Yeltsin and Putin, leading to the present form in Russia of a regressive and repressive oligarchic authoritarian capitalism.

Kagarlitsky is probably the best known Russian Marxist intellectual activist, a powerful voice for socialism and Marxism in Russia and around the world. His many books and articles have been widely translated and published, and his popular broadcasts have astutely analyzed the political economic situation in Russia.

Boris Kagarlitsky is a prisoner of conscience, repressed for his public condemnation of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and his critique of Kremlin policy. As the Russian socialist movement put it, Kagarlitsky’s arrest is “an attack on the whole left movement in Russia.” Repression of dissent, however peaceful or witty is not tolerated in Putin's Russia, and many thousands have been arrested and fined for real or imagined protests against Putin and his war. The draconian and bizarre penalties for anti-war expression demonstrates the absence of any democratic rights, indeed the absence of legality in Russia. There is only the decision handed down in advance from the Putin regime in their campaign to crush domestic opposition.

As a respected social sociologist, a widely published author and popular lecturer in Europe, the US and the global South, Kagarlitsky could enjoy a respected position at any of the world's fine universities. But he has chosen to remain in Russia to fight first against a grotesque parody of Communism and then against a particularly cruel form of Capitalism.

In his writing, in his political organizing, and in his life, Boris Kagarlitsky displays a casual courage and an easy wit that incenses authoritarians. This same grace and courage inspires others to fight on.

So it is with both sorrow and hope that the Daniel Singer Foundation bestows its Prisoner of Conscience Award on Boris Kagarlitsky. In his absence, Boris Yulievich’s daughter Ksenia Kagarlitskaya will accept the Daniel Singer Prisoner of Conscience Award. We’re very fortunate that Ksenia is with us today and pleased that she continues the fight in her father's tradition.
Ksenia.

Ksenia Kagarlitskaya: Thank you so much. Hello, everyone. Thank you, everyone, for inviting me, for making this conference. Everything going on here is an invaluable help. And for me, as a member of the family, I am super grateful for everything that is going on around Boris and his case, because this way I don't feel alone. I feel the solidarity in myself, and this is a great feeling. Thank you for so much for providing this feeling. I also want to say a huge thank you to Suzi and to the Daniel Singer Foundation for the prize. For us it is a great honor.

I hope there will be more prizes for other people who are also fighting the regime, but I also hope there will be no more cases like that, no more absurd, bizarre cases. And I hope all the political prisoners will be free, and that this day will happen as soon as possible.

I will be happy to answer all the questions you have, because I think there are there are questions.

Suzi Weissman: Thank you so much. I’ll take questions, but first I'd like to ask Ksenia, can you give us a little overview of what your father's situation is right now?

Ksenia Kagarlitskaya: The situation is pretty much okay, but we are speaking about a person who is 66 years old and who is in jail . We don't know how he will pass the winter. So, if we don't speak about all this stuff, everything is okay.

We get phone calls every day. I had a call this morning, and Boris sends greetings for everyone. He knows about the conference. He knows about everything that is going on.

So my father shares his, I don't know the word, room. He shares his room with three other people. There are four of them in the cell. Now I remember this word cell. He shares it with three other people. He doesn't work because of his age, so mostly he writes, and he answers letters.

I also want to highlight the importance of letters, because for every political prisoner, they don't have any connection to the outside world except those letters.

And those letters are really, really important. And for you, not for citizens of Russia, there is the possibility to write those letters. There is a service called prison mail, where you can pay with your credit cards, with dollars or euros or any other currency, and you can write the letters. The only thing is that you need to use the Russian language, so you can use ChatGPT or Google Translate or Deepl or any translator. You translate your letters and send them directly to Boris, and he will get them and he will definitely answer them because he answers all the letters he gets. And this is his main principle, to answer all the letters. On a bad day, he gets four letters. On a good day, he gets up to 50 letters.

I have a huge hope that every political prisoner needs to receive 200 letters each day, every political prisoner. And we have, nobody knows exactly the number, but more than 1000 people who are in jail right now for their anti-war speeches. Not only anti-war, because we have many political prisoners who were arrested before the war and they are not mentioned in the media. Mostly everyone speaks about the ones who suffer because of the war, but not the ones who came to prison before the war.

Suzi Weissman: Thank you, Xenia. This is all incredibly informative. I just wanted to let people know that you can write letters using the prison mail service. There are details on the Boris website, also at the Ovd-info website, about how you can write letters. You have to have them translated into Russian, but you can do a machine translation, and I can tell you, Boris responds practically immediately. You have to pay a very small amount of money to do these letters, but we really need people to continue to write.

And I think, I don't see any questions. If anybody else has a question, please let me know immediately, because we're running up against the end of this period.

I want to thank all of you, and thank you, Ksenia, for joining us today. And I hope, like you Ksenia, that we don't have to give more Prisoners of Conscience awards to people in Putin's prisons.

Ksenia Kagarlitskaya: Thank you so much. And if you need to contact me, please ask for my contact info, you can ask the members of the international campaign, all of them have my contact information, and you can write to me directly.