Reading Lenin Makes You A Terrorist?

More Anti-Communist repression in Russia

Mícheál Ó Síodhacháin

On the 16th December, the trial of five members of a Marxist study group from the city of Ufa in the Russian Federation concluded. The outrageous verdict sentenced the five defendants to prison terms ranging from 16 to 22 years for terrorism. Their crime, according to the court? Studying the works of Lenin, Stalin, Marx, and Engels.

The group has been imprisoned since February 2022. They have denied all charges of terrorism and, throughout the proceedings, have been subjected to torture and abuse by the state. Yuri Efimov, a pensioner, made the following statement to the court as he was sentenced to 18 years: “They call communists terrorists. I no longer have the strength, I am old and ill. Do not torture me, just shoot me. I do not understand what I am being accused of.”

Throughout the trial, communist literature was repeatedly classified as terrorist material. The judge commissioned an “expert panel” to substantiate these claims. The panel concluded that Lenin’s State and Revolution was, in fact, a “terrorist manual,” and this, alongside video lectures made by the group, was used to justify the convictions.

This case clearly demonstrates the ongoing anti-communist trend of falsifying history in Russia, where the legacy of the USSR is rewritten to tarnish socialism and the achievements of the Soviet people, while their victory over fascism is claimed in a purely national-patriotic sense, in order to create a false association with the supposed “anti-fascist” war in Ukraine. This trial stands as proof of the increasingly anti-democratic nature of the Russian state, which, having emerged from the counter-revolution in the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism, represents solely the interests of Russian monopoly capitalism.

Those who believe that a strengthened Russian state, through improving its position within the imperialist world system, will usher in a supposed “multipolar order” and a friendlier capitalism for the working class, ought to take a closer look at the contemporary Russian state and its ruling bourgeoisie. In Russia today, open fascist festivals such as that of the Paladins can be held without repression, while a Marxist study group of five people faces the harshest possible sentences.

We must support the communists in Russia in their difficult but heroic struggle against the Russian bourgeoisie: as well as in their fight against the falsification of history and the mischaracterisation of the USSR, and their struggle against the forces of reformism, such as the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), whose commentary on this case has been wholly absent, even when one of the defendants, Dmitry Chuvilin, was a former deputy of the State Assembly of Bashkortostan for the party.

We express our solidarity with the members of the Marxist study group and call for their immediate release, and for the end to all anti-communist political repression in the Russian Federation.