Gennady Zyuganov

Gennady Zyuganov emerges as the drab, cautious leader of the Communist Party whose candidacy turned popular anger at post-Soviet democracy and market reform into a formidable electoral challenge. The book’s account makes his importance visible not only in his program but in the alarm it provokes: when he appears to be a possible future ruler, the oligarchs unite their money and control of the media to keep Boris Yeltsin in power.

Political setting and rise

In Moscow, Zyuganov belongs to a crowded and unstable opposition milieu. Eduard Limonov first tries to find a political gang rather than immediately form one himself, moving among nostalgic Communists and hard-line nationalists. The book places Zyuganov in that mixture alongside Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Viktor Alksnis, Anpilov, Makashov, and Vladimir Prokhanov. These figures share neither a settled program nor durable alliances; their political paths and clashes are presented as convoluted, while their ideas and coalitions remain uncertain. Zyuganov’s later prominence is therefore a change in scale: he becomes more than one name among the opposition figures Limonov approaches or observes.

His electoral opening grows out of the failures and inequities of the new order. Five years after Boris Yeltsin declared the Communist Party illegal, polls indicate that many Russians are ready to vote for it. The narrative attributes this shift to deep dissatisfaction with democracy, the market, and the injustice accompanying them. The economic shock helps explain the stakes. Price liberalization brought inflation of 2,600 percent; vouchers sent to Russian citizens on September 1, 1992, were already nearly worthless when they arrived. Many recipients sold them for little, while resourceful buyers accumulated shares and became oligarchs. The account does not make Zyuganov responsible for these conditions; it shows the widening contrast between popular insecurity and newly concentrated wealth that gave his appeal force.

Program and public appeal

The book distinguishes Zyuganov’s campaign from a straightforward promise to restore Soviet repression. He is not proposing to reopen the Gulag or rebuild the Berlin Wall. Under the Communist label, he offers a cautious platform centered on fighting corruption, restoring national pride, and affirming the spiritual mission of Russian Orthodoxy in the face of the new world order. He also presents Jesus as the first Communist, joining religious language to a program that might otherwise appear difficult to reconcile with it.

His economic promise is deliberately simple: the rich should become less rich and the poor less poor. The narrative notes that even readers who reject the rest of his platform can recognize the appeal of preventing old people from dying hungry and cold. This formulation does not erase the historical burden of the Communist Party, but it helps explain how its leader could attract voters after the collapse of the Soviet system. Zyuganov’s politics answer immediate hardship as well as a desire for national dignity; the account presents those concerns as the basis of his popular strength, not as evidence of a mass wish to restore every institution of the past.

The election and the oligarchs’ response

Zyuganov’s challenge becomes tangible at the 1995 World Economic Forum in Davos. Although the oligarchs regard him as a ridiculous, minor politician, journalists and advisers to heads of state gather around him and record his comments with the deference accorded to a possible future Russian ruler. His remarks are described as moderate, making the attention more unsettling to the wealthy business leaders who had expected to shape the post-Soviet economy.

The immediate danger, for them, is not simply his Communist identity. The oligarchs have arranged a loans-for-shares scheme: their banks lend money to an impoverished state, with shares in valuable, not-yet-privatized assets such as natural gas and petroleum serving as collateral. If the loans are not repaid after a year, the lenders can take those assets. Since the deadline falls after the presidential election, they need Yeltsin to remain in office; they fear that Zyuganov might repudiate the arrangement. His candidacy thus threatens to interrupt a transfer of public wealth that the oligarchs expect to complete.

Boris Berezovsky responds by calling six other powerful oligarchs and urging them to set aside their disputes. Their combined financial and media influence is directed toward Yeltsin’s reelection. Newspapers, radio, and television repeat the choice as Yeltsin or chaos, or a great leap backward. Documentaries about the Gulag, Stalin’s famine in Ukraine, and the Katyn Massacre, along with commissioned films about the purges, reinforce the campaign’s warning against a Communist return. The account does not portray Zyuganov as controlling this response; rather, his rise precipitates it. The resources of the new wealthy class become a political force deployed against the candidate whose redistributive promise imperils their interests.

Narrative significance

Zyuganov’s role is defined by the contrast between the modesty of his stated platform and the scale of the reaction to his candidacy. He is characterized as cautious and unremarkable, yet his campaign makes visible how dissatisfied the electorate has become and how much the oligarchs stand to lose. The election is therefore narrated not only as a contest between a Communist and an incumbent, but as a struggle over who will control the wealth produced by privatization and the public story told about the Soviet past.

The narrative also sets Zyuganov’s appeal beside Limonov’s own political world without treating them as identical. Zyuganov appears among the mixed company of Communists and nationalists with whom Limonov associates, but the evidence does not make him a member of Limonov’s party or attribute Limonov’s actions to him. His distinct function is electoral: he turns discontent into a plausible route to power. The oligarchs’ rapid coordination, their use of every major medium, and their fear that the loans-for-shares deal could be reversed make his candidacy a measure of the fragility of the new order—and of the extraordinary means its beneficiaries are prepared to use to preserve it.