Eminentoes: Zyuganov the Terrible
Aikman, David
"Eminentoes: Zyuganov the Terrible" by David Airman Zyuganov the Terrible It was at the Swiss Alpine resort of Davos in early February that Western politicians, business executives, bankers, and economists got their...
...Sipping champagne and purring through the crowds, he stressed that he would not try to expel Western capital from Russia, and that he favored both a mixed economy and continuation of Russia's free press...
...and Western Europe, in contrast with the "Eurasian" civilization of the former Soviet Union plus (ominously) Eastern Europe...
...It would be one thing if Zyuganov were merely a Soviet nostalgist, a party hack who misses Moscow's former superpower status, the perquisites of nomenklatura membership, and the stolid stability of a lumbering, planned economy...
...and assisted by "Zionism" (translation: the Jewish diaspora), to destroy Russia as a nation and turn it into a colonial repository of cheap labor and raw material for Western industry...
...Indeed, in his nationalist sensibility he is far closer to the thinking of a majority of Russians than the other three candidates are, including the bizarre Zhirinovsky, whoremains anti-Communist...
...Boris Yeltsin rallied a then–solidly pro-democratic Moscow citizenry in 1991 to turn back the very coup that Zyuganov no doubt supported...
...Among the first steps Zyuganov would want to take would be to disentangle Russia from the International Monetary Fund and other global financial institutions he deems part of the worldwide anti-Russian conspiracy...
...you get the picture...
...From the historical point of view," he writes in a 1995 monograph called Russia and the Contemporary World, "Russia is a unique type of civilization, the heir and extension of the thousand-year tradition of Kievan Rus, the Muscovite tsardom, the Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union...
...Such moves would likely cause immediate hyper-inflation in the Russian economy and weaken Russia even more...
...Red Ivan the Terrible-ism" might be the best way to describe Zyuganov's ideology...
...In that case, Communist support for the Duma's mid-March vote to restore the Soviet Union — a resolution rather than a binding piece of legislation—would be unpleasant but understandable...
...That would be reasonably comforting, if only it were true...
...and the Atlanticist theory of 'great space...
...What Russia now needs to combat this corrosion of its national life is "an ideology of patriotism," Zyuganov asserts, that can set in motion Russia's rebirth nationally and internationally...
...An astounding 77 percent said they thought the collapse of the Soviet Union had done more harm in Russian life than good...
...This comforting impression was reinforced by supposedly savvy liberal Russian politicians...
...Even in Russian politics, of course, miracles occasionally happen...
...But Zyuganov seems prepared to pay the price, repeatedly referring to Lenin's brutal 'War Communism" of 1918-1921 or Stalin's rallying of the Russian people in 1941 against Hitler as models of how such "patriotism" has saved Russia in the past...
...Succinctly put, Zyuganov has become the chief spokesman for Russian revanchism...
...Zyuganov says that "the Jewish diaspora, which traditionally controlled the financial life of the continent...as 'its market' developed...has become the holder of the `controlling interest,' as it were, of the entire market system of Western civilization...
...He dreams not just of the restoration of Russian global imperialism as soon as possible, but of the neutralization—and eventual destruction—of Western civilization as soon as Russia is in a position to lead the world along this route...
...The American Spectator • May 1996 49...
...As for the West, he maintains, it strives to maintain "a global dictatorship in the name of the preservation of its political, economic, and military leadership...
...About the same number said they were worse off than ever before...
...Some of the "white" nationalists have pursued the analogy further, suggesting that if Moscow is indeed Rome, the U.S...
...In this year's June elections in Moscow, they may be beyond even his remarkable political reach...
...Whatever that ideology might be, it isn't social democracy...
...To acquire the power necessary for such a centrally based re-mobilization of Russian national life, democracy, the free press, and cordial relations with the West would quickly go out of the window...
...Yeltsin defied most prognostications by unambiguously winning a tough 1993 referendum on his own rule and policies...
...It is the belief that Russia's economic and military collapse after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 was the result of a deliberate Western conspiracy, led by the U.S...
...Just six weeks earlier, in elections for the State Duma, Zyuganov's Communists had trounced both nationalist firebrand Vladimir Zhirinovsky's ill-named Liberal Democratic Party and the pro-Yeltsin Our Home Is Russia party...
...and its allies are "Carthage...
...But it was easy enough to conclude that, a little latent bellicosity aside, Zyuganov might slip quite easily into the mold of other former Communists who have returned to power in Eastern Europe —Poland's Aleksander Kwasniewski, for example...
...If Zyuganov should win, even the U.S...
...But basically he's a social democrat...
...But each time Yeltsin's back has been against the wall, the odds seem to get longer...
...So what was Russia's new political big wheel really like...
...But a Zyuganov-ruled Russia would possess nuclear weapons and a vengeful and humiliated population fed a daily diet of poison as to who was responsible for Russia's woes...
...Of all the declared candidates Yeltsin alone may be able to rally the remnants of anti-nationalist electoral support in Russia to keep Zyuganovor Zhirinovsky—at bay...
...Weimar Russia...
...revealed that more than 6o percent thought the answer was yes...
...From the geopolitical point of view, Russia is the pivot and chief weight of the Eurasian, continental block, whose interests conflict with the hegemonic tendencies of the 'oceanic power' of the U.S...
...They are conservatives...
...Once the dust had settled on Russia's complex election process, the Communists turned out to have won control of slightly more than a third of the Duma...
...In 1992, when the Communist Party was still banned, Zyuganov went even further, openly joining with nationalists and anti-Semites as co-chairman of the virulently revanchist National Salvation Front...
...Some Moscow observers suggest that Zyuganov's radical anti-Western stance would enable him to establish beneficial financial relations with the radically anti-Western component of the Islamic world, particularly Iran, Iraq, and Libya...
...It's an ugly word, reminiscent of the heyday of Soviet Cold War propaganda, when it was invariably used by Moscow to characterize the pro-U.S...
...Zyuganov's public record—extensive writings and statements, as well as his zealous pro-nationalist activities from 1991 until he became Communist Party leader in March 1993—makes it clear that, in fact, he remains a fanatically anti-Western ideologist...
...Zyuganov goes on: "From age to age the West, like an insatiable Moloch or a giant whirlpool, has been sucking into its womb useful raw materials and a cheap colonial labor force, new territories and spheres of influence, goods, money, ideas, and brains...
...Unlike Stalin in 1946, against whose threats to the free world Winston Churchill raised the rallying cry at Fulton, Missouri, Zyuganov is unlikely to be able to mount a credible military threat to the West for a while to come...
...The sale of advanced weaponry to these states could bring in sufficient funds to make up for the probable post-Zyuganov removal of the IMF's recent $io billion credit to Russia and other states in the Middle East...
...Not exactly yet, but with Zyuganov, coming closer...
...But today, revanchism has a very real content right in the heart of Moscow...
...With this overwhelmingly gloomy and revanchist electoral mood, nothing but a miracle is likely to prevent the election of the most zealously ideological anti-Western Russian leader since Stalin...
...Zyuganov, however, subscribes to a rack of paranoid Russian historiographic theories that interpret Western opposition both to Russia's nineteenth-century empire and the Soviet Union as part.of a concerted anti-Russian crusade dating back to the grand schism—in 1054— 48 May 199 6 The American Spectator between the Papacy and the Patriarchate of Constantinople...
...votes," Mikhail Margilov of the pro-democratic Yabloko bloc told a British reporter in Moscow...
...policy of West Germany...
...A new Punic war, they say, needs to be waged...
...As he was in meetings with foreign business representatives a few months earlier, Zyuganov proved suave, even charming...
...The biggest reason to worry about Zyuganov's worldview is that he is currently well ahead of the other three declared contenders —Zhirinovsky, Yeltsin, and Gorbachev—in Russia's presidential race...
...EMINENTOES by David Airman Zyuganov the Terrible It was at the Swiss Alpine resort of Davos in early February that Western politicians, business executives, bankers, and economists got their first close-up look at an emerging new presence on the global political scene: Russia's Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov...
...Nor is it "Red Gaullism," as someone from Moscow's Gorbachev Foundation suggested, the term connoting a sort of blustering demand for international self-respect...
...He joined the Communist Party at a young age, climbing steadily through the apparat until he found himself on the Central Committee at the height of Gorbachev's perestroika in the late 1980's...
...In his paranoia he foams against the "New World Order" (which he claims is "a planetary regime" of Western dictatorship), Francis Fukuyama's theory of "the end of history," Samuel Huntington's theory of the "clash of civilizations," multinational corporations, and, yet again, the "Atlanticist" civilization of the U.S...
...But a month before, he appended his name to a long list of Russian nationalists who signed "A Word to the People," a manifesto published in the nationalist newspaper Den...
...That list included known supporters of the coup, and such neoimperialists as the novelist Aleksandr Prokhanov, an ardent supporter of Russian military intervention outside Russia's borders...
...In fact, "the ideology of patriotism" is what Zyuganov claims Stalin—whom he admires unreservedly—was trying to construct in the Soviet Union in the post-World War II period...
...Sergei Markov, an analyst at the U.S.-financed Moscow section of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, agreed: "The Communist Party is not Communist...
...Lurking in the background is full-fledged anti-Semitism, the stock-in-trade of both Zhirinovsky's "browns" and Prokhanov's neo-imperialist "whites...
...No doubt Zyuganov made a few listeners nervous when he called for the "voluntary re-integration" of the republics of the former Soviet Union and warned that the expansion of NATO to Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic would create a crisis of confrontation in Europe...
...He warmly applauds the sixteenth-century theory that Russia had inherited the global mantle of the Roman and Byzantine Empires...
...He now claims thatYakovlev, formerly the Soviet ambassador in Ottawa, was a Western "agent of influence" in league with foreign forces trying to destroy the Soviet Union...
...He's kept the name to get the DAVID AIKMAN is a former Time senior correspondent...
...elections could be played out in the shadow of a Russia once again moving decisively against the West...
...It isn't clear how much, if anything, Zyuganov knew in advance about the August 1991 coup attempt against Gorbachev...
...A recent Russian national poll asking the question, "Do you think that the West is pursuing the goal of weakening Russia with its economic advice...
...For all of his alcoholism, clumsiness, and brutal handling of the Chechnya crisis, Yeltsin has never been an ultra-nationalist and in fact admires more than any other Russian leader the pro-Western tsar Peter the Great, a figure of hatred for Zyuganov's new "national bolsheviks...
...When other Central Committee members like Alexander Yakovlev were trying to help Gorbachev move Soviet Communism out of its economic stagnation and national decline, Zyuganov wrote memos fiercely opposing such reform...
...Zyuganov, 51, started his professional life as a teacher in Orel, a provincial city some 25o miles south of Moscow...
Vol. 29 • May 1996 • No. 5
