The KPRF needed to do this some time ago, I think.
uvj at vsnl.com wrote: THE TIMES OF INDIA
THURSDAY, JULY 1, 2004
Russian Communist party splits
PTI
MOSCOW: Russia's main opposition Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) on Thursday split as rebels ousted Gennady Zyuganov from the party leadership and picked a new interim leader.
Ahead of KPRF's 10th congress, beginning on Saturday, the opponents of Zyuganov, 59, met at the parallel plenary meeting of the party central committee to vote him out of leadership and elected Vladimir Tikhonov, a moderate Duma-member, as an interim leader to prepare for the congress.
According to Zyuganov's rivals, out of 158 members of the KPRF central committee, 87 met separately to take the decision.
Zyganov has been under pressure from moderate opponents to quit. They blamed him for debacle at last parliamentary polls in December in which the communist party could retain only 55 in the Duma out of 131 seats in the earlier house.
Last month, KPRF's number two Valentin Kuptsov, a moderate, announced his decision to quit at the congress and urged Zyuganov to do the same to pave way for young leaders.
However, Zyuganov had accused Kremlin of plotting to split the communist party claiming that he had the vast majority of supporters in the party ranks.
Unhappy with the opposition to his policies within the party, Zyuganov expelled former speaker Gennady Seleznyov and many popular leaders from the KPRF.
Last in the series of expulsions, Zyuganov-led central committee expelled the red businessman Gennady Semigin from the top party body. In a parallel development, Semigin, who had financed communist party's last Duma polls, staged "a coup" against Zyuganov by seeking his expulsion from the People's Patriotic Union of Russia (PPUR) an amalgam of pro-Communist parties and groups.
Copyright © 2004 Times Internet Limited. All rights reserved.
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