Nikolai Karpitsky

Nikolai Karpitsky was born in 1968 in Tomsk and in 1990 graduated with a degree in philosophy from Tomsk State University. He taught philosophy at Tomsk State University (Tomsk, Russia), Siberian State University (Tomsk, Russia) and Yugra State University (Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia). In 1995 he received his Ph.D. in the “Dialectic of the Human being”. In 2004 he defended a thesis for a Doctor of Sciences degree in “Transcendental Presentiment as a Phenomenon of Human Subjectivity.” Nikolai Karpitsky has participated in the anti-war movement since 1995. In 1996-1997 he worked in the Tomsk Research Human Rights Center. In the autumn of 1999 he openly came out against war and authoritarianism. In 2011-2012 he testified against an official effort to declare the Bhagavadgita an extremist book and sought to recruit his fellow scholars in Tomsk to defend this Indian classic. In 2014 he publicly opposed the war of Russia against Ukraine. On October 1, 2015 he lost his job at Yugra State University because he took part in an academic conference on religious issues in Ukraine. Now he is teaching at Lugansk National Agrarian University (Kharkiv, Ukraine), and is conducting a field study of the repression of believers in the territory of military actions in Eastern Ukraine.