Sergei Udaltsov, the ‘new Lenin’, also stumbles against justice despite supporting the war

Wednesday morning, Sergey Udaltsov He wrote on Telegram that the police were trying to break into his house. After some time, this visionary political leader was interrogated and Accused of “justifying terrorism”. According to the state news agency TASS, authorities confiscated his electronic devices.

The war has divided the leftist movement in Russia. Udaltsov rose to prominence in 2011, at the same time jailed dissident leader Alexei Navalny, and in fact served time for rioting near the Kremlin. But when he was released in 2017, he said he supported the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, as well as the annexation of Crimea. After the start of the invasion of Russian troops into Ukraine in 2022, Udaltsov adopted a position favorable to the invasion, although he could not sit still. Last month, he was detained for violating the rules of holding demonstrations in Red Square dedicated to Stalin’s birthday, a protest in which he displayed a banner with a photo of the Soviet dictator. He was sentenced to 40 hours of hard labour. He now faces up to seven years in prison if found guilty of justifying terrorism.

Udaltsov has been led Left front, though without managing to enter the party system by force. In recent years he has called on communists and social democrats to ally and present a single candidacy. He started joining politics in the late 1990s.

His position has always been halfway between Old Bolshevism and the Alternative Left. “We are not nostalgic for the Soviet Union, we do not advocate a return to a centralized and planned economy where social initiative was suppressed, but we do We want to preserve the good of the Soviet system and take new paths towards development; Social democratic development of Russia.

Despite supporting the invasion – and calling pacifist dissidents like Navalny or Ilya Yashin “traitors” – he always insisted that he still was. A “harsh critic” of Vladimir Putin And talked about the hunger for change in Russia. In the last presidential election of 2018, he collaborated with the communist candidate, Pavel Grudinin. Due to his criminal record, Udaltsov could not run for office, so it was his wife, Anastasia, who began to participate more actively in political activities. They are known as both “Revolutionary Couple”. They called him “the new Lenin”. In 2022, Anastasia Udaltsova became a State Deputy due to the decline of the Communist faction in parliament.

Udaltsov is not the first person concerned to face criminal prosecution despite speaking out in favor of the war. In the summer of 2023, Igor StrelkovThose who actively supported the invasion but criticized the authorities were arrested on charges “Call Out Extremism”. Udaltsov planned to collaborate with Strelkov, a Russian nationalist accused of war crimes in Donbas in 2014, ahead of the presidential election in March this year.

In the end, the repression even reached the dissident who justified the war: “Are you with your country or with the enemy”, he said last year. Now he is designated as an enemy.