By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — In a resort complex north of the Russian capital on February 13 and 14, a "refounding-reunifying congress" re-established the Communist Party. More than a thousand people, including 651 delegates from all parts of Russia, discussed and adopted a political declaration and party statutes, and elected a leadership.
The Communist Party had first been suspended, then outlawed in Russia following the failed coup of August 1991. The way for its restoration was cleared by a ruling last November of the Constitutional Court. According to the judges, Russian President Boris Yeltsin had been justified in outlawing the national leadership of the Communist Party, but had overreached his powers in banning the party's local organisations. Communists were given the right to sue for the return of a proportion of the party's confiscated assets.
To meet the requirements of the court, party adherents set up a new national structure and adopted a new name: the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF). In future property suits, however, the party will claim to be the legal successor to the Communist Party of the RSFSR, the Russian wing of the old Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU).
The effort to reconstitute the party also included a membership re-registration drive; party activists claimed that a total of 527,000 people signed up.
At its height in the 1980s, the CPSU had as many as 16 million members, about half of them in Russia. Only a minority of these people joined out of real conviction. The party, the saying went, contained "3% communists and 97% party members"; membership was both a path to success and a virtual precondition for high-status jobs in management and the professions. In addition, the old party in its final months contained large numbers of people who had reacted to the decay of perestroika by becoming enthusiasts for capitalism.
New situation
The CPRF will be a very different organisation. It would be wrong to suggest that the motives of the people who have signed up with the revived party are invariably pure. Nevertheless, the CPRF will have a membership composed overwhelmingly of sincere leftists, prepared to risk being persecuted for their views.
Unlike the situation in the past, the Communist Party will no longer encompass almost the whole of the Russian left, and its role in the anti-capitalist opposition will be much less dominant than the size of its membership — by far the largest of any Russian political party — would imply.
During the final years of the CPSU, the conscious socialists in the party, grouped broadly in the "Marxist Platform", were divided into tendencies with sharply differing strategic outlooks. After August 1991 these formations served as building blocks for new parties whose positions now range from hardline Stalinism to a militant, democratic socialism.
None of these new parties has decided to dissolve itself into the CPRF. So, initially at least, the mass party of the left will contain few of the country's most committed socialist activists — the people who were already working outside the Communist Party in August 1991, or whose answer to the suspension of the CPSU was to set about creating new tools for struggle.
Nevertheless, the CPRF's achievement in re-registering more than half a million members is impressive, indicating that the party can competently perform major organisational tasks. The CPRF's strengths are likely to increase as activists in smaller left groupings decide that their place is in the mass party.
Signs of such a drift had begun to appear even before the February congress; there were indications that as many as half of the members of the small Russian Party of Communists would join the CPRF. The newly adopted rules of the CPRF ban dual membership, but members of other parties have been given until November 6 to make a choice.
An important question for the CPRF will be the attitude taken to it by the Socialist Party of Workers (SPT), the largest left formation to emerge in the months after the banning of the old Communist Party. Realising that the Communist Party would soon be revived, leaders of the SPT actively participated in the process, trying to influence the political line of the new party. A congress of the SPT in two months' time will decide whether to fuse with the CPRF.
A quite different approach has been taken by the other relatively large group to emerge from the suspension of the CPSU — the Stalino-chauvinist Russian Communist Workers Party (RKRP). The RKRP regards the CPRF with frank hostility, both for ideological reasons and as a rival claimant to the former party property. Nevertheless, considerable numbers of RKRP members are likely to join the CPRF.
National voice
Whatever the eventual relationship of forces on the Russian left, the CPRF will have a prominent national voice as a result of its large parliamentary fraction. Of the delegates to the party's congress, 65 were members of the Congress of People's Deputies.
The CPRF thus seems destined to be a significant actor in Russian politics during the coming years. However, it is much less certain that the party will lead a broad opposition to the Yeltsin regime's drive to rebuild capitalism in Russia.
For the CPRF to achieve this will require much more than a large membership and organisational experience. The Russian Communists will need uncommon political skills and, above all, a principled program based on the real interests of the country's workers and scores of millions of new poor. Here, the signs are discouraging.
In a statement issued on February 17, CPRF leaders set themselves the target of winning support among professionals and white-collar workers who have found themselves impoverished or jobless as a result of Yeltsin's "reforms".
These are among the people in Russian society who are most conscious of the need to defend and develop civil rights and democratic forms of rule. It needs little imagination to work out the impact on such people of the news that seven of the individuals charged as leaders of the August 1991 coup attempt attended the CPRF's congress, and were met with tumultuous applause.
Nor would the educated poor have been impressed by the CPRF's near-unanimous decision to elect Gennady Zyuganov as its key leader. Zyuganov is also a co-chairperson of the National Salvation Front, an unlikely-seeming bloc in which hardline Stalinists are grouped with monarchists and other right-wing nationalists in a struggle to restore the might of Russia.
Legacy
More fundamentally, an immense question mark hangs over the very notion of resuscitating the Communist Party. For many workers who joined the CPSU, admission to the party was a much-prized reward for years of selfless toil. It can be very difficult for such people to accept that, among non-members, the CPSU was broadly despised and hated. Even today, amid economic mayhem, only relatively tiny numbers of Russians want a return to Communist Party rule.
It is not as though reactionary ideas have seized the population. Progressive demands, when posed concretely and outside the "communist-democrat" dichotomy, can attract very solid support indeed. The challenge for the Russian left is to develop
a framework in which these ideas can be set before the masses in straightforward fashion, without the message being overwhelmed by the crimes and betrayals of the past.
Leaders of the CPRF would argue that the party rules adopted at the recent congress amount to a clean break with the undemocratic traditions of the CPSU. And indeed, the new statutes guarantee members the right to create "platforms" around contentious questions, and call for the development of base-level decision making. But if the CPRF has really broken with the past, why does it confuse potential supporters by calling itself "Communist"? Why does it claim continuity with the Communist Party of the RSFSR?
Without a serious and open examination of the past, the Russian left is not going to win broad support — or deserve it. Sadly, there is no sign that the leaders of the CPRF have made such an examination.
To be convinced of this, it is enough to read the report in the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya of a speech to the CPRF congress in which Valentin Kuptsov — soon to be elected the party's deputy chairperson — summed up the CPSU's errors. According to Kuptsov, the old party "failed to achieve the full realisation of the economic potential of socialism, let the new technological revolution pass it by, failed to give an up-to-date content to the ideas of federalism and popular soviet power and allowed serious oversights in its cadre policy. All of this culminated in the deception known as 'perestroika', which grew over into the dismantling of socialism."
As well as refusing to confront the real record of the past, the CPRF leaders did their best to dodge vexatious questions from the present. In the words of Andrei Kolganov, a former Central Committee member of the Communist Party of the RSFSR who is now among the leaders of the Party of Labour, the leaders of the CPRF deliberately avoided raising in documents, or discussing at the congress, a variety of pressing questions that were likely to provoke disagreement.
There is a certain logic, albeit contorted, in the CPRF leaders' approach. There are arguably two ways in which a mass party of the left can be built in Russia today. The difficult way, but the only one that promises real long-term results, starts with an unequivocal break from the heritage of the Stalinised Communist Party, backed up by public, searching debate on the crimes and errors of the past. Unless this is done, the party will never enjoy the respect of the masses, and even amid economic collapse, will never attract large numbers of fresh activists.
Large ghetto
The other possible course is the one chosen by the leaders of the CPRF. That is to orient, not toward the mass of workers and poor, but toward a particular closely defined sector: former Communist Party members. If you call for the party to be resurrected, while sidestepping painful issues, you may well succeed in signing up hundreds of thousands of people. But working people in general will find your revived party as repellent as they found the old one. You will have an exceptionally large ghetto, but it will be a ghetto nonetheless.
Organisations which have made a public break with Stalinist traditions and practices would make a grave error by dissolving into the CPRF. The Socialist Party of Workers is thought likely to reject this course at its coming congress.
At the same time, the fact that half a million former CPSU members have shown a willingness to return to political involvement as part of the left is an important development. To take a sectarian attitude toward these people would be unpardonable.
The democratic left in Russia now faces the task of finding ways to collaborate with the CPRF, on both a leadership and membership level, in resisting the nomenklatura-capitalist onslaught and preventing further impoverishment of the working class.