Putin’s Terror Turns Left

On December 16th, a Russian military tribunal of three judges in the Ural Federal District sentenced five members of the Marxist group Ufa to 16-22 years in prison for conspiracy to “violently take power and install a communist régime in Russia and Bashkortostan.” For proof of terrorist intent, the court pointed to the fact that Ufa Marxists studied the “Declaration of Rights of The Working And Exploited People”—a text written by Lenin that served as the basis for the Soviet Constitution of 1918^[1]—as well as the possession of camping equipment: a tent, sleeping bags, and a mat.

Two of these five people are good friends of mine. For many years we were active in the Russian “Left Front.” Dimitri Chuvilin served as a deputy in the regional parliament of Bashkortostan, an autonomous Russian republic that leads regional counts of war dead. To be clear, these five did not participate in any armed insurrection—but they were effective, coherent, and determined opponents of Putin’s régime.

In 2022, Dimitri publicly opposed the war Putin started. The members of Ufa discussed “the beginning of a new imperialist war” and coming unrest. A month later they were arrested. When police raided their homes the police beat them, abused their pets, and threatened them with death. During interrogation black bags were put on the heads of the accused, then their heads were beaten with threats of “liquidation” if they did not answer questions “correctly.” When the verdict was pronounced the eldest member of the group—66-year-old Yuri Efimov—said, “I am an old and sick man. Do not torture me, just shoot me.”

The Repressive Machine Turns

Over the four years of war [against Ukraine], the repressive machine of the Russian state has radically changed. For decades the target of political repression were leaders of the pro-Western opponents of Putin. Politicians, businessmen, non-profit directors, journalists, and activists were imprisoned or fined in order to push them into exile. The scale of this violence grew slowly but inexorably: in the 2000s there were a few political prosecutions per year, by the 2020s there were hundreds per year.

The victims were not only pro-Western liberals: Muslims, left-wing activists, and even some Russian nationalists were crushed under the steamroller of state terror. Yet a tacit rule prevailed: prison awaited those who engaged in political action or took a public stand. The depoliticized majority of the population escaped the attention of the state security services.

At the beginning of the war, repression brutally intensified. In one year, the number of convictions under the 33 articles of the Penal Code most commonly used to go after dissidents grew by 50%. People were getting sentenced to 7-10 years for antiwar stickers, holding up a sign, or posting on social media. Now the victims were not only opposition leaders but sympathizers. More, they mainly came from the educated middle class of large cities.

The resistance of this social stratum totally collapsed by mid-2023: some were in prison, others had fled the country. An outside observer might have gotten the impression that repression subsided, as if the system had “digested” the opposition and rested.

This illusion was shared even by the majority of human rights organizations. In effect, these trace repression according to open-source intelligence, gathering information first of all from victims and their lawyers. Before the war, publicity often helped: the attention of journalists and NGOs could lighten sentences. Over the last three years, the situation changed: the system now responds to publicity with overt brutality. This is why victims and their lawyers now try to obscure information, hoping for lighter sanctions.

Political repression has not reduced in quantity but visibility. Above all, the social profile of those facing it has radically changed.

The Working Class Under the Gun

“The FSB [secret police] arrested a former priest in Novorossiysk suspected of recruiting citizens to commit terrorism.” It is with such headlines that Russian media is saturated nowadays. Every day begets another: “The security services arrested a saboteur from the republic of Komi on a train headed to Belgorod.” This news is often accompanied by videos of masked men jumping some unknown person, beating them, and throwing them to the ground or hauling them off in cuffs.

No proof of guilt is provided, and these people had no time to even commit the smallest deed. The newspapers are content to reproduce the communiqués of the secret police, who boast of “thwarting” the attacks prepared by yet another anonymous locksmith, teacher, or bum: “In Kaluga, a court will try a 38-year-old resident who photographed military equipment and sent it to the enemy.”

The turn can be dated to mid-2024: a new wave of political repression began, much larger than the first at the beginning of the war. By the second semester of 2024, the number of convictions under the 33 articles increased 40% over the first semester of that year, and the first semester of 2025 increased again 30%. The total number increased 80% in one year and 300% compared to the prewar period. In 2025, tribunals delivered about ten political convictions per day, and the growth will likely continue.

That this new wave of repression began very brutally can only indicate one thing: it is the result of a political decision. In Russia, the average time from the opening of a prosecution to a verdict is between six and nine months. This decision therefore must have been made at the end of 2023 or beginning of 2024.

This decision was preceded by two major internal political events: the mutiny of Prigozhin in June of 2023 and the mass protests in Bashkortostan in January of 2024. The régime was able to overcome these crises, but it had to make discomfiting discovery: discontent and even resistance was no longer coming from the liberal milieu of “advanced inhabitants of megacities” but from lower social strata, the working class, upon whose loyalty power rested for decades.

The Kremlin and its leadership of the repressive apparatus understood this well before the liberal opposition or Western political leaders. And the Kremlin responded with the sole tool at its disposal: unleashing terror against the poor, disorganized, but increasingly malcontent.

Now “crime” is no longer limited to taking action in the street or posting on social media, but includes merely talking in a factory smokeroom or posting in a group chat about the Ukrainians’ right to resist. Words spoken in a private conversation are considered by the tribunals as “preparation to betray the fatherland.” An idle word spoken in anger—“they should be killed”—against the Kremlin becomes a “justification for terrorism.” The chatter of disgruntled neighbors in a garage becomes “creating an extremist group.”

As in Stalin’s era, we suddenly discover that “enemies of the people” are everywhere. They might even be the majority.

Aiming at the Left

As soon as the régime understood that the threat came from the lower social strata, it adjusted not only the social but also ideological target of its terror. Before, repression was aimed mainly at the pro-Western liberals. Today, leftists are catching the harshest penalties.

Despite their organizational and political weakness, it is precisely the left that could potentially become the amplifiers of the growing discontent in the working class. All are attacked: anarchists, antifascists, student union organizers, intellectuals like the sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky, trade-unionists like Anton Orlov.

The Marxists of Ufa were ideal targets: they opposed the war from an internationalist position in a national republic where thousands of people have died in the Ukrainian bloodbath. Consider the former leader of the Left Front, Sergei Udaltsov: he took an ambiguous position at the beginning of the war and was arrested for “apology for terrorism.” According to the prosecutor, he “justified terrorism” by refusing to denounce as criminals his more strident comrades in Ufa. Prudent loyalism did not save him from prison, as the powers that be perceive clearly the mounting unrest resonating with the ideals, history, and slogans of the left. As Udaltsov told the press, “The inquest conflates Marxism and terrorism.”

European governments have invested billions of euros in the military-industrial complex, and the French commander-in-chief has declared that the French must be ready to “lose their children” in the struggle against the foreign enemy. Yet in this paranoid and bellicose atmosphere, European authorities deport to Russia deserters who risk death or many years in prison. They seem to deliberately undermine the possibilities of internal resistance, pushing Russians to rally around the dictatorship.

The bitter irony of all this is that the only major party to coherently support Russian resistance to the war—the France Unbowed—is cynically accused of serving Putin. This is not the first time in history that left opponents to war have been targeted by “professional patriots” on both sides of the front lines.