ABSTRACT

As the twenty-year anniversary of the collapse of communism in Russia approached, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) remained Russia’s second largest party – an eventuality barely conceivable in the heady days of August 1991 when Boris Yeltsin suspended (and later banned) Party activity in Russia. Of course, on closer inspection the current picture is far less rosy. In the 2007 parliamentary elections, the KPRF polled 11.57 per cent, its worst result since just after its 1993 foundation, and a vote-share just one-sixth of the election winner United Russia. Although the party still regularly polls around 20 per cent in regional elections, its salad days were clearly in the 1990s, when its leader Gennady Zyuganov ran Yeltsin a (relatively) close second in the 1996 presidential contest, its faction was the largest in the Duma and it was overall by far Russia’s electorally most successful and organisationally biggest party.