Gennadi Zyuganov

Gennadi Zyuganov appears briefly in the book, not as the subject of a biography but as a revealing political example. The Communist presidential candidate’s imagined account of what might have saved the Soviet Union—Stalin living at least five years longer and completing his final campaign—compresses the book’s argument about the unresolved violence inside the postrevolutionary order. The stability Zyuganov longs for would have required a purge that the book presents as both the regime’s promised resolution and a further expression of its constitutive betrayal.

Identity and Political Appearance

Zyuganov enters the discussion as a Communist presidential candidate in 1996. The book supplies no personal history or account of his campaign beyond this identification; its focus is the political dream attributed to him and what that dream reveals about the legacy of the October Revolution. He functions as a concise example of a later effort to imagine how the Soviet project could have been made whole.

The Dream of a Completed Stalinist Project

In the account, Zyuganov imagines that events in the Soviet Union would have turned out well if Stalin had lived at least five years longer. Stalin would have completed a project that joined the elimination of cosmopolitanism with a reconciliation between the Russian state and the Orthodox Church. The book interprets that imagined endpoint more starkly: its realization would have required Stalin’s planned antisemitic purge.

The desired reconciliation is therefore not presented as a simple return to social harmony. Its proposed means are further exclusion and state violence. Zyuganov’s counterfactual makes a settled political order appear attainable, but the condition for attaining it is the intensification of the coercion already built into that order. The hoped-for end of instability and the continuation of purging are bound together.

Purges and Revolutionary Betrayal

The book places this political wish within its account of Stalinist purges. The purges of high Party ranks drew on an accusation with a particular historical charge: members of the new nomenklatura were treated as guilty because they had betrayed the Revolution. In this reading, the terror did not merely erase the revolutionary past. The regime repeatedly reenacted its betrayal through arbitrary arrests and killings that threatened the very officials who embodied its stabilized hierarchy.

That is why the purges are described as the form through which the betrayed revolutionary heritage survived and continued to haunt the regime. Zyuganov’s imagined successful final purge points toward a fantasy of release from this tension: if the campaign could be completed, the new order might at last become stable. Yet the completion of the purge would not undo the violence or betrayal that produced the need for it. It would carry them further.

Historical Context and Significance

The surrounding historical argument resists treating Stalinism either as an accidental deviation from the October Revolution or as proof that the Communist project was totalitarian from its beginning. The book instead asks readers to hold together the revolution’s emancipatory potential and the historical necessity of its Stalinist outcome. Within this frame, Zyuganov’s dream is significant because it expresses a desire to preserve the revolutionary inheritance by imagining a more decisive Stalinist resolution of its contradictions.

The account also distinguishes the transformations of the revolutionary period. The years from 1917 to 1921 brought emergency and upheaval, while the Soviet New Economic Policy period consolidated state power without fundamentally remaking much of the social body. The forceful collectivization and rapid industrialization begun in 1928 targeted that social composition directly: peasants were liquidated as a class of individual owners, and the old intelligentsia was replaced. This wider history sharpens the significance of Zyuganov’s counterfactual. The sought-after stability belongs to a political sequence in which transforming society and consolidating rule were inseparable from coercion. His brief appearance thus gives a later voice to the wish that the Stalinist order could have resolved its revolutionary inheritance, while the book’s analysis shows why that resolution could only reproduce the conflict it promised to end.