Even as the Putin regime wages a brutal war against Ukraine, unveiling new monuments to Stalin in Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod, it is, at the same time, launching a political trial against “Trotskyist students.” The symbolism is powerful.
Garry Azaryan is a 23-year-old activist born in Kazakhstan who came to St. Petersburg University for his graduate studies. A doctoral student in political science, he was first organized in the People’s Party of Kazakhstan, then the Organization of Internationalist Communists in Russia (the Russian section of the Revolutionary Communist International) before joining Workers’ Power (a split from the Organization of Internationalist Communists), a new organization, which claims to be Marxist and Trotskyist, founded in January 2025.
In its five months of existence, Workers’ Power has pursued various policies against the Putin regime and Russian employers. The organization has notably denounced employer arbitrariness and harsh working conditions in various factories across the country, taken part in environmental struggles defending forests and green spaces coveted by real estate speculators, and denounced the war in Ukraine and Russian militarism. This is taking place in the conditions of a country at war ruled by a Bonapartist dictatorship that carries out mass repression against some of its opponents and physically eliminates others.
It was the participation of Workers’ Power activists in the URA (Administration Relations Management) student movement at the University of St. Petersburg that alerted the authorities and the regime’s press. Accused of infiltrating the student movement to push their demands, Workers’ Power activists were harshly repressed, with searches of their homes and the detention of nine students. Criminal proceedings were then opened against Garry Azaryan, accused of “public calls for terrorism.”
The prosecution of the students is based on a report of discussions at the Workers’ Power congress in which Azaryan spoke of “revolution” and “class hatred.” For expressing his political opinion during a private meeting of the small organization, he now faces up to seven years in prison. The University of St. Petersburg also expelled several of his comrades, and the Workers’ Power group dissolved itself in mid-May in an attempt to end the repression of its activists.
The persecution of Garry Azaryan joins the cases of Boris Kagarlitsky (a Marxist sociologist), anarchist doctoral student Azat Miftakhov, and numerous other left-wing and far-left activists incarcerated in Putin’s prisons. Marxist activists are declared extremists and terrorists, LGBT people are imprisoned for being LGBT, and immigrants are subjected to pogroms by far-right militias in close combat with the regime’s police.
This strengthening of the repressive apparatuses of the regime is part of the desire to increasingly discipline the opposition and to nip in the bud any mobilization of working people or those critical of the regime. While the Russian economy is beginning to show signs of overheating and the social crisis is tending to worsen due to the war economy, the accusation of “terrorism” is a convenient scapegoat that aims to build a form of “national unity” against the enemy within.
But who is the real terrorist? Activists who organize Marxist circles and intervene to the best of their ability in student struggles? Or a state that bombs Ukrainian cities, kills men, women, and children, and sends hundreds of thousands of young Russian men, Tatars, Bashkirs, and Buryats to the slaughter of the trenches? Freedom to Garry Azaryan and all Russian political prisoners!
Originally published in French on August 19 in Permanent Revolution.
Translated and revised for Left Voice by James Dennis Hoff
