For Victory? The Crises and Dilemmas of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation

IT HAS LONG BECOME COMMON for analysts to predict the demise of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) and its irrelevance as a political organisation. The CPRF in turn has repeatedly confounded such analyses. In 1993 Richard Sakwa came to the understandable conclusion that communist groups in Russia were 'part of an exhausted tradition nursed only by the old generation', just before the CPRF re-entered parliamentary politics in the Duma elections of December 1993.1 After the party's defeat in the presidential elections of 1996 and repeatedly throughout the period of the 6th Duma (1995-99), analysis focused on its future organisational and ideological viability. A common assumption was that the CPRF had reached a 'crossroads' by the summer of 1996, and thereafter might split, or turn itself into a non-communist organisation (either social democratic or nationalist), or both.2 Yet, having neither split nor renewed itself ideologically, the party actually achieved a better result on the party list vote in 1999 than in either parliamentary election before. Moreover, soon after this election, the party obtained the re-election of its candidate Gennadii Seleznev as parliamentary speaker, and a significant number of parliamentary committee chairmanships. So was there any real substance to such rumours of the CPRF's difficulties? What was the real significance of the communists' election performance? How did this influence the prospects of the party's evolution? This article seeks an explanation of the CPRF's long-term development up to 1999 by focusing on how an 'anti-system' communist party aims to achieve its ends in a pluralist system. The CPRF's ideology, culture, structure and much of its mass membership and electorate are anti-system in orientation. Yet the CPRF's elite made the transition to a within-system opposition within the parliament of 1995-99, and this was marked in the conduct and aftermath of the 1999 elections. The contradiction