BY BORIS KAGARLITSKY
MOSCOW — There has been heated discussion in the camp of the Russian opposition this northern Spring. The crisis of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) led to the emergence of "renovating" tendencies in its leadership, while also spurring hopes for the appearance of a "new opposition" that corresponds to the needs of Russian society.
These hopes were connected above all to left-leaning economist Sergey Glazyev, who has pledged to run in the December election at the head of a new list, under the pretentious name of the "Homeland" bloc. Anyone who pinned their hopes on Glazyev, however, is to be profoundly disappointed.
He is an attractive candidate because of his independence from the old nomenklatura (Soviet bureaucracy) and current political clans, but his electoral list is certain to destroy his image as a person able to suggest something new.
Glazyev's is a strange opposition slate. It contains Dmitry Rogozin, a champion of the Russian government's policies towards Kaliningrad Province. Kaliningrad used to be part of East Prussia until 1945, and was settled by Soviet citizens, mainly Russians, after the Germans were expelled in 1945. The province is bounded by Poland, Lithuania and the Baltic Sea. With Poland and Lithuania to join the European Union, the enclave is set to become a Russian island within the EU.
The question of how contacts between the province and the Russian "mainland" are to be managed is now a significant irritant in Russian-European relations; the Russians want the freest possible transit, while European governments are appalled at the thought of millions of Russians jumping from trains and vanishing into the common European space. In addressing the issue, Rogozin is bidding for credentials as a "patriot".
On the rights of the ethnic republics within the Russian Federation, such as the Chechens, Rogozin also supports for Kremlin's conventional "Great Russian chauvinist" line.
Aleksandr Dugin, the leader of the far-right nationalist Eurasia movement, is also a member of the Homeland bloc. Dugin has repeatedly declared his "total support for Putin in spite of everything". Their participation in the bloc will help attract the fascist vote, but will repel everyone else.
The formation of Glazyev's bloc was accompanied by an unseemly squabble in the Russian Party of Labour (RPT), founded by the Astrakhan deputy Oleg Shein and the trade union leader Sergey Khramov. From the beginning, there had been something strange about the collaboration between Shein, who won his place in the Duma (parliament) with far-left slogans, and Khramov, who is known for his right-wing views. What brought the RPT undone, however, was not disagreements over principles, but behind-the-scenes machinations around the manner in which the places on the list would be divided up.
When the RPT leaders entered Glazyev's bloc, they explained to their bewildered party activists that it was necessary to make any compromise simply to get people into the Duma. There was also talk of Duma positions being sold. Eventually, after expending enormous effort to persuade the party congress to accept a decision to join the Homeland bloc, the RPT leaders found they had been excluded from it.
A second congress was immediately called, at which the RPT decided to join the list of the Eurasia party. Meanwhile, Shein declared that he would remain as an independent in Glazyev's list. This was a natural outcome for a political grouping whose most basic principle was unprincipled behaviour.
Meanwhile, the situation inside the KPRF was no better. Out of complex compromises and intra-party brawls emerged a list in which second place went to the former Kuban governor Nikolay Kondratenko, known beyond the borders of the province solely for his anti-Semitic statements. Third place was occupied by the leader of the Agrarians, Nikolay Kharitonov, equally powerless to inspire anyone. Nobel laureate Zhores Alferov turned down a place in the first three, pleading that he was too busy.
The well-known economist Mikhail Delyagin refused outright to run on the KPRF list once he became aware of its make-up. Others who did not appear in the federal part of the list were the sole worker in the Communist Duma fraction, Vasiliy Shandybin, and the actress Yelena Drapeko. There were, however, a certain number of new people who have distinguished themselves in business. To be fair, it should be acknowledged that there were fewer candidates from business circles in the list than had been expected.
The KPRF congress was accompanied by unprecedented scandals. In the lists, the delegates found large numbers of "commercial candidates", included as a mark of gratitude to sponsors. The most notable of them was Mr Muravlenko, never previously seen among the opposition, but familiar as one of the owners of the oil company YUKOS. The sale of deputies' positions for money is a common practice in the Russian Duma, but this time all proprieties were abandoned.
While communists found that hardly any places remained for them in the lists of their own party, sponsors were complaining of being cheated, maintaining that the number of places they had received did not correspond to the money they had spent. To put it more simply, there had been a case of overbooking, as in an airliner or a hotel, when places are sold without any attempt to check whether they physically exist.
The presence of Kondratenko in second place proves decisively the failure of all the efforts by the "renovators" to change the KPRF's image to something more modern and left-wing. The troika of KPRF leader Gennady Zyuganov, Kondratenko and Kharitonov, appearing at the head of the list, symbolises the inability of the party to haul itself out of the swamp of national-conservative politics. They have clearly decided to place a large cross through the attempt to win new voters among workers dissatisfied with the authorities, and among youth and the intelligentsia.
Nevertheless, it is becoming hard to believe that even the present state of affairs will last. National-conservative voters are gravitating more and more toward the "party of the authorities". In these elections, the KPRF will find that its accustomed electorate is being eroded, at the same time as the party is totally incapable of attracting new people. The number of Duma positions the KPRF gains from the electoral list will not suffer much, but in territorial electorates, where the outcome is sometimes decided by only 1% of votes, the party could lose a significant proportion of its seats. One should not forget the desire of the bureaucracy to ensure the victory of the centrists at any price, including the "correction" of voting figures. In sum, it is easy to foresee that the KPRF is facing a severe and humiliating defeat.
The important question is what will result from the party's next failure. The defeat of 2003 will be a personal catastrophe for Zyuganov, and will provoke an acute leadership crisis. This is where things will become really interesting. Until now not a single party in Russia has changed its leadership, and in this respect the KPRF is just as much the property of Zyuganov as the "Yabloko" party is the organisation of Grigory Yavlinsky, and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia is the personal business of Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
Of course, the Communist Party has a huge membership base, as well as local organisations. Its political character, however, has been determined arbitrarily by a small group of people who have paid little heed to the interests of Russia's broad social layers, or to the ideological principles of the left.
Surveys show that people with left-wing views are the majority in Russia. However, the majority are not prepared to vote for the KPRF. For all its talk of the "general popular interest", the KPRF is nothing like the kind of force which the masses will follow, if not to the barricades, then at least to decisive political confrontations. Throughout the world, the left rests on the workers' movement, youth and national minorities. It is these three groups that have played the decisive role in all the social conflicts of the last century. But these three categories of voters are precisely the people with whom the KPRF is not forging links.
It may be that the renovating tendencies within the party will again make their presence felt after the elections. Until now, the slogan of "renewal" has signified the usual kind of compromise. What Russian reality demands of an opposition, however, is not moderation but radicalism.
The opposition bears a large share of the blame for the situation in which Russia finds itself. The KPRF congress provided no particular grounds for optimism. Paradoxically, however, the present crisis of the opposition is more of a stimulus to change, than proof that change is impossible.
The bankruptcy of the present opposition leadership is obvious not just to left-wing intellectuals and activists, but also to considerable sections of the population. Moreover, the situation is becoming intolerable even for the opposition parties' apparatus, whose members are finding themselves in the unaccustomed role of supporters of change. For the apparatus, after all, the erosion of mass support is reflected in the loss of jobs and of the funds needed for survival.
In sum, the next victory for the Kremlin's political fixers threatens to prove Pyrrhic. The opposition has no other road left except that of reconstructing itself. These changes are long overdue, but this does not make them any less necessary.
From Green Left Weekly, October 15, 2003.
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