Russia's Communists at the Crossroads

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.