The Thinking Reed

Part One of this book, ‘The Thinking Reed’, was completed in 1982 and subsequently circulated in samizdat It is published here for the first time. Part Two includes two articles written by Boris Kagarlitsky in 1987, and an interview with him by Alexander Cockburn.

We would like to thank the editors of New Left Review for permission to publish ‘The Intellectuals and the Changes’, which originally appeared in NLR 164, July-August 1987. We also wish to thank the editor of the Times Literary Supplement for permission to reprint the article by Boris Kagarlitsky which appeared in the TLS of 25–31 December 1987. Our thanks to Labour Focus and The Guardian for allowing us to publish the transcript of Boris Kagarlitsky’s speech to the inaugural Meeting of Informal Associations and the declaration of the Federation of Socialist Clubs, which appeared respectively in Labour Focus vol. 9 no. 3, November 1987-February 1988 and The Guardian 12 September 1987.

We are grateful to Dr Nick Lampert and to Tamara Deutscher for editorial help with this volume; and we would also like to thank Brian Pearce, who translated ‘The Thinking Reed’ and the essay in NLR 164, for tracking down English versions of works cited in the endnotes.

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