Novaya Gazeta No. 63 August 2002 THERE IS SUCH A PARTY The Communist opposition to the CPRF: a very familiar, but European, appearance Author: Anatoly Baranov [from WPS Monitoring Agency, www.wps.ru/e_index.html] THE NEW COMMUNIST PARTY, LED BY ANDREI BREZHNEV, UPHOLDS TRADITIONAL COMMUNIST IDEAS LIKE INTERNATIONALISM AND CLASS SOLIDARITY. IT OPPOSES THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION. IT IS ONE OF THE NEW LEFT-WING GROUPS EMERGING FROM THE SHADOW OF GENNADY ZYUGANOV'S PARTY.
The New Communist Party: an inside look
>From our files:
The New Communist Party is truly new; it was formed less than a year
ago. Paradoxically enough, the "new" communists differ from all the
rest in their deference to traditional communist ideas like
internationalism and class solidarity. On the other hand, they
disassociate themselves from the "Russian idea" promoted by CPRF
leader Gennady Zyuganov, and they despise financial capital and neo-
liberalism. The New Communist Party may be accepted by Western
leftists, who are fed up with the speeches of CPRF leaders. Time will
tell whether the New Communist Party can really establish itself in
Russian politics. Everything will depend on the "new communists"
themselves.
If the New Communist Party, associated with the name of Andrei Brezhnev, had failed to arise on its own, it would have been necessary to invent it. After all, the concentration of all opposition under the aegis of the CPRF has been pointless for a long time.
Essentially, the right-left alliance of communists and monarchists - in the form of the Russian People's Patriotic Union (only a subdivision of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation) - has achieved its purpose. This was to preserve the opposition after the violence of October 1993. These days, the Russian People's Patriotic Union is just a convenient election campaign tool. The CPRF itself is no longer happy about its alliance with the extreme right.
The ideological failure of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation played into the hands of new party secretaries in the regions, informally rallying around Alexander Kuvayev, secretary of the Moscow Party Committee. He drove Gennadi Seleznev and other compromise-seekers out of the party, and shoved aside the old guard led by Valentin Kuptsov. It is reasonable to expect that the next step will involved eliminating the right-wing "allies". Specifically, Kuvayev and Co. may attack Sergei Glaziev and his "drift to the right". Doing that will be particularly convenient when Glaziev is defeated in his campaign to be elected governor of the Krasnodar territory.
Certain events have been happening outside the Communist Party of the Russian Federation as well. Left-wing groups which are not members of Gennadi Zyuganov's party (or those expelled from it by the party bureaucracy) are busy with some party-building of their own. Observers agree that the process was apparently initiated by the elections for the Moscow municipal legislature, at which the Moscow Party Committee failed miserably. This election made it plain that neither Zyuganov nor Kuvayev are working for the party's stated goals; they are actually afraid of winning and finding themselves in positions of power. The first suspicions of this sort appeared after the presidential election in 1996.
Under these circumstances, the arrival of Andrei Brezhnev - the grandson of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev - with program statements taken straight out of Marxism-Leninism textbooks, and therefore familiar to the majority - was fated to be a stunning success. Not to mention the fact that Andrei Brezhnev, 40, is much better-looking than his grandfather.
To tell the truth, Leonid Brezhnev would have described some statements of Andrei Brezhnev as "European communism": something frowned upon during the era of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The party leaders of old would have made acid comments about Andrei Brezhnev's attraction to bourgeois parliamentarism and his insufficiently militant nature, his weak links with the working class and particularly weak links with the impoverished peasantry. Moreover, they would never have seen the features of a professional revolutionary in Andrei Brezhnev, a graduate of the Moscow State University of International Relations and former Foreign Trade Ministry official.
This is what Andrei Brezhnev himself says on the subject of European communism.
Andrei Brezhnev: You mean you have failed to notice certain changes in the world over the last two decades? The Communist Party of the Soviet Union is no longer the ruling and leading force. The Soviet Union is no more, and the Russian Federation cannot take its place. What seemed to be secondary and undesirable in the time of my grandfather (I mean European communism) has become the major direction of development by the early 21st century.
Question: Do you mean to say that your grandfather was wrong to criticize European communism?
Brezhnev: He was absolutely correct to do so, at the time. Those who disbanded the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were wrong - with their failure to understand (or perhaps they understood all too clearly) that the collapse of the Soviet Union itself was bound to follow.
Question: In general, the people wanted democracy and liberty. What they got was privatization, new borders, and a sad lack of a common idea.
Brezhnev: This lack of a common idea was initially welcomed. I remember that it was mistaken for liberty, ideological liberty. What everyone failed to understand than was that people can't tolerate a total absence of goals and objectives.
Some quasi-patriotic idea is being concocted nowadays, both on the right and on the left. But where is proletarian internationalism?
Question: The vocabulary of CPRF leaders no longer includes the term "proletarian"...
Brezhnev: It has never included the term at all. After all, there were no proletarians in the Soviet Union: there was the working class, there were peasants in collective and soviet farms, there was the working intelligentsia. We have proletarians now - and that means we have impoverished workers. The Communist Party, the only party until recently, utterly missed the advent of the proletariat. It is still mouthing its boring phrases about the "anti-people regime". There are no "common people" any more. Oleg Deripaska and Mikhail Fridman - are they not members of "the people"? They are. And the regime is anything but anti-people, from their point of view.
Given the situation, we have to explain to the people this simple truth: the Russian bourgeoisie is not an ally of Russian workers - but ordinary Ukrainians or people from the Caucasus, those who work 12 hours a day for a pittance, are allies.
Question: According to their memoirs, the communist leaders of your grandfather's time sound quite democratic in their views. But the society they ruled was anything but democratic. What do you think about these double standards: one ideology for "the elect", another for the masses?
Brezhnev: Yes indeed, Politburo members were on first-name terms among themselves. There was no deference to rank or bureaucracy in the apparatus of the Central Committee. The situation differed as distance from the center increased. I would not say, however, that society was not changing. The direction of development of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and public opinion in the USSR, were clearly shifting towards liberty and democratization. We did not need to topple the regime for that. Vietnam is a vivid example of how a totalitarian regime can make way for a democratic and free society within a single generation under the guidance of the communist party. The people of Vietnam have not had to suffer so much in the transition period. It has been different in Russia - and I don't think we are any better off nowadays.
Together with the Kremlin, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation has participated in everything that has happened in Russia in recent years... On the one hand, it was the opposition. On the other, it was the necessary counterweight making the whole system stable. Is it surprising that we want to go our own way?
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