According to the authorities, the activists operated as an “organized group”, holding regular meetings, renting an office, and even setting up a small studio to record Marxist agitation.
The Nizami District Court has ordered three months of pre-trial detention for Asadli and Ibrahimli. They are charged under Article 233 of Azerbaijan’s Criminal Code, “organizing actions that disturb public order or actively participating in such actions,” which carries a potential sentence of up to three years in prison. The investigation is still ongoing, and state-aligned media have already begun a smear campaign, insinuating that the activists were “working for a foreign power.”
The arrests come shortly after Baku announced the suspension of Rossotrudnichestvo’s activities in Azerbaijan, declaring that the republic “no longer requires external assistance.”
The case illustrates how bourgeois states, regardless of political rhetoric, criminalize communist organizing once class struggle steps outside the “permitted” corridor of opinion. The content of the case — flags, books, meetings, agitation — shows that what is being punished is not violence but political organization under working-class leadership.
The appropriate answer to such persecution is not silence, but disciplined international solidarity: legal assistance, public exposure, trade-union and political support, documentation of abuses, and pressure on all institutions cooperating with the regime. The episode also exposes the boundaries of bourgeois democracy: once the order of capital feels threatened, the “law of order” becomes a tool to suffocate Marxist organizing.
For the working class in and beyond Azerbaijan, the message should be clear: build stronger structures, protect comrades, continue agitation. Repression can stop a demonstration — but it cannot stop the material conditions that produce resistance.
Info from readovka.news & riktpunkt.nu