The statement of the International Relations Section of the CC of the KKE reads as follows:
“The decision by the Russian authorities to impose prison sentences of 16 to 22 years on members of a Marxist group —based on the ridiculous and dangerous opinion of an appointed committee that characterized Lenin’s work The State and Revolution as a ‘manual of terrorism’— is completely unacceptable and exposes the anti-communist and anti-democratic degeneration of bourgeois power in Russia. The Russian bourgeois justice system’s lexical interpretation of the word ‘revolution’ and its designation of the ‘ideology of socialism’, ‘power to the Soviets’, and the ‘creation of Soviet power’ as ‘extremist ideology’, allegedly to document ‘the violent nature of the change in the basic principles of the existing regime’, demonstrates the ruthless effort of the bourgeois authorities to discredit revolution and socialism, as well as to suppress any political action that challenges the political choices of the bourgeoisie and fights to overthrow capitalist barbarity.
This court ruling is yet another link in the anti-communist chain exploited by the Russian bourgeoisie. Notable examples include the hosting of a global fascist gathering with the participation of the Nazi Golden Dawn party from Greece; the operation of a Higher Political School at a public university in Moscow named after the Russian fascist philosopher Ivan Ilyin; and the anti-Soviet and anti-communist rhetoric employed by Vladimir Putin to justify the unacceptable Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. That invasion marked the formal outbreak of the ongoing imperialist war, which has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of young people in Ukraine and Russia, mainly from the poor popular strata, for the interests of the capitalists.
The KKE condemns in the strongest terms this unacceptable conviction, which aligns with similar anti-communist trials and bans in Ukraine, the recent persecution of the Communist Party of Poland, with the ‘week against communism’ declared by Trump, etc. These developments prove that anti-communism is not an exclusive tool of the Euro-Atlantic imperialist bloc. When deemed necessary by the bourgeoisie, it can also be exploited by capitalist Russia, whose leadership falsely claims to be waging an ‘anti-fascist war’ while each year on 9 May it seeks to exploit the anti-fascist victory of the USSR and the partisan movements against Nazism, which is born of capitalism itself.
We demand the immediate release of the convicted members of the Marxist group and an end to anti-communist political persecution. Hands off the communists!”