Russia's Communists At The Crossroads

Joan Urban, Valerii Solovei

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429977114
• Subtopic: Political Parties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is about the evolution of the communist movement in the Russian Federation from the last years of the U.S.S.R.'s existence through Russia's presidential elections of June july 1996, when the chief contenders were the incumbent president, Boris N. Yeltsin, and his communist challenger, Gennadii A. Ziuganov. Our main protagonist is the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, or CPRF as it is commonly called. But the CPRF was a latecomer to the post-Soviet communist playing field. Its formal establishment came only in February 1993, well after the formation of a number of more doctrinaire communist parties which initially competed with the CPRF and influenced its political profile and conduct in numerous, if not always readily apparent, ways. All of these new Russian CPs emerged from the rubble of what had been the mighty and supposedly monolithic Communist Party ofthe Soviet Union (CPSU). On the Marxist-Leninist political spectrum, however, the range of the official positions espoused by these post-Soviet neocommunist groups was more comparable to that of the international communist movement as a whole in the post-Stalin era than to the CPSU under Nikita S. Khrushchev and Leonid I. Brezhnev.

1

Introduction

This book is about the evolution of the communist movement in the Russian Federation from the last years of the U.S.S.R.’s existence through Russia’s presidential elections of June–July 1996, when the chief contenders were the incumbent president, Boris N. Yeltsin, and his communist challenger, Gennadii A. Ziuganov. Our main protagonist is the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, or CPRF as it is commonly called. But the CPRF was a latecomer to the post-Soviet communist playing field. Its formal establishment came only in February 1993, well after the formation of a number of more doctrinaire communist parties which initially competed with the CPRF and influenced its political profile and conduct in numerous, if not always readily apparent, ways. All of these new Russian CPs emerged from the rubble of what had been the mighty and supposedly monolithic Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). On the Marxist-Leninist political spectrum, however, the range of the official positions espoused by these post-Soviet neocommunist groups was more comparable to that of the international communist movement as a whole in the post-Stalin era than to the CPSU under Nikita S. Khrushchev and Leonid I. Brezhnev.

The post-Soviet Russian CPs began to take embryonic shape during the last year or so of Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s tenure in power (1985–1991). With the reforms “from above” beginning in 1987–1988, the freedom from fear to publish what one wished (glasnost), and the promise of pluralist politics to come, multiple grassroots pressures developed for yet more far-reaching democratic changes in Russia and some of the other Soviet republics. Similar pressures “from below” developed within the CPSU. But these intra-party tendencies, somewhat muted at first because of the longstanding Leninist ban against any manifestation of factionalism, embraced both conservative anti-reformers and reform-minded groups. Moreover, the diverse political-ideological factions that openly surfaced among CPSU activists in the U.S.S.R.’s twilight years were grounded in long-standing differences of opinion which had been concealed from public view by the Soviet party-state’s enforced code of unanimity. For reasons that have yet to be satisfactorily explained, before Gorbachev’s perestroika most Western Sovietologists dismissed the relevance, indeed often even the existence, of these genuine ideological and policy cleavages within the CPSU elite.

The Soviet elite, for the purpose of our analysis, included the senior CPSU functionaries in the full-time party bureaucracy, or apparat, as well as the far more numerous holders of upper-level positions in the multiple, all-embracing state bureaucracies, those whose job appointments required party certification of their political reliability. As a group they constituted the so-called nomenklatura. The Soviet-era elite may also be said to have included the many establishment intellectuals who populated the academic institutes and party-sponsored think tanks and whose prestige and perquisites set them apart from the rest of the population. From the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991 if not earlier, numerous members of these groups rushed to bare to the world the political differences that had in fact divided their ranks for decades.

Many of these individuals in the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (R.S.F.S.R.), as Russia was then known, supported Gorbachev’s policy initiatives and later backed the market reforms of President Yeltsin. A large number were also able to execute successfully a personal transition from Soviet bureaucrat to manager, businessman, or government official in the new post-Soviet order. Here, however, we wish to make one point clear: our purpose in undertaking this book was not to examine the career patterns of these figures from the former CPSU elite, nor was it to evaluate the policies and conduct of President Yeltsin and his administration.

Our concern was with those lower or middle level Soviet-era bureaucrats, researchers, and ordinary employees who were not so easily able to navigate the shoals of system change, let alone repudiate their political convictions. They, too, soon began to expatiate upon the behind-the-scenes character of the former CPSU party-state. However, they stressed the chasm that had always existed within the U.S.S.R.’s ruling party between those who joined it for reasons of personal career advancement and those who did so because of genuine ideological commitment. All too quickly, moreover, the distinction they drew between careerist motives and Marxist-Leninist conviction was transformed into a dichotomy between traitors and patriots. One cannot emphasize too strongly the pervasiveness of this way of looking at things among the neocommunist activists in the post-Soviet Russian Federation. Regardless of specific group affiliation, they were all but unanimous in denouncing Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and their respective inner circles as self-serving opportunists who were, to boot, guilty of high treason.

For students of the international communist movement in the Soviet era, the notion of a cleavage between careerism and conviction among communist party members was taken for granted. A fundamental difference between ruling and non-ruling CPs involved precisely this type of differentiation. The presence or absence of authentic ideological belief contributed to a crucial psychological gap between members of non-ruling CPs and members of ruling communist parties, between individuals devoted to the cause of somehow, someday bettering their societies and those already in power who were concerned primarily with maintaining their status and privileges. Nevertheless, the rapid emergence of semi-clandestine Marxist-Leninist groups in Russia in late 1991, in the wake of the ban on the Soviet and Russian communist parties after the hardline coup attempt that August, furnished telling evidence that in the CPSU too, even in the “era of stagnation,” there had been pockets of true believers in the official ideology. Elaboration of this point is one of the basic themes of this book.

There is one characteristic common to all of the post-Soviet Russian CPs: their shared view that the results of the Yeltsin government’s economic “shock therapy” and pro-Western orientation vindicated once and for all the writings of Marx and Lenin. On the one hand, economic conditions in the Russian Federation bore witness to Marx’s views regarding mass impoverization, social polarization, and the degradation of the human spirit under capitalism. On the other hand, the influx of consumer goods and food products from Europe and the newly developed periphery of East Asia, along with the export of Russian raw materials to the West, corroborated much that Lenin had to say about imperialism. Russia, they insisted, was being transformed into a colonial outpost of Western powers, led by the U.S.A.

Another idea held by all Russian neocommunists is that the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. was an act of treason on the part of both Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Never mind that Gorbachev had struggled to the last to preserve the Soviet Union on the basis of a new and equitable federation treaty. Never mind, too, that Yeltsin had acted in concert with the chiefs of state of Ukraine and Belarus in signing the early December 1991 Belovezhskie agreements dissolving the Soviet Union, or that most of the leaders of the Central Asian and Caucasian republics of the former U.S.S.R. later appended their signatures to this act. For the post-Soviet Russian communist parties the lowering of the Soviet flag over the Kremlin on December 25, 1991, was a symbol of high treason rather than national liberation. It was a move undertaken, so they argued, at the behest of Yeltsin’s Western “bosses” as well as his spurious democratic cronies in Russia.

It is important to keep in mind these shared perceptions within the post-1991 Russian communist movement for two reasons. First of all, this book focuses largely on the differences among the many neocommunist formations in post-Soviet Russia. Under these circumstances, it is easy to lose sight of the broad areas of agreement which explain the emergence and strength of the Russian communist movement in the mid-1990s. Secondly, all too often the beliefs of the “born again” Russian Marxist-Leninists were disregarded by Western observers of contemporary Russian developments. If it was commonly thought before perestroika that the Soviet order could never really change, it was just as frequently assumed after 1991 that communism in Russia was somehow dead and gone forever.

At the same time, a countervailing conclusion which emerges from our study is that the development of the post-Soviet Russian communist movement was just one facet of the explosive, if fitful and incomplete, growth of a democratic political culture in the Russian Federation. We ask the many persistent skeptics in this regard to reflect for a moment upon the political profile of Soviet Russia in 1985–1986 compared with that of 1995–1996. During the former time frame, as Gorbachev began his tenure as the last CPSU General Secretary, Andrei Sakharov was still under house arrest in a city that was still called Gorky (now Nizhnii Novogorod) for daring to endorse democratic civil liberties and condemn the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Ten years later, under a constitution approved by popular referendum (however flawed), competitive and relatively fair elections were held for the new State Duma (the lower house of parliament) as well as for the presidency of the Russian Federation. Russia was plainly a tortoise rather than a hare in the modern industrial world’s march to create democratic institutions. But the Russian people, once released from the grip of communist dictatorship, have shown themselves to be quick and determined learners. One of the purposes of the present volume is also to shed light upon this phenomenon.

The book as a whole has two major focal points. One pertains to the political profiles of the multiple, diverse components of the post-Soviet Russian communist movement as well as the infighting among them. To this end we analyze, on the one hand, the ultra-leftist Marxist-Leninist groups which emerged in 1991–1992 and, on the other hand, the mainstream Communist Party of the Russian Federation formed in early 1993. Chapters 2 through 4 as well as the last section of Chapter 5 deal with these topics, including the question of where the individual CPs fit on a broadly conceived Marxist-Leninist ideological spectrum.

The other major focus involves the CPRF’s organizational and programmatic development as well as its political conduct in general, especially during the election campaigns of 1995 and 1996. In Chapter 3 and again in Chapters 5 through 7 we examine in particular the theoretical positions and political strategy of the CPRF chairman, Gennadii Ziuganov, whose writings have led some in the West to view him as a potential “national Bolshevik,” or fascist. We also, however, explore two other major tendencies within the CPRF, which we label “Marxist reformers” and “Marxist-Leninist modernizers.” At times their influence has been as great, if not greater, than that of Ziuganov and his nationalist associates.

Throughout our discussion of the multi-faceted communist movement’s evolution, we also touch on various aspects of overall developments in post-Soviet Russia. Highlights include the events leading to President Yeltsin’s September 21, 1993, dissolution of the Soviet-era legislature, the Russian Supreme Soviet and the Congress of People’s Deputies. That step sparked, in turn, the immediate takeover of the parliament building by opposition deputies and their supporters and the eventual outbreak of armed conflict in the center of Moscow on October 3–4, 1993. It is obviously of critical importance to examine the role of the different communist groups in that bloody conflagration, in which over 150 civilians perished.

The new constitution framed by the Yeltsin administration and approved by popular referendum on December 12, 1993, along with the electoral system implemented during the parliamentary contests of 1993 and 1995, were also important benchmarks in Russia’s post-1991 evolution. These institutional developments provide the background and political context for our examination of the CPRF’s organizational growth and political conduct. As the only communist party to run in the 1993 elections and to be represented in the State Duma, the Ziuganov party enjoyed significant access to offices, funds, and communication links which were unavailable to the extra-parliamentary CPs.

A brief overview of the chapters that follow may be useful to the reader. Chapter 2, “From the Debris of the CPSU: The Rebirth of the Communist Movement,” deals with the creation in late 1991, early 1992 of a half dozen or so small Marxist-Leninist parties, tracing their origins back to anti-reform factions which emerged within the CPSU during 1990–1991. That, of course, was the period when the Soviet political system as a whole as well as the CPSU party bureaucracy, or apparat, were fragmenting under the dual impact of Gorbachev’s halting steps toward democratization and the rush by the Soviet republics to assert their sovereignty vis-à-vis the Kremlin’s central authority.

Chapter 3, “Unity in Diversity: The Founding of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation,” focuses on the party that would soon become the most important communist organization in post-Soviet Russia. The proceedings of the CPRF’s February 1993 congress suggested the presence of three more or less discrete political-ideological tendencies among the party’s activists. The most prominent one at that time was represented by Marxist reformers, individuals who had supported many of Gorbachev’s changes but had balked at their ultimate denouement: the disintegration of the CPSU and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. A second tendency, the one led by the party’s newly elected chairman, Ziuganov, was characterized by unvarnished ethno-centric Great Russian nationalism. The third and weakest current was more orthodox Marxist-Leninist in outlook. Although not nearly as doctrinaire as some of the neocommunist groups described in Chapter 2, it sought to update traditional Soviet ideological precepts to fit the modern world. We thus call its proponents Marxist-Leninist modernizers.

Chapter 4, “The CPRF, the Radical CPs, and the Constitutional Crisis of 1993,” addresses the escalating tensions between the executive and legislative branches of government during 1992 and the first half of 1993, which culminated in Yeltsin’s dissolution of the Russian Congress of People’s Deputies and the bloody clash that followed. During the months leading up to the ultimate confrontation, Ziuganov opted for caution, calling for the creation of a broad national front coalition to oppose the Yeltsin government by peaceful, non-violent means. Most of the more radical neocommunist parties, in contrast, were prepared for a violent showdown with the regime. As we shall see, however, when push did come to shove between the president and the defenders of the Russian parliament (the so-called White House), all of the communist groups including the CPRF were to some extent implicated in the events culminating in the outbreak of mob violence on October 3. That explosion, which included the armed storming of the Moscow mayor’s offices next to the White House and an abortive assault on the state-run Ostankino TV station several miles away, prompted the president’s decision to order the military bombardment of the White House at dawn the next day. The honeymoon of Russian democracy was over, and Yeltsin’s standing in the eyes of many of his fellow citizens would never be the same again.

Chapter 5, “Ziuganovism in Theory and Practice,” examines some of Ziuganov’s political writings during 1993 and 1994. In these works the CPRF chairman revised many of the basic tenets of Marxism-Leninism, expounded upon his thinking regarding the special character of Russia through the ages, and set forth his vie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 From the Debris of the CPSU: The Rebirth of the Communist Movement
• 3 Unity in Diversity: The Founding of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation
• 4 The CPRF, the Radical CPs, and the Constitutional Crisis of 1993
• 5 Ziuganovism in Theory and Practice
• 6 The Political Evolution of the CPRF, 1994–1995
• 7 On the Campaign Trail: The CPRF’s Electoral Strategy
• 8 Whither Communism in Post-Soviet Russia?
• Bibliographical Note
• About the Book and Authors
• Index