After the Communist Collapse
Medvedev, Roy
On Saturday, August 24, 1991, a huge crowd surrounded the buildings of the Central Committee of the Communist party of the Soviet Union (CC-CPSU) on Staraya Square in Moscow. The defeat of the...
...Gennady Burbulis, Yeltsin's close friend who had headed the Sverdlovsk party club and was an elected People's Deputy of the USSR, was also an active participant, and Gavriil Popov and Yuri Chernichenko belonged to it until they broke with the CPSU...
...Nonetheless, several factors allowed them to hope that they could improve the economic situation very rapidly...
...There is already a People's Party of Russia (PPR), formed by Tel'man Gdlyan (Gdlyan, formerly a People's Deputy of the USSR, achieved fame as one of the investigators of the USSR Procuracy involved in the fight against corruption in Uzbekistan...
...The head of the president's office, Valery Boldin, a major participant in the attempted coup, was under arrest, together with the chairman of the KGB, Vladimir Kryuchkov, the minister of defense, Marshal Dmitry Yazov, and the chairman of the secretariat of the CC-CPSU, Oleg Shenin...
...After the coup the only way that leaders who had remained members of the CC or the Politburo or even of CPSU regional committees could retain their influence was to repudiate the party and leave it as quickly as possible...
...The elections to the republican parliaments in the spring of 1990 demonstrated even more strongly that many people no longer supported the CPSU...
...The Central Committee of the RKRP must consist of at least 50 percent workers and peasants...
...The membership of the SPL rose rapidly: when the first congress was held the membership was 15,000, 496 • DISSENT but by March 1992 it had grown to 70,000...
...To rid themselves of a purely intelligentsia base the party united with the Moscow Federation of Labor in 1991 and became the Party of Labor...
...and ordered all workers to quit the buildings without briefcases within an hour, leaving their doors and safes open...
...This party, which had about 20,000 members at the end of 1990, has now joined the Democratic Russia movement and abandoned its socialist program...
...On August 24 the announcement of his resignation as general secretary of the CC-CPSU was read on radio and television...
...The Democratic Party of Communists of Russia (DPKR) and the People's Party of Free Russia (NPSR) These two names reflect the political evolution of the parliamentary group led by Alexander Rutskoi, Communists for Democracy, at the Congress of People's Deputies and in the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR...
...The statutes of the RKRP are, to a large extent, reminiscent of the statutes of the CPSU, and the party has retained the principle of "democratic centralism...
...Buzgalin) were elected to the CC-CPSU...
...The majority of the Soviet population, particularly in Russia and the Central Asian republics, certainly did not want the Union to be eliminated...
...This ensures that broad discussion will take place about policy and strategy...
...A real danger of hunger loomed, particularly in large towns...
...The Democratic Platform of the CPSU and the Republican Party of the Russian Federation (RPRF) Perestroika and the democratization of Soviet society led in 1989 to the creation of numerous regional party clubs such as Communists for Perestroika, Democratic Platform of the CPSU, and others...
...From the evening of August 21 power in Moscow shifted almost entirely into the hands of Boris Yeltsin, who could dictate whatever terms he wished to Gorbachev...
...Its coordinating council called a small conference in Moscow on September 7, 1991, in which about thirty people took part...
...With the exception of humanitarian aid from the West, none of their expectations led to an early improvement in the economy...
...Rutskoi's fraction, on the other hand, supported Yeltsin and ensured his election...
...The Central Ukrainian Rada (parliament), for example, did not recognize the provisional government in Petrograd and hoped to create an independent Ukrainian republic that would include the Crimea and that would own the Black Sea fleet...
...Because the party has not been legally registered, it has been leading an underground existence...
...The economic situation of about 90 percent of the population of Russia, and particularly of pensioners and students, began to decline sharply in January 1992, falling below the official poverty level...
...In the Moslem republics nationalism was espoused first and foremost by fundamentalist religious groups from which the urban population did not expect a market economy and democracy...
...Among the intelligentsia, hardly a voice was raised in defense of the CPSU, with the exception of a few teachers of MarxismLeninism in the universities...
...Prigarin and decided to begin work on the formation of a new communist party called the Union of Communists (after the organization for which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848...
...The collapse of this organization led to the rapid disintegration of the Soviet Union as a unitary superpower...
...It has not yet had its first congress, although it held an interregional conference in Moscow in January 1992 at which a Russian organizational committee of the Party of Labor was formed...
...The Russian Federation is a new state, which has existed for only several months...
...About a hundred of the delegates to the Twenty-eighth Congress of the CPSU belonged to the Democratic Platform of the CPSU...
...The decree instructed the Congresses of People's Deputies to "place the property of the CPSU under protection" and to decide about its future use "in strict accordance with the laws of the USSR and republics on property and public organizations...
...From that moment a peculiar form of dual power existed in the USSR...
...However, while it prepared for its first congress, a split occurred because of disagreements over the issue of private ownership of the means of production and land...
...Polozkov headed the fraction Communists of Russia, which consisted of about three hundred people, while Rutskoi headed the Communists for Democracy, which consisted of about one hundred people...
...Capitalism began to advance in Russia, sweeping away all the social gains of the workers, which had been achieved in the course of almost one hundred years of social-democratic, socialist and communist movements...
...The instruction to evacuate the buildings came as a complete surprise...
...Given the extreme economic crisis, the end of which is not yet in sight, it is left-wing socialist parties in particular that may become very strong in the future, on condition, of course, that Russia continues to respect democratic freedoms and the rights of the individual...
...Moreover, it was obvious that the policies of the "democrats" did not reflect the interests of blue- or white-collar workers or of collective and state farm members, in other words, of all those people who in any society belong to the category of wage labor and depend on fixed salaries...
...Petersburg, which continues to be called Leningrad in all the documents of the party...
...From that moment onwards, the CC-CPSU and all other central and regional committees of the CPSU ceased to function...
...Communist and Socialist Parties At the Twenty-eighth Congress of the CPSU in Moscow in the summer of 1990 it was already obvious that the twenty million members of the CPSU had begun to splinter into fractions...
...The Popular Revolution The expulsion of the leading workers of the CPSU from their luxurious buildings and offices in Moscow and other towns was the final act of the anticommunist movement, which had wide popular support...
...In June 1990 the Marxist Platform held a large conference in Moscow attended by representatives from six republics and about forty regions of the USSR...
...Among the delegates were about eighty-five People's Deputies of various levels, with a clear predominance of members of the scientifictechnical intelligentsia (about 50 percent of delegates...
...The banning of the activities of the CPSU and of the Communist party of the RSFSR did not formally extend to the OFR...
...The impressive victory of Boris Yeltsin, standing on an anticommunist platform, was a historic defeat for the CPSU...
...Later he also became minister of defense of the RSFSR (renamed the Russian Federation in January 1992...
...At present it has a collective leadership in the form of an Organizational Bureau...
...The buildings and property of the CC-CPSU, on the other hand, should have been placed in the temporary custody of the president of the USSR and the USSR Supreme Soviet...
...The initiative for forming the Communist party of the RSFSR in 1990 as a Russian organization within the CPSU came from the OFR...
...The PL is firmly opposed to the Yeltsin government and to the Moscow mayoralty...
...Gorbachev's arrangement made it possible for the leaders of the CC-CPSU to take various documents with them...
...Unlike the Democratic Platform, the Marxist Platform took an active part in the work of the Twenty-eighth Congress of the CPSU and its leaders (A.A...
...The most popular leaders (Boris Yeltsin, Anatoly Sobchak, Gavriil Popov) had ostentatiously left the party in 1990 or not long before the August coup in 1991 (as Edvard Shevardnadze, Alexander Yakovlev, and Alexander Rutskoi had done...
...The Party of Labor (PL) The third party that has its roots in the political movements that arose before August 1991 is the Party of Labor (PL...
...He did not resign from the party and he kept his party membership card...
...In November 1991 the SPL was officially registered with the Ministry of Justice of the RSFSR, which speeded up the formation of local organizations and preparations for its first congress in Moscow on December 21-22, 1991...
...Its internal political development has only just begun...
...At that meeting the party changed its name, trying to distance itself from the word that connected it to communism...
...Formation of Political Parties The popular revolution of August to December 1991 can be compared to the February Revolution in 1917...
...The congress adopted a name for the party in the historical tradition, calling it the "All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks" or VKPB, in an attempt to resurrect the name VKP(b), which is what the Leninist-Stalinist party was called until 1952...
...The conference chose an organizational committee under the chairmanship of A.A...
...490 • DISSENT Nonetheless, the main "battle" between the CPSU and the bloc of parties united against it in "Democratic Russia" took place in June 1991 during the election of the president of the Russian Federation...
...The main center party, Democratic Russia, was formed when several democratic parties and political groups united in a single bloc during the electoral campaign for the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR...
...The Socialist Party of Labor (SPL) At the end of 1989, liberal groups that supported Gorbachev's reforms began to form within the CPSU...
...The best known was the Liberal-Democratic party, formed by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who stood against Yeltsin in the presidential elections in the RSFSR, winning 7 percent of the vote...
...The founding conference of the new party, called the Socialist Party of Labor (SPL), took place in Moscow on October 26...
...Sevast'yanov, People's Deputy of the RSFSR and a well-known cosmonaut...
...Despite the popular protest, however, both Gorbachev and the CC kept control over the work of the Congress of People's Deputies and the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, not least because a third of the deputies, including most of the Politburo members, had been elected not from territorial wards but as delegates of party and public organizations...
...The OFR was formed as an international response to the nationalist popular fronts in the republics...
...However, the largest republic of the Union, Russia, and six other republics refused to obey the central government...
...Translated from the Russian by MARGOT LIGHT FALL • 1992 • 497...
...Alexander Rutskoi was a popular figure, an air force colonel and an Afghan war hero...
...It was formed at a founding congress on November 23-24, 1991 in Ekaterinburg (formerly Sverdlovsk...
...The more orthodox Marxists objected to any form of private property...
...In effect, an authoritarian dictatorship appeared in Russia, but it existed parallel to parliamentary democracy...
...Petersburg on November 8, 1991 attended by 164 delegates from 18 regions of the USSR...
...The founding conference of this party, called the Democratic Party of Communists of Russia (DPKR), took place in Moscow on August 3, 1991...
...In October 1991 Yeltsin combined the post of president of Russia with that of prime minister...
...But when they descended by special lift from the fifth, "nomenklatura" floor, they found that they could traverse only one underground passage...
...Yeltsin was rapturously accepted in Russia specifically as the "Russian" leader who had liberated Russia from the communism that was foreign to it...
...At the level of the union—in the central government and the Supreme Soviet of the USSR—the CPSU retained power...
...The February revolution was not organized by a party, and the struggle for power between various parties only began after FALL • 1992 • 491 the revolution...
...Its main ideologist is Boris Kagarlitsky, a young Marxist who has written a number of books that have been published abroad but not yet in the USSR...
...It can be traced back to the creation of a committee of New Socialists in 1989 that held a congress in 1990 and formed a small Socialist party of the USSR...
...The DPKR, which is often simply called Rutskoi's party, has about fifty thousand members at present...
...However, the attitude toward Yeltsin in the national republics of the USSR and in the national autonomies of the Russian Federation itself was either negative or restrained...
...Kagarlitsky and some other officials of the Socialist party of the USSR successfully took part in the elections to the Moscow City Soviet and were elected as deputies...
...The SPL is opposed to the policies of the Yeltsin government, since it considers that if the transition to a market economy is too rapid it will be a destructive process...
...But by then nobody was paying much attention to the strict letter of FALL • 1992 • 489 the law...
...Highly educated young socialists, some of them Trotskyist in orientation, who were influenced by the Western New Left, have long aspired to form a New Left party...
...The Soviet government, in whose name the prime minister, Valentin Pavlov, had joined the State Committee on the Emergency Situation, was paralyzed, its ministers suspended from duty...
...After August 1991 various "initiative groups" within the OFR began to organize a new political party...
...The minister of internal affairs, Boris Pugo, had committed suicide...
...After the coup, "Bolshevik platform" activists held a founding congress in St...
...However, he arranged that, when they had locked their offices and safes, CC secretaries, department heads and Politburo members could leave the building through a secret underground exit so as to avoid the main entrances around which an over-excited crowd was waiting...
...However, Gorbachev merely confirmed that the seizure had been discussed with him and answered brusquely, "Do you really not understand the position I'm in...
...It should, therefore, have been possible to predict that people would protest against the party that had ruled since 1917...
...However, the development of the PL has been very slow and it is confined primarily to Moscow...
...During the selection of delegates to the Twenty-eighth Congress of the CPSU these party clubs began to work out new, more democratic statutes for the CPSU that rejected the principle of democratic centralism...
...Breakaway orthodox delegates to the founding conference held a new conference at which they formed the Russian Party of Communists (RPK) under the chairmanship of A.V...
...The Higher Party School in Moscow and its rector, Viacheslav N. Shostakovsky, were at the center of this movement...
...It had many active members in Moscow and Leningrad but was very weak in the provinces...
...The minister of internal affairs of the RSFSR, who was supervising the seizure of the CC buildings on Staraya Square, received an order to conduct a "blitzkrieg" and to include all the buildings of the CC-CPSU...
...The CPSU was removed from power in six republics (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Armenia, Georgia, and Moldova) and nationalist groups took over...
...Even before August 1991 this group had tried to remove Gorbachev from the post of general secretary of the CC-CPSU...
...However, the democratic parties that had begun to form in Russia and the other republics after the removal in February 1990 of the CPSU's constitutional monopoly of the "leading and guiding role" in society, were small and weak...
...A Trotskyist party, the Spartakovtsy, is also being formed, and it intends to join the Fourth International...
...In the summer of 1990, after the formation of a conservative Communist party of the RSFSR under the leadership of Ivan Polozkov, a split occurred among the CPSU members who were People's Deputies of the RSFSR...
...Kryuchkov, formerly a member of the Central Committee of the Communist party of the RSFSR...
...The capture of the building of the CC-CPSU in August 1991 in Moscow, like the seizure of the Winter Palace in Petrograd in October 1917, symbolized the overthrow of the old order...
...Not really radical, these groups formed a centrist section of the CPSU...
...On Friday, August 23, at the session of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation (RSFSR), which was transmitted live on television, he tried to prevent Yeltsin from publicly signing a decree that banned the Moscow activities of the CPSU in Russia...
...A new type of dual power arose, reproduced in every region, where Yeltsin's "regents" (local representatives of the president later called "governors" at the regional level and "prefects" at the district level) often had more power than the elected local government...
...Since it was not the outcome of careful preparation, negotiations, and agreements but took the form of a kind of explosion, it became necessary to resolve major problems of complex international relations after the premature birth of new, independent, sovereign states rather than before...
...One hundred and two delegates from ten regions and one hundred and eight representatives of individual groups of CPSU members attended the conference, which adopted statutes and a program...
...They were forced to turn back, part with their briefcases, and leave by the main exit, enduring a search and the humiliation of the crowd...
...The Union of Communists (SK) and the Russian Party of Communists (RPK) Believing that Gorbachev's policies were deviating from a number of fundamental principles of Marxism, a group of members formed the Marxist Platform of the CPSU shortly before the selection of delegates to the Twenty-eighth Congress of the CPSU...
...The putsch on August 19, 1991 was a hapless attempt by the center to regain its lost power...
...He stressed his adherence to socialism and tried to defend ordinary members of the Communist party...
...The continuing economic crisis had further eroded the party's popular support...
...Effective anticommunist propaganda in the press had also played an important part...
...The best known supporters of these ideas were members of the CC-CPSU (elected to the CC in 1990) and USSR People's Deputies, Roy A. Medvedev and Anatoly A. Denisov, and also V.I...
...The defeat of the conservative putsch that had begun on August 19 and Mikhail Gorbachev's return to Moscow on the night of August 21 did not mean that the president of the USSR could once again fulfill his functions...
...Several other People's Deputies of the RSFSR and secretaries of CPSU regional and city committees joined the initiative group...
...The disintegration of the USSR was, therefore, not so much the result of the victory of "democratic" forces as the product of nationalist pressure...
...In fact, the disintegration of the USSR caused so many new problems in the food and financial spheres that the economy of Russia soon teetered on the edge of catastrophe...
...The RPK has not yet been formally registered: it has only two thousand members and the RSFSR law on public organizations requires that a new party must present a list of no fewer than five thousand members in order to register with the Ministry of Justice...
...Polozkov's fraction opposed Yeltsin's election as chairman FALL • 1992 • 495 of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR...
...The founding conference of the Union of Communists took place in the town of Zheleznodorozhny (near Moscow) on November 16-17, 1991...
...The CC-CPSU took the view, however, that there could not be a "party within a party" as they made preparations to expel members of the DPKR from the CPSU, and they removed Rutskoi from the CC-CPSU...
...The Russian Communist Workers Party (RKRP) If the VKPB brought together the extreme right, Stalinist wing of the CPSU and had very few supporters (the number of members is still not known), a larger tendency in the former CPSU, conservative as far as the economy is concerned rather than from a FALL • 1992 • 493 historical point of view, formed the Russian Communist Workers party, or RKRP...
...First, they would have access to the enormous confiscated property and finances of the CPSU—thousands of buildings in towns, dachas, sanatoria, resort facilities, special clinics, and car pools, as well as billions of rubles and hundreds of millions of dollars...
...This has created innumerable conflict situations both between these states and within the Russian Federation itself...
...The Union of Communists was officially registered as a public organization with the Ministry of Justice of the RSFSR...
...What they basically wanted was its democratic transformation...
...The collapse of the CPSU left Russia virtually without national political organizations...
...The banning of the CPSU at the end of August did not extend to the DPKR, and at the end of October 1991 the DPKR held its first congress...
...Five hundred and twentyfive delegates attended the congress, coming from almost all the regions and larger towns of Russia...
...The press, radio, television, and, particularly, the Orthodox Church and Russian emigrants abroad (particularly powerful in the person of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and his widely distributed pamphlet about Russia) constantly emphasized that the Russian people were the main victims of the communist, "Soviet" dictatorship...
...With the rapid impoverishment of most people and the simultaneous existence of political freedoms, the revival of communist and socialist movements and parties as a legal opposition to the existing regime was inevitable...
...After the banning of the CPSU each of these fractions began to form separate organizations...
...Most of the population believed the promises of the nationalists that a transition to a market economy would improve living conditions and bring the same level of consumer and food products as the abundance that existed in the developed countries of the West...
...The congress was attended by 298 delegates from 65 regions of the RSFSR...
...The CPSU could not put forward a single popular candidate in the elections...
...When it became clear that conservatives were dominating the congress, many members of the Democratic Platform resolved to leave the CPSU and form their own party called (in November 1990) the Republican party of the Russian Federation...
...The February revolution, as is known, also strengthened the nationalist movements in the Russian empire...
...It signified the transfer of power in the Russian Federation to a complex bloc of various parties and groups united primarily by their anticommunism...
...It was a powerful, multimillion-member organization that managed everything in the country, including the economy...
...Only in the republics of Central Asia and in Azerbaijan did Communist parties, having changed their names to "socialist" or "national-democratic" and having supported the independence and sovereignty of their republics, retain their positions...
...The organizers tried to create an "All-Union" rather than a "Russian" party, despite the fact that it was impossible to register an All-Union party legally...
...Fourth, they hoped to receive Western credits and aid...
...In spite of this, czarism collapsed in the face of relatively weak political pressure localized in Petrograd and supported by spontaneous popular protest and strikes caused by food shortages and the long war...
...The congress elected a collective leadership consisting of seven cochairmen and a Federal Council of 105 people...
...The movement had been gaining strength since the spring of 1989, when the first partially democratic elections in the history of the USSR (of USSR deputies) took place...
...However, one has to consider that such a system lays the groundwork for a direct dictatorship in case the democratic process turns the country in the direction of socialism...
...The political vacuum caused by the ban on Communist party activity was quickly filled, first and foremost by nationalist parties and movements that could relatively quickly, particularly in the national republics, appeal to the population with anti-Soviet and often anti-Russian, and not only anticommunist, declarations...
...Central Committee Secretary Valentin Falin immediately contacted Gorbachev on his direct line, expecting instructions...
...Despite the fact that it was Saturday, the most important CC employees were at their desks...
...He also admitted that the leaders of the CC-CPSU had taken part in the attempted coup and called on the CC-CPSU to "take a difficult but honest decision about its dissolution," although he must have understood that it was impossible to call a plenary meeting of the Central Committee to take such a decision...
...It supported a multiparty system and set itself the 494 • DISSENT task of turning the CPSU into a parliamentary party...
...They also supported a new program for the CPSU, rejected the CPSU's monopoly of political power, and wanted the CPSU to become more democratic...
...Among its better known members are General Albert Makashov, who stood as a candidate (on behalf of the Political Administration of the Soviet Army) in the RSFSR presidential elections, and several leading figures from the ideological department of the CC-CPSU (including Richard Kosolapov, former editor of the party journal, Kommunist...
...The initiative group published an announcement in the central newspapers, Pravda, Glasnost, and Sovetskaya Rossiya at the beginning of October 1991, proposing the formation of a new party of "left socialist orientation" on the basis of "progressive forces of the CPSU...
...The power of the Russian monarchy rested on a centuries-old tradition, a large nobility, an officer corps and a Cossack caste, and on an extensive bureaucracy (not to mention the police and gendarmerie...
...However, it is determined to avoid creating an "apparatus" separate from its elected bodies, and it does not recognize the principle of democratic centralism...
...At this early stage of self-organization the existence of a large number of socialist and left-wing parties in the RSFSR is both inevitable and useful...
...They also actively participated in the work on the new, more democratic program of the CPSU...
...It was thought necessary to have such authoritarian power and to combine legislative and executive functions in one person in order to implement economic reforms —the shift from a "socialist" planned economy to a market economy based on competition between producers and private property—as quickly as possible...
...Political freedoms were not abolished and parliament (the Supreme Soviet) and the president both had the right to issue laws...
...In the March 1990 elections to the Congress of People's Deputies of the RSFSR, many members of the CPSU who had been nominated as candidates refused to be part of the official parliamentary group, or fraction of the CPSU...
...This is what Leonid Kravchuk, Nursultan Nazerbayev, and Stanislav Shushkevich did...
...Ridiculed by the Russian deputies and humiliated by Yeltsin, Gorbachev yielded, however, apparently hoping at least to save his position as president of the USSR...
...Its founding conference took place in Moscow on February 15, 1992...
...The CPSU was not an ordinary parliamentary political party...
...Since none of these parties have passed the fivethousandmember threshold, they cannot be officially registered, which hinders their organizational work...
...This was why Yeltsin offered Rutskoi the post of vice president of the Russian Federation in 1991...
...Hoping to find important documents, the special "capture group" of the Moscow and Russian departments of the Ministry of Internal Affairs arrived at the CC buildings at 4 p.m...
...In Russia Yeltsin came to power on a wave of anticommunist feeling augmented by Russian nationalism, although, unlike Rukh in the Ukraine or Sajudis in Lithuania, it was not concentrated in a single mass organization...
...The All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (VKPB) Within the CPSU a small Stalinist group arose in 1989 headed by Nina Andreeva, who had formulated a "Bolshevik platform...
...The anticommunist revolution, led by Boris Yeltsin, ended with the victory of the democratic forces and the people...
...The historical essence of Russian nationalism is, without doubt, imperial...
...In their struggle for power, the "democrats" did not have a clear economic program apart from vague promises to change to a more effective market economy...
...The conference also called for amalgamation with other groups in a future "United Communist party...
...The appearance of two parallel systems of power was justified by reference to the continuing strong influence of the CPSU in elected provincial bodies...
...In membership and program, the SPL can be considered the legal heir to the CPSU...
...After he became vice president, Rutskoi decided to form a new political party on the basis of his parliamentary fraction...
...Within the CPSU this faction tried to elaborate the principles of "democratic socialism...
...Although formally about fifty different political parties and groups existed by July 1991, some of them officially registered, in practice their influence did not extend beyond Moscow and Leningrad...
...Basically it united the Russian minorities in the national republics and its main task became the defense of the rights of the Russian minorities in the Baltic Republics, Moldavia, and the Caucasus...
...A steel door closed off the second section of the tunnel and they could not open it...
...The defeat of the coup was, without doubt, fatal both for the center and for the CPSU...
...The collapse of the CPSU in August 1991 was just as rapid and as general as the fall of czarism in February 1917...
...This was a clear hint that even he was subordinate to someone else...
...After announcing his resignation as general secretary, Gorbachev, as president of the USSR, signed a special decree "On the property of the Communist party of the USSR...
...The Communist party and its leaders were defended neither by white- nor blue-collar workers nor by kolkhoz farmers...
...The RKRP has been officially registered with the Ministry of Justice of the RSFSR and its central bodies are located in St...
...Third, they would rapidly privatize state 492 • DISSENT property and housing...
...The new leaders who came to power in Russia were not by nature party people...
...In an announcement published on August 28, 1991, the PL expressed the intention of becoming the political organization of trade unions...
...At that time the DPKR only had seven thousand members, and although they disassociated themselves from the Communist party of the RSFSR, many of them were still members of the CPSU...
...It was attended by 315 delegates from 68 regions and republics of the RSFSR and it confirmed the statutes and provisional program of the SPL...
...They passed laws that contradicted both the constitution and the laws of the USSR...
...In many national autonomous republics Russia was still perceived as the nucleus of the colonial empire...
...The program of the VKPB promised to reestablish Soviet power, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and to retain the status of the USSR as a great power...
...Perestroika had not made life better, and the food situation continued to deteriorate...
...The defeat of many party "apparatchiks," particularly in the provinces, came as a great shock to the party leadership...
...There was some suspicion that they were busy destroying important documents...
...The leaders of the Marxist Platform quickly recovered from the shock of the collapse of the CPSU...
...The arguments delayed the convocation of the first congress, which had been planned for February 1992...
...In his electoral speeches, Boris Yeltsin had emphasized that the president of Russia should not belong to a political party...
...Second, there would be a sharp decrease in military spending and in expenditure on various prestige projects, such as space exploration...
...In November he was given "emergency powers" which gave him the right to issue legally binding decrees and to appoint people to any government post without reference to the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR...
...The decree thus allowed the mayor of Moscow, Gavriil Popov, to place "under protection" only the building of the Moscow committee of the CPSU...
...About seventy delegates from eastern regions could not attend because of poor weather and cancelled flights...
...All the government and party buildings in the center of Moscow and in the Kremlin are connected by a complex system of underground passages with secret exits at three metro stations...
...Nina Andreeva was elected leader of the party (general secretary) and fifteen full and four candidate members were elected to its Central Committee...
...In most regions of Russia this bloc is not strong enough to win local elections, and because of this Yeltsin has passed a special decree postponing local elections until December 1992...
...It is probable that blocs of left-wing parties will be created in the near future with common platforms and strategies...
...Other Left-Wing Parties of Russia At present (in April 1992) a Workers Party of Russia is in the process of organizing itself...
...After the banning of the CPSU these liberal groups decided to form a new left-wing party based not on a new program but on the liberal and, in essence, social democratic program of the CPSU, a draft of which had been approved by the last plenum of the CC-CPSU in July 1991...
...Judging by its program, this party belongs to the category of national socialism...
...The appearance at the Congress of People's Deputies of the RSFSR of a legally formed fraction, Communists for Democracy, which was neither subordinate to the CC-CPSU nor to the CC of the Communist party of the RSFSR, stimulated an extraparliamentary movement, Communists for Democracy, and the formation of similar groups in the Moscow City Soviet and other regional Soviets...
...At the same time, it recognizes the advantages of a mixed economy...
...This faction began to organize itself in 1989 at the founding conference of the United Front of Workers (OFR), which took place in Leningrad on July 15-16, 1989...
...Unlike the parliamentary parties, which are active only during elections and serve the interests of parliamentary fractions, the territorial sections of the SPL will work permanently in cooperation with the trade unions...
...The leadership of the RSFSR relied on the authority of one populist leader, Yeltsin, and not on party programs...
...However, the party's new name, the People's Party of Free Russia, creates problems...
...At the press conference on August 22, Gorbachev spoke both as president of the USSR and as general secretary of the CCCPSU...
...The party statutes were copied from the statutes of the VKP(b...
...Boris Yeltsin could only decide the fate of the Communist party of the RSFSR...
...The collapse of communist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe offered a graphic example of what had become possible...
...Prigarin and A.V...
...About 30 RSFSR People's Deputies had joined, including the chairman of the Soviet of Nationalities of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR, R. Abdulatipov, and his deputy, V. Syrovatko...
Vol. 39 • September 1992 • No. 4
