#7 - JRL 7272
Russian Communists' Failure To Win Power Analyzed
Vremya MN
26 July 2003
Article by Semen Shatskoy:
"With a Single Leftist Column"
Three is not a crowd.
When Gorbachev, the last CPSU general secretary, sanctioned the calling of a republic party conference in Russia in 1990, he thought that he was knocking the chair out from under Yeltsin, the chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet, the very chair that his rival was intending to take. But he almost missed the chair himself. If the speaker of parliament of the "backbone" of the Soviet Union had also combined the job of first secretary of the republic Central Committee-even with the levers of central power the president of the USSR certainly would have had to depart without any "war of sovereignties."
But no one could match Mikhail Sergeyevich as a party apparatchik, and so the Russian Communists did not elect the "progressive" Boris Nikolayevich as their leader, but rather his recent rival in the struggle for the main seat at the Congress of People's Deputies of the RSFSR, the "retrograde" Ivan Kuzmich Polozkov from the Krasnodar Kray party committee. What did it cost? It led to the appearance of the "party of oblast committee first secretaries," who did not agree with the general secretary's line. This party was not needed by the Soviet Kremlin or the Russian White House-in short, it was the Vandee (counter-revolutionary center) of perestroika.
The second man in the "restorative" Communist Party (CP) of the RSFSR was Valentin Kuptsov, from the Volga region, and the third, who--organizationally speaking-did not "make a crowd," was Gennadiy Zyuganov, the deputy chief of the ideological department of the CPSU Central Committee. These two fit together pretty well: they were the opposition within the government: for one, they were in the Center opposing further democratization of the party from inside, and for two, they were tripping up the Yeltsin government of Silayev and Yavlinskiy, called the "500 days," within the republic. Just before the GKChP (State Committee for the State of Emergency) coup in August 1991, essentially not being responsible for anything, they each rose a step higher in the party hierarchy by putting the "papa from Kuban" on political pension (well-deserved for his suicidal confrontation with the USSR general secretary).
The Communists of Russia had half the votes in the republic parliament and if they had wanted they could have removed Boris Nikolayevich and Mikhail Sergeyevich with a single leftist column. But they preferred first to wait for the election of Yeltsin as president from the democrats, and then the overthrow of Gorbachev by the disintegration of the USSR; so they voted to ratify the Belovezhye agreements. But unfortunately, the power of the CPSU proper ended with this, and in the 1993 State Duma elections the Russian "left," as the mass proletarian party is usually called in Europe, greatly weakened (after two years of semimarginal existence) and renamed--as was the republic--the CPRF, only finished third.
At the Gates of Heaven-the Kremlin
The brand name "communist party" needs no promotion in our country of leftist convictions. Gennadiy Andreyevich, becoming chairman of the Central Executive Committee, and then of the Central Committee of the Russian "left," behaves in public as the natural monopolist with the most consolidated and totalitarian of all the domestic voting blocks. And he is acting correctly. The country's only mass party and in essence its only ideological party is capable of winning any election in Russia, even a presidential election. It can, but it does not want to.
And it is not even a question of the people's genetic memory, that they supposedly fear a repetition of the communist experiment. The events around YUKOS showed that the attitude of "take it away and divide it up" is not only popular with the ordinary voter, but also dominates within the entrepreneurial stratum itself. The CPRF is run, after all, by people who are used to being in a comfortable opposition to fast-changing capitalist governments. The leftists led the Duma in 1995 and in 1999, but they always preferred to remain a bogeyman for the democrats, a device President Gorbachev had already taught their leaders and one that his successors in the country's main office used brilliantly.
Zyuganov was at the gates of heaven-the Kremlin--at least twice, in 1996 when, even in the opinion of Vladimir Zhirinovskiy ("no friend" of the communists), he won the first round of the election from the "doomed" Yeltsin but did not dispute the "inaccurate" vote count; and in May 1999 when, after the popular "leftist" premier Yevgeniy Maksimovich was replaced, he did not lead the people into the streets against a president who had "gone out of his mind." The Communists could have managed the political crisis in post-August (1998) Russia with a single leftist column-and a readymade candidate for president from the "greater opposition" in the freshly retired head of government Primakov-but for some reason they preferred to fight "For Victory!" (the name of the CPRF's single-party bloc in the last Duma elections) alone.
Together with the 'Bears'
The lack of fighting spirit in the leader, who prefers to lose to Kremlin candidates one after another, is too simple an explanation of the CPRF's failures since 1996. In fact, the Communists simply decided to peacefully become intergrown with the new government so that they could possibly change it later from within. In the first two years of Putin's rule the Russian "left" has supported Vladimir Vladimirovich's policies, completely forgetting about its opposition status until someone in the president's administration decided to show the party nomenclature figures to the door, replacing Communist appointees with candidates from the "Big Four," the pro-Putin factions. This was the second test of the political marginality of Gennadiy Zyuganov's fellow party members since 1991.
The CPRF, deceived in its best hopes, was no longer able t
o deal with the regime as a single leftist column for the simple reason that there were no elections on the horizon, and the other parliamentarians in the country banned holding all-Russian referendums-the favorite weapon of the Duma proletariat. The result, however, is well known: the mistakes of the actual "party of power" and the growing jingoistic attitudes following the foreign political insults Russia has suffered work to build the Communists' popularity.
All the CPRS has to do to defeat United Russia in the December elections is simply not to make mistakes and to somehow resolve the Glazyev equation. A non-party economist from the Communist faction, Sergey Yuryevich took the completely capitalist, in form, slogan of "nationalizing land rent" and turned it into a magic election weapon that promises to double the well-being of everyone, tomorrow. And if the Kremlin does not take it away from the opposition, the majority will have no choice but the leftists.
All they have to do is get up their courage and send their own premier to the White House. If they fear executive power like fire, the disintegration of the biggest and most traditional party is inevitable.
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