Communist Party of the Russian Federation

The Communist Party of the Russian Federation returns to the political foreground as the electoral beneficiary of post-Soviet disappointment. Five years after Boris Yeltsin declared the party illegal, polling suggests that many Russians, alienated by democracy, the market, and the injustice accompanying both, are ready to vote for it. Under Gennady Zyuganov, the party offers not a simple restoration of Soviet rule but a restrained platform that makes the word Communist carry new promises: less corruption, greater national pride, and a spiritual mission for Russia. Its resurgence alarms the newly rich, whose fortunes and political influence depend on Yeltsin remaining in power.

Identity and Political Return

The party’s significance lies in the gap between its recent prohibition and its renewed popular appeal. The book presents the reversal as a measure of how quickly the democratic experiment had lost public credibility. Only five years earlier, the Soviet project had seemed finished; now, amid widespread frustration, the Communist Party appears capable of winning a mass vote. The polls offer no comforting interpretation: people are not merely nostalgic for an old regime, but are responding to the inequalities and hardships associated with the new one.

That distinction shapes the party’s presentation. It is not depicted as promising to reopen the Gulag or rebuild the Berlin Wall. Its return is instead framed through a political climate in which memories of Soviet communism coexist with anger over present conditions. The organization can therefore attract support without proposing an exact return to the past: its name evokes a previous order, while its campaign addresses immediate grievances.

Zyuganov’s Platform and Appeal

Zyuganov, the party’s leader, is described as a cautious, unshowy politician rather than a revolutionary tribune. His program turns the Communist label toward a limited set of widely legible claims: fighting corruption, restoring national pride, and affirming Russian Orthodoxy’s spiritual importance in a new world order. He also presents Jesus as the first Communist and promises to narrow the distance between rich and poor. The book stresses the force of that last promise by asking who could accept a society in which old people die of hunger and cold.

This combination helps explain why the party’s advance unsettles its opponents. Zyuganov does not need to persuade voters to desire the Gulag; he can speak to people who resent corruption and economic insecurity while offering a language of collective purpose. The party’s electoral appeal thus rests on the contrast between a modestly stated social promise and the severe disillusionment surrounding the market transition.

Oligarchs, Privatization, and the Election

The party’s rise directly threatens the interests of the oligarchs. Their proposed loans-for-shares arrangement would allow their banks to lend money to an impoverished state in return for stakes in major assets, including natural gas and petroleum. If the state failed to repay the loans within a year, those holdings could pass into private hands. Because the deadline would fall after the presidential election, the oligarchs had a strong reason to prevent a change of government that might undo the deal. Zyuganov, whom they feared could repudiate it, turned an electoral contest into a question of economic survival for the newly wealthy.

At the 1995 Davos World Economic Forum, Zyuganov’s reception helped make the danger vivid to Boris Berezovsky. Though the oligarchs regarded the Communist leader as a minor politician, journalists and advisers to heads of state gathered around him and treated him with the deference due a possible future ruler. Berezovsky responded by contacting six other powerful oligarchs and proposing that they set aside their rivalries. Their media and financial resources were then concentrated behind Yeltsin’s campaign.

The resulting campaign reduced the choice to Yeltsin or chaos, and Yeltsin or a great leap backward. Newspapers, radio, and television repeated the warning; documentaries about the Gulag, the famine organized under Joseph Stalin in Ukraine, and the Katyn Massacre supplied images of what a Communist victory was meant to recall. The book’s account connects this anti-Communist media barrage to the oligarchs’ material stake: political messaging and the protection of private fortunes worked together.

Limonov and the Limits of Opposition

The party’s advance also exposes divisions among forces hostile to Yeltsin. The National Bolsheviks, including younger activists drawn to Soviet symbols and ideals, are disgusted by propaganda that condemns what they had been taught to love and places those ideals alongside Nazism. Their leader, Eduard Limonov, however, cannot endorse Zyuganov as a straightforward alternative. He regards a choice between Yeltsin and Zyuganov as a choice between two evils and turns instead to a marginal Stalin Bloc, only to be displaced as its candidate by Joseph Stalin’s grandson, Yevgeny Dzhugashvili.

For the runoff, Limonov unexpectedly tells the National Bolsheviks to vote for Yeltsin. His reasoning is that greater chaos might hasten revolution, but the paradox is difficult for the rank and file to follow and feeds a rumor that he is secretly serving the Kremlin. This episode does not make Limonov a representative of the Communist Party; it shows how Zyuganov’s electoral strength forces rival anti-Yeltsin currents to confront a choice they cannot easily resolve. The party becomes the center of a contest over the meaning of communism itself: for some, a vehicle for protest against corruption and inequality; for others, a compromised or insufficient answer to the collapse of Soviet ideals.