16.12.1999
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 any 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. In the turgid ‘theorising’ of such works as Russia - my homeland we discover a doctrine directed not towards the liberation of humanity from alienation and oppression, but towards its continued enslavement. In seeking to bolster his notion of Russian statehood, Zyuganov is not content with ransacking the works of such people as NA Berdyayev - the ‘legal Marxist’ turned mystic and god-seeking apostle of social inequality, or the theocrat VS Solovyov. He goes back to such reactionaries as S Uvarov, minister of education under tsar Nicholas I, whose formula of nationality-autocracy-orthodoxy, employed in the 19th century to underpin tsarism and serfdom, Zyuganov puts to a new use: this trinity, rich in “cultural-historical meaning”, is adapted to the present day, comprising the CPRF (popular unity), the rightwing nationalists (Russian statehood) and the Russian orthodox church (ibid pp232-37). For this former ideologist of the CPSU, writing in a pamphlet entitled Russia and the world today, “Russian statehood grew and ascended from strength to strength as imperial statehood” and the Soviet Union was the “historical and geopolitical continuator of the Russian empire” (GA Zyuganov Rossiya i sovremenniy mir Moscow 1995, p46).
In this pamphlet, Zyuganov treats us to a disquisition on the role of the Russian state that bears the unmistakable imprint of Great Russian messianism: Russia constitutes “a cultural-historical and moral tradition, whose fundamental values are conciliatory, great-powerhood and a striving to embody the highest ideals of kindness and justice”; as “a unique ethno-political and spiritual-ideological unity”, it is the mission of a strong Russian state to save civilisation from the consequences of western dominance and the rise of islam (ibid pp65-6).
Such are the mystical and messianic vapourings of Gennadiy Andreyevich when he dons the philosopher’s mantle. They reek of obscurantism and reaction and are evidently the product of a third-rate, perhaps slightly hysterical and paranoid intellect. Does that mean that we should dismiss them as mere bunkum, or as opportunistic pandering to the nationalist sentiments of the Russian electorate? Certainly not. To do so would be a serious mistake for two reasons. First, it is the duty of communists to fight against reactionary, proto-fascist ideology of this kind in all circumstances, but especially when it is propagated by so-called ‘communists’ themselves. Secondly, Zyuganov is not just a cranky Great Russian chauvinist - he is also an anti-semite.
It can hardly be a coincidence, for example, that Zyuganov has sat on the editorial board of Zavtra, a newspaper, edited by his close collaborator and mentor Prokhanov, that regularly publishes anti-semitic articles. Zyuganov’s own remarks about the baleful influence of Jews on the history of Russia are well documented, as is the fact that, in a manner and tone worthy of the Protocols of the elders of Zion, he attributes Russia’s catastrophic economic state to the machinations of international Jewry. His close colleague, Viktor Ilyukhin, chairman of one of the duma committees, states quite openly: “If there were less Jews in the Russian government, then Russia would not be in the state it is in today.”
In his writings, Zyuganov repeatedly maintains that there were in fact two parties within the old CPSU: a patriotic, Russian party - “the party of Sholokhov and Korolev, Zhukhov and Gagarin, Kurchatov and Stakhanov”; and the anti-patriotic “party of Trotsky and Kaganovich, Beria and Mekhlis, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, Yakovlev and Shevardnadze” (see Rossiya - rodina maya p327). The list is revealing: of the ‘good guys’, all are, of course, Russians and not a single one was a politician; on the other hand, Zyuganov’s contemporary ‘villains’ are linked with the names of three prominent Bolsheviks - LD Trotsky, MM Kaganovich and LZ Mekhlis - whose could hardly have differed more from each other politically, but who just happen to have been Jews.
Needless to say, the CPRF denies that it is remotely anti-semitic. For example, on December 23 1998, the party’s website carried a statement by Zyuganov intended to reassure us that in its ideology and composition the party is “internationalist”. It states: “Any forms in which chauvinism and national intolerance manifest themselves ... are incompatible with communist convictions.” But the language he uses to defend himself actually demonstrates his guilt. Accusations of anti-semitism are just “lies and slander” put about by “Russophobic”, “non-national” and “anti-popular” forces in the mass media. It just so happens that these epithets, like the Stalinist code word ‘cosmopolitan’ - also much loved by Zyuganov - are regularly employed in CPRF materials as euphemisms for ‘Jewish’.
In time-honoured fashion, Zyuganov seeks to dissociate himself and his party from anti-semitism by drawing a sharp distinction between Zionism and what he calls “the Jewish problem”. But the manner in which he attempts to do so is hardly convincing: not only is Zionism part of an imperialist world conspiracy, striving for “world supremacy”, but, he claims, it is also actually worse than Hitler’s national socialism, for “Hitlerite Nazism acted under the mask of German nationalism and strove for world supremacy openly, while Zionism, when its appears under the mask of Jewish nationalism, acts in a concealed manner ...”
Let the conclusion of his extraordinary tirade speak for itself: “Zionisation of the governmental authorities of Russia was one of the causes of the country’s present-day catastrophic situation, of the mass impoverishment and extinction of its population. They cannot close their eyes to the aggressive and destructive role of Zionist capital in the disruption of the economy of Russia and in the misappropriation of its national property. They are right when they ask the question as to how it could happen that the key positions in several branches of the economy were seized during privatisation mainly by the representatives of one nationality. They see that control over most of the electronic mass media, which wage a destructive struggle against our motherland, morality, language, culture and beliefs, is concentrated in the hands of the same persons.” And these are the words of a man trying to prove that he is not an anti-semite.
However painful it may be for some, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the ideological roots of Zyuganov’s approach to the “Jewish problem” go deep into the history of the CPSU. It is a matter of plain historical fact that in the post-war years Stalin was planning a wide-scale purge of Jews. The ZIS case (November 1950) was a precursor - a number of doctors, executives and bureaucrats working at the Stalin Automobile Factory in Moscow were arrested and shot. They were all Jews. On January 13 1953 Tass issued a communiqué concerning the discovery of a “terrorist group of poisoning doctors” and the arrest of prominent Jews began. The February 8 Pravda article ‘Simpletons and scoundrels’ contained a long list of names - the ‘scoundrels’ (Jews) against whom the ‘simpletons’ (Russians) had relaxed their vigilance. Only Stalin’s death prevented the purge, which reportedly included plans for the mass deportation of Jews to Siberia, from going ahead.
In this connection, it should come as no surprise that Zyuganov’s reading of post-revolutionary Russian history is thoroughly Stalinist. He speaks of the “ideological Russophobia of the radical-cosmopolitan [ie, Jewish - MM] wing of the party” having been “seduced” by the idea of world revolution, and incidentally blames the “radical-cosmopolitans” for the “dekulakisation” and mass repressions of the 1930s. Stalin, however, “like no one else” understood the need for the revival of the “Russian idea” and in the post-war years initiated an “ideological reconstruction”, with the patriotic teaching of Russian history and a new approach to religion and relations with the orthodox church (Rossiya - rodina maya pp141-143; p327).
Some might ask why I have devoted so much space to the question of the CPRF’s anti-semitism. Because this vile and perverse aspect of the party’s ideology should alone be enough to condemn it in the eyes of anyone calling themselves Marxist or communist.
Lenin’s attitude to the question was absolutely clear: “Only the utterly ignorant and cowed can believe the lies and slanders against Jews ... It is not Jews who are the enemies of the workers. The enemies of the workers are the capitalists of all countries. The majority of Jews are toilers. They are our brothers as victims of capitalist oppression, our comrades in the struggle for socialism. Amongst the Jews there are kulaks, exploiters and capitalists, just as there are among Russians, just as there are in all nations ... the capitalists attempt to sow and to inflame hostility between workers of different religions, different nations and different races ... Rich Jews, like rich Russians, like rich people throughout the world, ally with each other and crush, oppress, rob and divide the workers ... Shame on those who sow hostility towards Jews, who sow hatred of other nations!” (VI Lenin, ‘On the pogromist persecution of Jews’, quoted in Perspektiva, journal of the Union of Marxists, Moscow February 1999).
On this occasion there is not sufficient space to deal in detail with the CPRF’s programme - in every sense a heavy document - but the main planks of the platform on which the party will fight the December 19 duma election were clearly set out in an interview which Zyuganov gave earlier this year to Pravda correspondent Vladimir Bolshakov.
The party’s campaign will be fought under the central slogan of ‘Victory to the patriots of Russia’, reflecting the fact that, while standing in its own right, the CPRF is also part of a block of more than 200 organisations comprising the People’s Patriotic Union of Russia, a broad coalition of nationalist forces that came into being after the 1996 presidential elections, and of which Zyuganov was unanimously elected chairman. According to Zyuganov, the PPUR can be likened to “the resistance movement operating in France during World War II: it includes communists, agrarians, social-democrats, and rightwingers who have all united on the basis of patriotism ... Our motto is ‘Order in the land - prosperity in our homes’ ... We are all united above all by a common concern for our native land [and] share the same views about the protection of Russia’s national interests and restoration of a unified federal state.” Just in case this sounds rather too rightwing, Zyuganov adds that “Our primary concern is about social justice and the protection of the interests of the working people” (‘When my country is in danger’ Pravda February 9-10 1999).
The sycophantic Bolshakov is too polite to ask Zyuganov how the latter assertion about the interests of the working people, coming from a ‘communist’, can be squared with an economic platform that is almost unreservedly committed to stabilising the hybrid semi-capitalist, semi-bureaucratic socialist relations of production and circulation which at present characterise Russia. As Zyuganov puts it, “I’m for the market ... We have discarded many of the dogmas that used to be as untouchable as the sacred cows in India ... If we come to power, we will not move towards all-out nationalisation and egalitarianism. We are now in favour of state ownership and various other forms of ownership” (ibid).
According to the assessment of Mikhail Dimitriev of the Carnegie Centre in Moscow, this markedly understates the reality of the CPRF’s volte face: “In 1995 a major aim of the CPRF was to alter the outcome of privatisation, including the long-run goal of renationalisation of major industries ... The CPRF is now talking about how to enforce property rights. In unambiguous terms it accepts that, where competition exists, private property should be the dominant form of ownership. Although the CPRF continues to support collective ownership, it now defines this term as it is defined in western economies, meaning private, employee-owned firms. The CPRF’s economic programme supports state ownership only for natural monopolies and enterprises in need of long-term restructuring” (Russian and Eurasian issue brief October 28 1999).
When it comes to answering questions about the CPRF’s relationship to its communist and Soviet inheritance, Zyuganov is necessarily ambiguous, because he needs somehow to reconcile the glaringly contradictory forces both within the CPRF and the broader PPUR.
On the one hand, he tells us that “the Soviet era was the heyday of Russia’s prosperity and greatness, the acme of its history”. When rather pathetically depicting himself and the CPRF as possible victims of future persecution by rightwing extremist oligarchs such as Berezovsky, he has the gall to claim that such persecution will be on account of the fact that Zyuganov and his comrades have “never renounced our credo and have remained communists.” Asked why he has always resisted changing the party’s name, he replies candidly: “We are using it to present our party as a political force capable of returning to the Russians all those social gains, social protection, the prosperity, greatness and power of our country which have been taken away from us by the ‘democratic’ traitors (Pravda February 9-10)”.
On the other hand, “It’s time we stopped dividing the left into true believers and infidels. Social democracy and the communist movement represent one political trend in the struggle for social justice, democracy and human rights. Today’s communists should take and apply the best of the international experience of leftist movements. And not only leftist” (ibid).
What, we might ask finally, do “today’s communists” in the CPRF actually represent? Despite the plethora of contradictions and absurdities in their writings and statements, the answer seems unequivocal: rank opportunism, counterrevolution and a poisonous brew of the most reactionary Great Russian chauvinism and anti-semitism. That is the reality.
It could be argued with some justification that Zyuganov is a true son of Stalin, that his ‘state patriotism’ is the natural continuation of that ‘Soviet’ - ie, Russian - patriotism which characterised Stalinism. Stalin, of course, however sweeping his power, was still obliged by the political character of the Soviet regime and its ideology of Marxism-Leninism to continue claiming adherence to the ideas of revolution, class struggle and proletarian socialist internationalism. Zyuganov is under no such constraint, and has repudiated the lot. Stalin turned Marx, Engels and Lenin into icons in the temple of Soviet state power and nationhood. Zyuganov has discarded the old icons and replaced them with the icons of Russian orthodoxy.
Whatever its precise origins in the realm of the history of ideas, ‘state patriotism’, like all ideologies, did not spring up from nowhere, but arose out of a complex of politico-economic circumstances, namely the vacuum created by the collapse of the USSR. It reflects not the interests of the working class of Russia, but the dashed hopes of that stratum of the Soviet bureaucracy that dreamt that the old system could work and would sooner or later dominate the world.
Either way, born of disillusionment, humiliation and despair, maturing in a climate of nationalism, xenophobia and racism, Zyuganov and his party represent the negation of every value which Marxists and revolutionary internationalists hold dear.