Zyuganov's Communists at Odds

...orthodox Marxist-Leninist revivalism...

...There also was a generational shift in the Communist electorate, with the votes of educated but impoverished urban dwellers in their 3 0s and 40s (teachers, doctors, engineers) helping to compensate for the decline in the Red Belt...

...In doing so, he pre-empted the issues pressed for years by Gennadi A. Zyuganov, chairman of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), and pulled the rug from under him in his own bailiwick...

...The CPRF won over 22 per cent of the vote (twice as much as its nearest competitor) and better than onethird of the seats (157 out of 450) in the powerful lower house...

...But given the CPRF's fault lines, it should come as no surprise that even the leadership bid by Zyuganov—with his non-Marxist notions of the Great Russian historical mission—stirred considerable controversy...

...On July 15 Seleznyov formally launched the Rossiya movement with an estimated 100,000 members...

...Putin may thus have created an opportunity for incipient social democrats within the CPRF to become the dominant force in the Communist Party, or to create a formation of their own...

...At the very least, this controversial undertaking may offer what has until now been lacking in Russia: a potential organizational home for CPRF members oriented toward creating a European-style social welfare state, rather than replicating the Soviet politicaleconomic system...

...The leadership resolved to launch a Duma election campaign resembling the one it had waged in 1995...

...It actually won just over 24 per cent, up two points from its 1995 showing, but a mere one point ahead of the new Unity Party formed in late summer by Yeltsin's entourage...

...Conspicuous for their readiness to work within the system, this group included Svetlana P. Goryacheva, who became one of four Duma Deputy Speakers, and Yuri D. Maslyukov, chairman of the important Economic Policy Committee...

...Putin won almost 53 per cent of the votes and Zyuganov only 29 per cent, down three points from his 1996 first-round showing...

...Once again Zyuganov took the limelight, calling for "the victory of patriots of Russia" and a coalition "government of people's trust...

...Furthermore, the CPRF has before it the example of the former Communist parties of Poland, Hungary and Italy...

...placing term limits on all leadership posts...

...On July 23, one day after the CPRF Presidium voted unanimously against his doing so, Maslyukov joined the Kirienko government...

...On the other hand, public opinion polls consistently indicate massive support for Center-Left socioeconomic policies...

...In the winter of 1998-99 political jockeying was well under way for the quadrennial Duma and presidential elections...

...To the CPRF's organizers it therefore seemed more expedient to urge Left-wing oppositionists to rally around Zyuganov's slogans of "state patriotism" and "Great Russian nationhood," rather than around the ideological baggage of the widely discredited Soviet system...

...Belov delivered an emotional defense of Zyuganov's statist positions...

...and electing Central Committee members by secret ballot...

...It accused various party deputies, including Zyuganov and Seleznyov, of violating the 1995 program by compromising with the Yeltsin regime, and it demanded "a purge of turncoats from the leading organs of the CPRF...

...In early 1998, militant Marxist-Leninists (four of them members of the CPRF Central Committee) penned an angry open letter "To the Communists of Russia...

...Given the anticipated changes in operational rules for the December congress, the outcome of the deepening confrontation among CPRF factions remains uncertain...

...Confrontations occurred at key party meetings in late May and early June, with the Marxist-Leninists taking the offensive and apologists for Zyuganov clearly on the defensive...

...The incipient social democrats were restrained on these occasions, but privately they insisted that a showdown was in the offing between them and old-line Leninists...

...Joan Barth Urban, a new contributor, is a professor of politics at Catholic University of America and author of Russia's Communists at the Crossroads...

...Meanwhile, plans to form a new Center-Left movement named Rossiya, led by Seleznyov and supported by a number of regional CPRF activists, have gone forward in the face of criticism from all sides in the Communist camp...

...Yeltsin's reluctant choice of his assertive Center-Left Foreign Minister, Yevgeny M. Primakov, as the new Prime Minister designate thus met with the Communists' solid backing...

...That he prevailed was a reflection of the times...

...The project was bitterly denounced at the May plenum, with Kuvaev comparing it to the "democratic platform in the CPSU" that had, he claimed, contributed directly to its destruction...

...Zyuganov, though, formulated the parly's public, electoral image in interviews and books stressing his Great Russian ethnocentric bias and anti-Western hostility...

...As the third and last constitutionally permissible confirmation vote was about to be taken in the Duma, a CPRF Central Committee resolution directed all Communist deputies either to vote against Kirienko or to abstain...

...That did not sit well with the CPRF's rank-and-file, who were angry about the extreme polarization of wealth, the regional pockets of abysmal poverty, and the persistent nonpayment of wages...

...Putin may have preempted "state patriotism," but ample space exists to the left of center for a new political formation...

...Its deputies were awarded one-third of the committee chairmanships...

...In early 1993 the hyperinflation of the previous year was slowing down, the words "capitalism" and "privatization" had not yet been sullied by oligarchs, and Boris N. Yeltsin was still able to win ringing personal endorsement...

...After complaining that Zyuganov's campaign speeches had pointedly avoided the word "socialism," he recommended a series of procedural correctives for December's Seventh Congress...

...The first occurred when Yeltsin abruptly dismissed longtime Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin in late March and nominated the young, Right-of-Center Sergei V. Kirienko in his place...

...For a majority of educated urban Russians, hopes for economic betterment and memories of past oppression outweighed any nostalgia for the social safety net...

...Likewise, Maslyukov's inclusion in Primakov's Cabinet as one of two First Deputy Prime Ministers, was now deemed acceptable...

...The Communists were not alone in misreading the electorate...

...Maslyukov himself claimed that half the CPRF's deputies supported his decision...

...They have rarely been aired in public, however, partly because of the disciplined habits of party activists who, after all, belonged to the sectors of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) most infuriated by Mikhail S. Gorbachev's systematic dismantling of its traditional "leading role" and the obligatory unity that dictated...

...Against this backdrop, internecine polemics erupted at the CPRF's May 20 Central Committee plenum and at a similar gathering in June that was held by the pro-Communist People's Patriotic Union of Russia (PPUR...

...Compared to 1996, too, the CPRF vote dropped 5 per cent in the traditional rural "Red Belt" of southern and central European Russia...

...The Marxist-Leninist revivalists went on the offensive, attacking Zyuganov and the entire CPRF Presidium for their ongoing neglect of ideological principles and faulty emphasis on "state patriotism...

...Maslyukov...

...Elections overthe past decade, though, have demonstrated that the majority of Russian voters reject a return to the old political order...

...Hence, while many Communist deputies were publicly unstinting in their criticism of Yeltsin's policies, the moderate Marxists played a constructive role in the Duma that aided his government, notably during the annual budget deliberations...

...It was a daunting challenge to build an effective political organization from the disparate constituent elements that came together in the CPRF...

...Then, in July, Maslyukov said he would become Minister of Trade and Industry in the Kirienko Cabinet...

...After a year of intense debate, the January 1995 Congress approved a theoretical program that was heavily tilted toward the Marxist-Leninists' ideological position...

...Others came into their own during the four-year term, gaining practical legislative experience, public visibility and leverage among their fellow Communist deputies (half of whom weremembers of the party's Central Committee...

...The stunning victories by Putin and his Unity Party in both last December's Duma elections and the subsequent presidential race have triggered what some CPRF insiders call a "struggle for power" among these groups...

...They included dividing up the different top offices currently held by Zyuganov (party chairman, Duma caucus leader, PPUR head...

...Similarly, in private conversations I was told by several supporters of the party's social-democratization that they opposed Rossiya...

...Seleznyov, warning against CPRF intransigence, declared that the party "must fight to win over Putin, not drive him into the camp of the Right-wingers...

...Much will depend on the delegates elected to the Seventh Congress by lower-level party bodies (a reversal of the CPSU's top-down process), and the extent to which they hope for a return to the "bright future" of the Soviet past...

...An official announcement in Pravda revealed that at the meeting where the Presidium registered its disapproval, Yuri P. Belov —a prominent figure long associated with Zyuganov—threatened to call for a Central Committee vote of no confidence in the Presidium if it approved Maslyukov's assuming the Cabinet post...

...All have successfully maneuvered the shoals of social-democratization and thereby facilitated a genuine alternation in power between Center-Right and Center-Left in their countries during the 1990s...

...By the mid-1999 transition to Putin as Prime Minister and the Second Chechen War, the CPRF press had muted its references to internal disagreements...

...The moderates also showed their hand at two critical junctures in the spring and summerof 1998...

...During the Duma election and the presidential race that came close on its heels, Russia's party spectrum and political geography changed fundamentally...

...As for the latent social democrats, one of them, Gennadi N. Seleznyov, was elected Duma Speaker...

...Less outspoken but likewise pragmatic and conciliatory was Ivan I. Melnikov, chairman of the Committee on Science and Education...

...The Communists were deeply divided by this whole sequence of events...

...During the brief Primakov era (September 1998-May 1999), the CPRF focused on spearheading an attempt to impeach Yeltsin...

...A decisive outcome is expected at the Communist Party's forthcoming Seventh Congress, scheduled for December 2-3...

...The results of the presidential contest were not exactly encouraging for the Communists either...

...Moreover, three of those six were basically new: Unity as the upstart "party of power" (with over 23 per cent of the party-list vote), the neo-liberal Union of Rightist Forces (8.5 per cent), and the centrist—despite Primakov's coleadership—Fatherland-All Russia alliance (13.3 per cent), early on expected to be a frontrunner...

...Consequently, the tenuous equilibrium among the three factions began to give way to actual cleavages...

...Two months before the December 19 balloting, the CPRF's pragmatically inclined Ideological Secretary, Alexander A. Kravets predicted at a Carnegie Moscow Center seminar that its list would win 25 to 30 per cent of the party-list vote...

...Among those who owned up to voting for Kirienko—in order to avoid the dissolution of the Duma and early parliamentary elections—were Seleznyov, Goryacheva and Maslyukov...

...Nonetheless, by the mid-1990s a precarious three-way balancing act was achieved...

...His motive, he explained in a letter to Pravda, was to "protect industry and the defense complex from further destruction...

...This strategy proved eminently successful in the December 1995 Duma elections...

...Contrary voices were, of course, also heard...

...and a moderate, pragmatic Marxism that amounts to social democracy...

...From its founding in February 1993, the CPRF has embraced three major propensities: Zyuganov's rabid antiWestern Great Russian nationalism...

...they preferred, instead, a struggle for control of the CPRF...

...The next day Pravda reported that, while many local party organizations agreed with Belov, "at the same time representatives of the VPK [military-industrial complex] and a number of [Communist] governors support Yu...

...Oleg N. Smolin, who ranked number 15 on the CPRF's central electoral list for the Duma but has publicly admitted to being a "social democrat," argued that the struggle for social justice must take precedence over "state patriotism" (and, by implication, Marxism-Leninism...

...Six parties, rather than four as in 1995, met the 5 per centrequirement for a share of 225 Duma seats allotted according to proportional representation...

...It failed to get the necessary twothirds vote (300) in the Duma, but was backed by a very sizable majority of deputies and was hugely popular among ordinary Russians...

...On the positive side, the party didmarkedly better in urban industrial centers, especially those in southern Siberia and the Far East...

...Two of the established parties, the liberal Yabloko Party and Vladimir Zhirinovsky's ultranationalist bloc, trailed all the others, each with about 6 per cent of the party-list vote...

...But an undetermined number defied party discipline and contributed to his receiving 251 votes, 25 more than required for victory...

...Partly because of the larger number of competitors, the CPRF won fewer seats than in 1995...

...It was only the mid-August financial crash that lessened the CPRF's internal disunity...

...Russia's Political Culture - 2 Zyuganov's Communists at Odds By Joan Barth Urban AMID the controversy over Russian President Vladimir V Putin's agenda, one thing is certain: He won election in the first round this past March by appealing to voters' deep and wounded national pride...

...Toward that end, only seven of 18 persons on the central party list were Communists, and allusions to Marxism-Leninism were played down...

...Since its "revival" Congress, the CPRF has been riven by internal differences...

...That served to mobilize the party's constituency, and the explosion of grass-roots outrage over the NATO air war against Serbia seemed to vindicate Zyuganov's anti-Western, statist rhetoric...

...Two of the more outspoken old-liners were the Secretary of the Moscow City Party Committee, Alexander A. Kuvaev, and a prominent Communist journalist, Viktor V Trushkov...

...No less articulate was the chairman of the CPRF's Central Control Commission, Vladislav G. Yurchik...