A new peak of anti-communist repression is unfolding in today's Russia. On 25 November 2025, during the closing hearings at the Central Military Court of the Yekaterinburg District, the prosecution demanded 20 to 24 years in a high-security penal colony for the members of a Marxist study circle in the city of Ufa, accusing them of “terrorism” and “conspiracy to overthrow the government.”
The five defendants, detained since February 2022, reject all charges and have reported torture during their interrogation. Their legal ordeal has now lasted nearly two years, with the first court session held in December 2023.
The Marxist group had been active since 2016. One of its later members, Sergei Shapozhnikov — a former fighter in the armed formations of the so-called “Donetsk People’s Republic” who subsequently received Russian citizenship — informed the FSB that the circle was supposedly “waiting for an unstable situation to seize power and kill police officers and politicians.” No material evidence was ever provided to support these claims.
Instead, the court instructed a panel of “experts” to evaluate whether the group’s lectures and reading material could be considered “terrorist activity.” Their conclusion reveals the true nature of the prosecution: they declared Lenin’s foundational work “State and Revolution” to be a “terrorist manual.”
The report goes so far as to argue that discussing socialist revolution, Soviets and workers’ power constitutes proof of extremism, asserting that the very “lexicographical meaning of the word ‘revolution’” demonstrates a violent intention to overthrow the state. On the basis of this pseudo-scientific interpretation, the prosecution now demands multi-decade prison sentences.
This judicial persecution is unfolding in the same Russia whose leadership claims to be conducting an “anti-fascist war,” and which every 9 May attempts to appropriate the legacy of the Anti-Fascist Victory of the USSR over Nazism — a victory achieved by the socialist system that today is being criminalised.
The scandal has already provoked international condemnation. On 10 March 2025, the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) sent an official protest letter to the Russian Embassy in Athens, denouncing this blatantly political and anti-democratic prosecution.
What is at stake here goes far beyond five militants in Ufa. It is the criminalisation of Marxist theory itself — and the attempt to turn Lenin’s “State and Revolution” from a historical and political work into an “act of terrorism.” The repression of revolutionary ideas is always a sign of a system in crisis. And no prison sentence has ever succeeded in stopping them.
