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In the ecological field: to create effective means for social organizations and movements to fight for the conservation of the environment, as well as historical and cultural monuments.

In the field of international relations: to show support and solidarity to revolutionary, liberation and democratic movements in the capitalist world and in developing countries.

Notes<p>4</p><p>The Soviet New Left: Alexander Cockburn Interviews Boris Kagarlitsky<a l:href="#c_1021">1</a></p>

More socialism, and therefore more democracy!

— Len Karpinsky, Moscow News, 1 March 1987

In Moscow this week, under conditions of official sanction that have remained open to doubt until the very moment the participants are brought to order, a momentous gathering is taking place: the first conference of the Federation of Socialist Clubs, which saw its public birth at the end of last summer.

Back then, between 20 and 23 August in a hall provided by officials of the Moscow branch of the Communist Party, a conference of independent left-wing reformers was held, the first such meeting to be sanctioned in more than fifty years. It brought together about 600 representatives of fifty ecological, cultural and grassroots socialist groups. The proceedings were tumultuous and at the end various associations emerged, among them the Federation of Socialist Clubs, the core bodies being the Club for Social Initiatives (CSI); Obshchina, a student group; and a youth group called the Forest Folk. Also under the Federation’s umbrella came such clusters as the Young Communard Internationalists, the Che Guevara Brigade and Red Sails.

Among the leading activists of the Federation is a twenty-nine-year-old sociologist called Boris Kagarlitsky. He was jailed in 1982 for advancing Euro-communist notions and released thirteen months later under Andropov. His father is an expert on Kipling and Wells, and Boris speaks English fluently.

I first talked to Kagarlitsky in Moscow in th fraught days after Mikhail Gorbachev’s speech to the Central Committee in November. People were prowling through Gorbachev’s speech, trying to gauge the shifts and eddies in the political winds. The affair of Boris Yeltsin, the Moscow party leader, was on every lip. Would he fall, and if so what would that presage?

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