Boris Kagarlitsky works as a senior research fellow at the Institute of Comparative Political Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is the author of The Thinking Reed, The Dialectic of Hope, and The Mirage of Modernisation. When in 1987-88 non-Communist Party political activities became legal, he was among the first leaders of the so-called "informal groups" – the Federation of Socialist Public Clubs and later a coordinator of the Moscow People\'s Front. In 1990 he was elected to the Moscow Soviet (provincial parliament) where he served until the coup in 1993 when local Soviets were dissolved. Boris has also been arrested twice for his activism, once in 1982 under Brezhnev, and in 1993 under Yeltsin.