(Abridged from original article in Green Left by Fred Fuentes)
The lawyer for jailed anti-war sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky has been notified by the Judicial Chamber on Cases of the Military of Russia’s Supreme Court that his client’s final appeal against a five-year jail term will be heard on June 5.
The news comes as support for Kagarlitsky grows. In Australia, leading politicians, including Greens’ Foreign Affairs spokesperson Senator Jordon Steele-John and Gunnai Gunditjmara and Djab Wurrung independent Senator Lidia Thorpe, have added their names to a global petition demanding his release.
The campaign to free Kagarlitsky was also boosted after his case was recently profiled by free speech organisation PEN America, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the Washington Post.
Senators Steele-John and Thorpe are just the latest Australian politicians to add their names, joining Australian Greens Leader in the Senate Larissa Waters, Greens federal MPs Max Chandler-Mather and Stephen Bates, NSW Greens state MP Jenny Leong, and Socialist Alliance councillors Sue Bolton (Merri-bek) and Sarah Hathway (Geelong).
Others are also speaking out for Kagarlitsky.
Washington Post Moscow bureau chief Robyn Dixon drew attention to Kagarlitsky’s case in a May 6 article, writing: “Putin’s push to remake Russia is marked by the persecution of thousands of those he calls ‘scum and traitors’ — enemies of the state.
“More than 116,000 Russians were tried under repressive criminal or administrative articles during Putin’s most recent term, the highest since Stalinist times, according to a study by Proekt, an investigative Russian news outlet.”
“Among them is Boris Kagarlitsky, a leftist sociologist who was jailed in 1982 as a Soviet dissident in his early 20s.
“Now 65, Kagarlitsky was arrested again in July by the Federal Security Service for promoting ‘terrorism,’ handcuffed and forced into an SUV by armed guards in black balaclavas, then driven 17 hours to Syktyvkar in northern Russia, where he faced court…
“He was fined and freed in December, then jailed again in February, after the prosecutor appealed. His days operating a YouTube channel out of a studio in a dim Moscow basement are finished.
“In an interview over lunch before he was sent back to prison, The Post asked why he did not leave Russia. He shrugged and smiled. Jail, he said, was “a professional hazard.”
PEN America also shone a spotlight on Kagarlitsky’s case in its Freedom to Write Index 2023. Noting that “Russia’s crackdown on free expression intensified in 2023, as part of broader efforts to stifle opposition to its war in Ukraine”, the report explains that Kagarlitsky was one of 16 writers jailed during 2023, “11 of whom were targeted for anti-war expression”.
HRW Associate Director of Europe and Central Asia Division Tanya Lokshina also commented on Kagarlitsky’s case in a May 4 article for The Moscow Times, noting that the “well-known opponent of Russia’s war in Ukraine” had been handed “a draconian sentence”.
Given “the Kremlin’s zero-tolerance war on critics and free expression, it is hard to be optimistic” regarding the cases of anti-war prisoners, Lokshina wrote.
“But this should not be about optimism. What matters is that the Kremlin has an obligation to free [anti-war prisoners], who have done nothing wrong, and to stop retaliating against its critics.
“It is everyone’s moral calling to show solidarity with them.”
The Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign calls on all signatories of this petition to redouble their efforts among friends, family, workmates and social networks: let's boost he number of signatures to our petition in the run-up to Boris Kagarlitsky's June 5 appeal!