With his grim red face and ill-fitting suits, Gennady Zyuganov reeks of the Soviet regime that he so longs to restore. Considering how well the Russian Communist Party's vote has held up under his leadership, it frightens me to think how much better the Communists might do under a more charismatic boss.
The same thought may be worrying the Kremlin. Having tolerated Mr Zyuganov's party as a tame opposition for the past couple of years, President Vladimir Putin appears now to have given his political fixers a free hand to undermine the Communists as best they can before parliamentary elections come round again in December next year.
The Kremlin is right to worry. It has manufactured a loyal coalition of centrist political parties guaranteeing it a majority in the Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, where the Communists and their allies have a third of the seats. But opinion in the country is proving more difficult to manage. Recent polls show that Communist support remains obstinately high, at about 35 per cent - and support for the pro-Kremlin parties remains weak, at about 18 per cent. Mr Putin's huge personal popularity is not transferring easily, if at all, to the political parties joined under his patronage.
Worse, some of the fundamentals now favour the Communists. Urban Russians are angered by government plans to withdraw government subsidies for heating, lighting, and municipal services, which will double and triple household bills. Rural Russians are worried by plans to make agriculture land freely saleable, which they fear rightly -- will drive collective farms and their workers off the land. Even under Mr Zyuganov's ham-fisted leadership, the Communists could use these issues to gain ground in the Duma next year, and to win some regional elections along the way.
That may be cause enough for the Kremlin to turn on the Communists. Whether Mr Putin's fixers can find the tactics to undermine them is another matter.
The Kremlin's main success to date has come from encouraging its loyal majority in the Duma to strip the Communists of some committee chairmanships there. Mr Zyuganov reacted by ordering other high-ranking Communists to resign from their parliamentary posts - including Gennady Seleznev, the speaker of the Duma. When Mr Seleznev and two others refused the order, Mr Zyuganov had them expelled from the party, provoking talk of a split.
Now Mr Seleznev, a sleek moderate by Communist standards, may set up a new centre-left political party. And if he does, the Kremlin will back it to the hilt, in the hope of siphoning votes and cronies away from Mr Zyuganov. But here, I fear, the Kremlin's luck will run out. It has tried but failed to create a new party of the centre which appeals to voters, despite having some genuine enthusiasm for that cause. I do not see why it should do any better in trying to foist on the country a new party of the left in which it does not even believe itself.
Another Kremlin manoeuvre has been rather more clumsy and, perhaps, rather more dangerous. Having decided that Communists are conservative people at heart, even reactionary, the Kremlin is trying to win away their votes by promoting a party appealing directly to the reactionary in them. At any rate, that is the only construction I can put on the sudden emergence of the People's Deputies, a hitherto fairly anonymous pro-Kremlin group in the Duma, as the voice of a new populist agenda.
The demands of the People's Deputies include the outlawing of male homosexuality and the reintroduction of the death penalty. They have not yet connected the two, but from the way their leader, Gennady Raikov, has been talking of late, I fear it can only be a matter of time.
Today, the newspaper "Komsomolskaya Pravda" publishes a long interview with Mr Raikov that is a gem of po-faced reporting. Asked why he voted for a new Criminal Code in 1995 which removed penalties for homosexuality, Mr Raikov explains: "We simply didn't know at that time! We looked at the statistics and we were surprised to find that there were only 15 people in jail for that offence But now we can see how that bit of the old criminal code was a barrier shutting out international organisations of homosexuals with powerful financial resources In those days they were afraid! Now you can't even turn on the television!"
One problem with this sort of talk, apart from its intrinsic evil and idiocy, is that it may attract more support than the Kremlin intends. Serious pressure to restore the death penalty and outlaw homosexuality would do a lot of damage to Russia's image in Europe, if rather less in parts of the US.
Another problem for the Kremlin is that Mr Raikov may end up taking votes not from the Communists but from the perversely named Liberal Democratic Party, the existing home of Russia's demagogues and conspiracy theorists. The LDP has certainly spotted the danger. Its parliamentary leader, Alexei Mitrofanov, says that if Mr Raikov's bill outlawing homosexuality looks in any danger of passing into law, then the LDP will introduce a bill outlawing lesbianism. Mr Mitrofanov adds traditional noises about Russia's declining population and the duty of women to reproduce. But his main aim is surely to make Mr Raikov look even more ridiculous, and in this he is succeeding handsomely.
If the Seleznev and the Raikov gambits both fail to do much damage to the Communists, I wonder what the Kremlin strategists will think of next. It had better be good. Otherwise they may end up with the worst of all worlds destabilising Mr Zyuganov as party boss, while leaving the Communist vote intact for a more capable leader to inherit.