On 25 December 2025, a military court in Moscow sentenced Sergei Udaltsov, coordinator of the “Left Front” movement, to six years in prison on charges of “supporting terrorism.”
His so-called crime consisted solely of an article he published in 2023, where he condemned the arrest of members of the Marxist Circle in Ufa and stated that the accusations of terrorism against them were unfounded. For expressing solidarity and voicing a political opinion, Udaltsov is now being punished with years behind bars.
This verdict did not appear in a vacuum. Just days earlier, a military court in Yekaterinburg sentenced members of that same Marxist Circle to 16–22 years in prison, accusing them of reaching “extremist conclusions” simply because they studied the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, and believed that revolutionary change was necessary in Russia. The absurdity of treating reading and political theory as terrorism speaks for itself — and yet, this judgment was used directly as evidence to convict Udaltsov as a supposed supporter of “terrorism.”
It must be stressed that Udaltsov had already been held in pre-trial detention since January 2024, long before any court formally ruled on his case. His political activity has always been public, and the Left Front — the organization he helped build since 2008 — has supported the Russian military intervention in Ukraine and maintained close cooperation with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF). Through this cooperation, Anastasia Udaltsova, also a coordinator of the Left Front and former spouse of Sergei Udaltsov, currently serves as a member of the State Duma.
From In Defense of Communism via This RSS Feed.