Zyuganov

[Michael Pugliese]

<URL: http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/317/cprf.html >
Weekly Worker 317 Thursday December 16 1999
Red-brown cesspit Michael Malkin examines the Great Russian chauvinism and 
anti- semitism of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation On December 
19 Russia goes to the polls to elect a new state duma. To try and predict 
the outcome of the election is futile. Practically nothing about it has 
appeared in the western media, and even at home the campaign has been 
totally overshadowed by the war in Chechnya and by next year’s much more 
significant presidential election. Whatever the outcome, however, it seems 
probable that the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, at present the 
largest party in the duma, will continue to occupy an important place in 
Russian politics. The purpose of this article is to examine the ideology of 
the CPRF, not least because it is the only major party in the contest that 
lays any claim - albeit a false one - specifically to represent the 
interests of the Russian working class. I hope to show that: first, the 
CPRF has nothing whatever in common with Marxism or (apart from its name) 
communism; secondly, that it cannot even be described as a social 
democratic party or a bourgeois party of the working class; thirdly, though 
dressed up in the rhetoric of communism its politics are thoroughly 
reactionary and chauvinist - in fact the category of ‘red-brown’ is, if 
anything, too generous: as we shall see, there has been a substantial and 
continuing shift away from the ‘red’ towards the ‘brown’. In order to 
demonstrate these propositions, it will be necessary to look in some detail 
at the political and ideological evolution of the party in recent years and 
to summarise the platform with which it is entering the elections. First, a 
few words about the party in general. With a claimed membership of some 
500,000 people and a nationwide infrastructure, the CPRF is Russia’s only 
real mass party. In the almost complete absence of any organised extra- 
parliamentary opposition among the working class, the CPRF has become the 
focus for opposition to the Yeltsin regime and thus appears to be a 
formidable political force. To some extent, however, this appearance is 
deceptive. In the first place, it is an old party (average age of 
membership is around 55) and its social class composition, far from 
consisting of workers, is dominated by a narrow stratum of pensioners, war 
veterans, some former members of the Soviet nomenklatura, and a heavy 
ballast of lower-level former bureaucrats, once employed in the party and 
state apparatus, many of them in the agrarian and military-industrial 
sectors. What we are dealing with, therefore, is hardly a party of 
activists bent on revolution - not even an organisation demanding radical, 
left social democratic structural reforms of the economy and property 
relations, but a ‘clientele’ of the dispossessed, disaffected and 
despairing, for whom the collapse of the USSR and the rape of Russia by 
foreign and domestic capital under Yeltsin has meant not just a loss of 
status, but in many cases social degradation and crushing poverty. The 
history of the CPRF in its present form began in February 1993, with the 
election of Gennadiy Andreyevich Zyuganov to the post of chairman of the 
central executive committee, in the process beating Valentin Kuptsov, a 
left social democrat candidate for the post. Born in June 1944, Zyuganov 
graduated as a maths teacher and later took a doctorate of philosophy in 
social sciences. His party career in the CPSU involved work in the Orlovsk 
city committee of the party and culminated in his becoming one of the 
deputy directors of the ideology department of the CPSU central committee. 
Prior to the collapse of the USSR he was a political commentator on the 
daily newspaper Sovietskaya Rossiya. To call him a hack party bureaucrat 
and Soviet ideologist would not be unduly harsh. In retrospect, we can see 
that Zyuganov began his leadership with two strategic goals: to make the 
CPRF a strong parliamentarist opposition and to supply it with an ideology 
to replace the (in his eyes) outmoded baggage of Soviet Marxism-Leninism. 
His first task was to consolidate the CPRF’s position by dealing with rival 
organisations on his left (the Russian Communist Workers Party, headed by 
Viktor Anpilov) and on his right (the Socialist Party of Workers, led by 
Lyudmila Vartazarova). In this he was successful: Anpilov’s organisation, 
even then a Stalinist party masquerading as revolutionary Leninists, lost 
many activists to the CPRF. A doggedly Stalinist rump of the RCWP still 
exists, but is of only marginal significance. The SPW, a moderate reformist 
organisation also lost much of its passive, elderly membership, attracted 
by Zyuganov’s dynamism. The first defining moment for the CPRF came in 
October 1993, when the long- standing confrontation between Yeltsin and the 
duma culminated in the shelling of the White House by tanks and the 
collapse of the opposition led by Ruslan Khasbulatov and former Russian 
vice-president Aleksander Rutskoi. As the crisis mounted during the summer, 
Zyuganov distanced the CPRF from any involvement in the opposition’s 
attempt at igniting a popular insurrection, making it clear that the party 
was embarked on an exclusively parliamentary road. Having destroyed the 
last vestiges of rebellion, Yeltsin lost no time in consolidating his 
victory: all leftwing organisations (including the CPRF) were banned; new 
elections were called for December 1993, to take place simultaneously with 
a referendum on a new constitution that endowed the presidency with 
dictatorial powers and more or less reduced the duma to a toothless talking 
shop. At this stage the CPRF’s left wing claimed that the only principled 
course was to call for a boycott of the polls, since to do otherwise would 
have meant giving post facto legitimacy to Yeltsin’s bloody outrage. For a 
while Zyuganov followed this line, but as soon as the ban on the CPRF was 
lifted - at the instigation of the Yeltsinite Russia’s Choice bloc, who 
knew a pliant and ambitious politician when they saw one - Zyuganov changed 
course to proposing a ‘no’ vote in the referendum. This set the CPRF apart 
from those other left organisations, whose adherence to a boycottist 
position forced them out of legal politics. Lacking the necessary cadres, 
resources and - most of all - a coherent theory, they were unable to 
partake in serious politics and to all intents and purposes fell apart. 
Some might say that Zyuganov was saving the party - but saving it for what? 
The answer, which like everything else about the CPRF is full of 
contradictions, became clear after the 1993 elections and has remained 
constant. It was not a love of democracy that motivated Zyuganov - the 
internal workings of the CPRF make that abundantly clear. No, Zyuganov 
wanted to save the CPRF so that it could, he hoped, become a party of 
government committed not to the dismantling of Russia’s new ‘capitalist’ 
polity and economy, nor even to its structural reform along social 
democratic lines, but to the creation of a strong Russian state on top of 
the disintegrating economic infrastructure. The CPRF’s record as the main 
party of opposition in the duma has also been marked by contradiction: on 
the one hand, vitriolic condemnation of Yeltsin and his successive prime 
ministers, but on the other, a marked degree of cooperation particularly on 
the state budgets of 1994-96, in which the CPRF acted essentially as a 
lobbyist for the sectional interests of its clientele. During the long 
premiership of Viktor Chernomyrdin and even more so that of Yevgeniy 
Primakov, the CPRF could point to some significant gains in terms of 
increased subsidies for depressed sectors of the agro-industrial and 
military industrial complexes. Under Primakov, the CPRF even had a deputy 
prime minister in the person of Yuriy Maslyukov, the last head of Gosplan 
and a full member of the central committee of the CPSU, who was given 
charge of economic planning. To be sure, there have been sharp 
confrontations between the CPRF duma fraction and Yeltsin over confirming 
the president’s appointment of various prime ministers. Latterly, of 
course, there was the CPRF’s unsuccessful attempt earlier this year to 
impeach Yeltsin for, amongst other things, his role in the “treasonable” 
dismantling of the USSR, his “criminal” war against Chechnya in 1994-6, and 
“genocide of the Russian people”. The pattern has, however, always been the 
same - confrontation, sometimes to the brink of the duma’s dissolution, 
followed by climbdown. Under the current premiership of VV Putin, whose 
standing has been dramatically enhanced by the current war against 
Chechnya, the CPRF, like almost all the main party blocs, has adopted a 
stance of unequivocal support for the government. Within months of his 
election as leader, Zyuganov signalled a rearticulation of the CPRF’s 
ideological past by promulgating his concept of ‘state patriotism’ 
(gosudarstvenniy patriotizm), which we examine below. His tactic was to 
produce a set of theses that marked a complete and unashamed embrace of 
nationalism and then get the party to accept them. At first, there was 
stiff resistance from such leftwing members as the veteran theoretician of 
Soviet Marxism-Leninism, Richard Kosola-pov, and the head of the CPRF in 
the Krasnodar region, Anatoliy Barykin, who complained that the new line 
had ditched any reference to communism. The dispute reached its climax at 
the April 1994 CPRF congress, but Zyuganov got his majority, even though he 
conceded the omission of any reference to ‘state patriotism’ from the 
platform for the 1995 duma elections, using instead the compromise formula 
of “soviet state patriotism” and calling for the “unity of patriotic and 
internationalist aims” (Documents of the CPRF’s 3rd Congress pp96-118). The 
background to the 1995 duma poll, from which the CPRF emerged as the 
strongest party, were particularly auspicious: there was yet another 
economic crisis and the war in Chechnya had started to go badly for the 
Russian army. Support for the CPRF rose markedly and Zyuganov scented the 
possibility of power. Hence, he backtracked on the new line to some extent, 
and larded the party’s programme with references to Marx and Lenin, in the 
hope of harnessing the broadest possible support across the old left. At 
the same time, the CPRF conducted its election campaign in such a way as to 
guarantee that independent, revolutionary leftists were denied ant 
possibility of success, even though that meant ensuring that Yeltsin and 
Chernomyrdin supporters gained the victory in the constituencies concerned. 
Under the new constitution, the CPRF’s power in the duma, strong on paper, 
was actually meaningless. The approach of the presidential elections in 
1996, in which Zyuganov was the CPRF’s candidate, marked the decisive 
ideological shift. He succeeded in having all references to socialism 
expunged from his platform - unless you include otiose references to the 
CPRF’s desire to bring in a constitution based on “genuine - ie, Soviet - 
people’s power”. Strenuous efforts were made to convince Russia’s embryonic 
capitalists that their interests would be safe in Zyuganov’s hands. Hence, 
CPRF specialists, under the leadership of Tatiana Koryagina, produced an 
economic platform, This can be done today, that promised active state 
support for privately- owned financial-industrial combines, making repeated 
references to the example of China and Roosevelt’s New Deal. The 3rd 
Congress’s commitment that “property acquired in defiance of the law, the 
country’s interests and the rights of labour” would be expropriated. Instead, 

 the state’s central goal would be “collaboration with corporations and 
their allies (financial- industrial groups, consortiums)”. The creation of 
such groups would be encouraged by means of tax breaks, easy credit and state 

 investment. In short, a promise of support for capital, albeit with the 
emphasis on Russian capital in the service of “Russia’s national-state interests”. 

 Nothing could more starkly illustrate the CPRF’s capitulation to the New 
Russians. The very phrase ‘state patriotism’ should by itself be enough to 
demonstrate that Zyuganov’s politics have nothing in common with Marxism. 
Its practical meaning became crystal clear during the 1994-96 Chechen war. 
At the time of the invasion, the CPRF actually voted to condemn the Russian 
military offensive - a sign that there were liberal voices which Zyuganov 
had yet to silence. CPRF duma deputy Leonid Pokrovskiy went to Chechnya 
with human rights commissioner Sergei Kovalev and worked alongside him 
trying to expose the reality of the army’s war on Chechen civilians. 
Zyuganov was incensed, accused Kovalev of “one-sidedly” supporting Chechen 
separatists and intrigued to procure his dismissal. When Russia’s 
application to join the Council of Europe was later being considered, in 
January 1996, Kovalev addressed an open letter to Strasbourg warning that 
Russia’s conduct in Chechnya made it ineligible for membership. Zyuganov’s 
reaction? To side unequivocally with Yeltsin - his supposed sworn enemy - 
and uphold the right of Russia to bomb civilians in order to defeat 
“Chechen terrorists”, arguing that any weakness on Russia’s part - ie, any 
respect for human rights and human lives - would “help the growth of 
fundamentalism in the Caucasus” (Segodnya January 27 1996). The CPRF, 
needless to say, said not a word in protest at the clampdown which then, as 
recently, took place against Chechen and other Caucasian nationals living 
in Moscow and other Russian cities. Small wonder that Zyuganov has been a 
firm supporter of prime minister Putin’s latest Chechen adventure - in 1996 
and thereafter Zyuganov was by far the most strident critic of Yeltsin and 
Chernomyrdin for surrendering. Somehow he manages to square this with 
wanting to impeach Yeltsin on the grounds of having conducted a “criminal” 
war in Chechnya. Perhaps the crime, in the eyes of Zyuganov, the ‘state 
patriot’, is that Russia lost. ‘State patriotism’ is of course just old- 
fashioned Great Russian chauvinism. However, in attempting to put some 
theoretical flesh on the bare bones of the concept, Zyuganov has concocted 
a poisonous mix of hysterical xenophobia and a touch of paranoia. He starts 
by repudiating the idea of class struggle, and dismisses the obvious 
contradiction between Marxist class analysis and his “all-national world 
outlook” as more apparent then real: in his vision, “The whole Russian 
people, overcoming schisms imposed on it from without and within, will 
constitute itself as one unified conciliar personality, one family.” The 
class approach must be “enriched by the cultural-historical and social- 
psychological” (GA Zyuganov Derzhava Moscow 1994, p39). These “schisms”, be 
it noted, are not the product of class society, but have been “imposed” on 
the Russian “family”, in part by wicked foreigners. This is bad enough, but 
in his book Russia - my homeland, published two years later, Zyuganov goes 
much further, actually rejecting the idea of class struggle altogether, and 
blaming it for Russia’s sorry plight: we are told that the main 
contradiction in Russian society is not between classes, but “between the 
ruling regime and the rest of the population”. What is more, “The most 
powerful means for the suppression of Russian national self-consciousness, 
the main weapons for its break-up and the cutting off of its historical 
continuity, are the ceaseless attempts to antagonistically counterpose in 
people’s minds the ‘white’ and ‘red’ national ideas” (GA Zyuganov Rossiya - 
rodina maya Moscow 1996, p218). In developing his concept of what he calls 
the ‘Russian idea’, Zyuganov claims that it represents a synthesis between 
the ‘white’ and ‘red’ ideas: “Unifying the ‘red’ idea of social justice, 
which takes shape as the worldly hypostasis of the ‘heavenly’ truth that 
‘all are equal before god’, and the ‘white’ idea of nationally comprehended 
statehood, perceived as the existent form of the things that have been 
sacred to the people for centuries, Russia has finally found its longed-for 
mutual agreement between estates and classes, its might as a great power” 
(ibid p219). Without this uniquely Russian synthesis, “national salvation” 
is impossible. To make it quite clear just where his ideas are coming from, 
Zyuganov tells his readers to study the works of Ivan Ilyin, the 
reactionary philosopher, whose anti-Bolshevik writings were very popular in 
white émigré circles, and whose tome On resisting evil by force - an 
incitement to counterrevolutionary violence - Zyuganov describes as his 
“best book” (ibid p63). That Zyuganov, far from being a communist, or even 
a social democrat, is in fact a brazen counterrevolutionary and a 
propagator of virulent anti-communism should by now be obvious.