MOSCOW — Since supporters of President Boris Yeltsin were routed in parliamentary elections in December, Russians have been faced with the prospect that their next president may be Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF). Late in February the English-language Moscow Times reported survey results that put Zyuganov 12% ahead of Yeltsin.
Intensive pro-Yeltsin publicity on the state-dominated television will probably close much of this gap before the first-round poll on June 16. But Zyuganov's candidacy remains a formidable threat, and the Communist leader's actions should he win office are a hot topic of political speculation.
The idea of Zyuganov taking the country's top job provokes alarm among many small property owners. But large entrepreneurs, along with liberal political cognoscenti, are more sanguine.
"There will be no catastrophic consequences if the Communists come to power", political scientist Sergei Markov told the Moscow Times. "There will be a change of course, but they cannot, and do not want to, introduce any radical changes. They are already part of the new establishment."
Quoted in the Moscow Tribune on February 16, Liam Halligan of the Russia-Europe Centre for Economic Policy was more bluntly ironic:"The Communists don't want to transfer assets from the private sector back to the public sector. They want to transfer them into another part of the private sector — their own."
Uneasiness
The cynicism is well merited, at least where the KPRF's leaders are concerned. But Russia's new rich still show a certain uneasiness at the thought of the presidency — invested by the "democrat" Yeltsin with near-dictatorial powers — falling into the hands of the organisation which is the main successor to the party of Stalin and Brezhnev.
Russia's capitalists are far from confident that the KPRF leaders could control the processes that a Communist election victory might well set off.
The turn by millions of Russians to the KPRF has its roots in outrage at the collapse of mass living standards, and in a bitter sense of national humiliation. In electing a Communist candidate to office, these voters would be posting the demand for changes in their interest — fast.
Whatever Zyuganov's plans, his party may act as the trigger for events that shape Russian society far into the next century. The political nature of the KPRF thus demands serious study.
The KPRF is not simply the old Soviet party recycled. After the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was suspended by President Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991, millions of its members who had joined for reasons of career and prestige ceased to identify themselves as Communists. Formal membership of the Communist movement in Russia eventually fell by more than 90%.
Mass links
Rid of this baggage, the KPRF when it was established in February 1993 was far less a party of managers and bureaucrats than the CPSU had been, and far more a party of workers, peasants and pensioners.
With a present membership around 500,000, the KPRF is not only the mass party of Russia's poor, but also of the social layers that have lost most as a result of capitalist counter-revolution. Among the party rank and file, there are few illusions that capitalism has much to offer the bulk of the population except poverty and insecurity.
The KPRF thus has genuine roots among the masses, and the mood among its rank and file is deeply anti-capitalist. But this has not been enough to make the party a militant organisation fighting for the rights of the oppressed.
Much of the problem is that the KPRF is still linked by a multitude of threads to the heritage of the old Soviet party. One of the painful contradictions of the Russian left is that after losing power, the Communist movement failed to purge itself of many of the reactionary and undemocratic attitudes and practices that had helped to doom the CPSU.
Among members of the various left organisations set up following the suspension of the Soviet party, militant opposition to capitalism tended to be part of a mind set that included Russian chauvinism, anti-Semitism and an uncritical nostalgia for the "barracks socialism" of Soviet leaders from Stalin to Chernenko. Concepts of inner-party democracy were little understood, and were applied formalistically or not at all.
The KPRF quickly absorbed many of the former CPSU members who remained committed to the left. But the regroupment process was not uniform.
No doubt to the relief of the KPRF leaders, many of the most determined opponents of capitalism stayed outside the reconstituted party. A self-described "irreconcilable opposition" became a significant feature of the political landscape. Its ideology remains a dizzying brew of the "Russian national idea", of the "Marxism-Leninism" of Stalin-era party schools and of opposition to a supposed "international Jewish conspiracy".
Even if unabashed Stalinists are the exception among KPRF members today, chauvinism and anti-Semitism are far from alien to the party's character. The KPRF's organisational life, meanwhile, resembles that of the CPSU during its final era. Although the KPRF rests on a broad layer of activists, grouped in local committees and cells, involvement by the ranks in decision making is minimal; instructions come from the top down.
The lack of internal democracy means that key issues are decided by a narrow circle of leaders on grounds that are often mystifying. As in the CPSU, the absence of consultation and open debate means that feuding is heated and near continuous. Students of the KPRF describe sharply different strata within the party agitating for often irreconcilable goals, with the leadership imposing a formal discipline and marshalling the rank and file for major campaigns.
The points of dissension arise from deep-rooted differences of social status and economic interest. The exodus of career-minded managers and officials in the early 1990s was by no means total. While the KPRF is far more "proletarian" in its membership than was the CPSU, the leading bodies remain largely an assemblage of "grey suits" — traditional-style functionaries. The KPRF's worker and peasant base has little chance of imposing its will on this leadership.
Moving right
This situation explains a startling paradox in the political course of the KPRF since its founding. So far, the impoverishment of the Russian population as a result of Yeltsin's "reforms" has not driven the KPRF leftward, in line with the shift in popular moods, but to the right.
Particularly in the last year or two, it has again become possible to make a prosperous career through Communist Party membership. KPRF candidates are now well able to win elections. In many parts of Russia, the party dominates local legislatures. For an important layer of functionaries, the KPRF now offers a road to power and privilege.
Zyuganov, who as late as 1990 was a provincial specialist in "Marxist-Leninist philosophy" with only dim career prospects, is as representative of this stratum as anyone.
As the openings for ambitious individuals have expanded, the party's electoralist orientation has come to dominate to the exclusion of almost every other kind of activity. Despite having a large worker component, the KPRF — unlike the "irreconcilables" —has only a tiny influence within Russia's labour movement.
Interlocking with the apparatchik layer within the KPRF is a small but important group of enterprise managers who have found membership of the party, or overt sympathy for it, to be no obstacle to success in business.
With the KPRF now a major force both in the national parliament and in numerous local administrations, the benefits of such ties need no explaining. The prime example of such a "red director" has been Pyotr Romanov, head of one of Siberia's largest industrial complexes and among Zyuganov's rivals for the KPRF's 1996 presidential nomination.
In the KPRF, people like Zyuganov and Romanov, armed with contacts and money, make the decisions that count. Such "Communists" have no personal interest in reversing "reform" — that is, the seizure of former state assets by the managers of large-scale industry and infrastructure.
As the prospect of winning the presidency — and hence the power to decide ownership of assets not yet privatised — has become more real, the anxiety of the leading strata within the KPRF to mollify existing owners of large-scale property, and smooth the way for joining their ranks, has become indecently obvious.
Platform
For KPRF leaders of this type, it is something of an irksome handicap that they can win elections only by securing the votes of workers, peasants and pensioners. With less money than the avowed parties of capitalism, the KPRF has had to rely on intensive canvassing by rank and file members.
That has meant drafting a platform able to motivate the party's grassroots activists, and with appeal for the people these activists are charged with persuading.
The KPRF's platform for the December elections focused on calls for social welfare payments to be brought into line with the subsistence minimum income; for the imposing of price controls, and for limits on profit margins; for the payment of compensation to make up the value of savings wiped out by inflation; and for unemployment to be "abolished". The USSR was to be restored through the voluntary union of Russia with other former Soviet republics. "Control by the people" was to be exercised over the actions of state bodies, and also of enterprises and banks "irrespective of the forms of property".
The pledge to review and to a large degree reverse "reform" was quite explicit. Collective ownership over land and natural resources was to be reinstituted. Privatisation would be reversed where it had been carried out illegally, was against the national interest or violated the rights of workers.
These promises, outlined to voters by scores of thousands of doorknockers, won the KPRF more than a third of the seats in the State Duma, the lower house of parliament. Journalists meanwhile observed that Zyuganov's message varied dramatically depending on which audience — western business leaders or Russian war veterans — he happened to be addressing.
With the parliamentary elections out of the way and the presidential campaign approaching, Zyuganov's public statements became either vacuous or opaque. KPRF parliamentary deputy Gennady Seleznyov, who had won the powerful job of speaker of the new Duma, became the mouthpiece for a startling disavowal of KPRF positions. Talking to journalists on January 18, Seleznyov proclaimed:
"No-one is going to send marines to LUKoil [one of the largest of Russia's new oil firms] to tell its managers that their time has run out and the state is going to take away their shares. No-one is going to destroy successful private enterprises by renationalising them."
So far as Zyuganov and his colleagues were concerned, the radical points of the KPRF platform were mere election fodder. The day after a Zyuganov victory, these pledges would be forgotten.
Can it work?
However, the KPRF leaders' scheme is by no means guaranteed to work. In a contest of lying rhetoric, the KPRF is at risk of being outdone by the Yeltsin regime. On February 13, interior minister Anatoly Kulikov called for "the partial renationalisation of commercial banks and major monopoly commercial structures" as part of a package of measures to ensure funding for the army and Interior Ministry forces. This was more radical than anything Zyuganov had uttered for months.
Meanwhile, the doubts remain that the KPRF could control its ranks and electoral supporters following a Zyuganov victory. A major reason for this scepticism is the fact that, with little presence in the trade unions, the KPRF has almost no ability to deter workers from struggling for the gains they would expect to flow from a Communist election victory.
Western governments are now making huge loan handouts in an effort to get Yeltsin re-elected. The KPRF has no guarantee that a sustained television barrage by the pro-Yeltsin forces, together perhaps with electoral fraud, will not achieve this goal.
The guarantee that might have been, but for which time has now clearly run out, would have had the KPRF modify its focus on electoral work and commit its activist base to building broad, combative movements to defend workers, pensioners, women and the environment. A mass party with such an orientation could have won a commanding position in Russian political life.