and Soviet offices. In the capitalist world, the Comintern guided and directed Communist parties, helped to build their organizational structures, educated party members in Marxism-Leninism, and demanded that its followers defend the USSR’s policies and leaders.
To manage its various activities, the Comintern had a substantial bureaucracy. Formally, Comintern congresses, held in 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, 1924, 1928, and 1935, determined its polices. In reality, the congresses approved the policies and nominees put forth by the CPSU delegation and the ECCI. Congresses elected the ECCI, which implemented and interpreted policies between congresses. Within the ECCI apparatus, departments provided the ECCI’s leaders with information about the fraternal parties; functional departments attended to routine operations.
Given the Comintern’s activities abroad, it cooperated with the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and with military intelligence and security organs. Originally relations among them provided for some measure of administrative autonomy. But from the mid-1920s cooperation between the Comintern and the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, security organs, and the military intelligence services deepened.
Although the Popular Front raised the Comintern’s international reputation, within the USSR domestic pressures placed it in a vulnerable political position. From the mid-1930s anxieties about foreign threats, a growing spy scare, and fears that foreign agents held CPSU party cards meant that vigilant police and party leaders increasingly scrutinized the Comintern. When mass repression erupted in 1937, Comintern workers and members of fraternal parties living in the USSR were often victims. By 1939 the Comintern apparatus lacked many essential personnel. Although it was not disbanded until 1943, the repression of 1937 and 1938 destroyed the Comintern’s ability to function and its reputation abroad. See also: COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION; PARTY CONGRESSES AND CONFERENCES; POPULAR FRONT POLICY; ZINOVIEV, GRIGORY YEVSEYEVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Braunthal, Julius. (1967). History of the International, vol. 2, tr. Henry Collins and Kenneth Mitchell. London: Praeger.
Carr, E.H. (1982). The Twilight of the Comintern, 1930-1935. London: Pantheon Books. Chase, William J. (2001). Enemies within the Gates? The Comintern and the Stalinist Repression, 1934-1939. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Crossman, Richard, ed. (1950). The God That Failed. New York: Harper Books. Degras, Jane T., ed. (1956-1965). The Communist International, 1919-1943: Documents. 3 vols. London: Oxford University Press. Kahan, Vil?m, ed. (1990). Bibliography of the Communist International (1919-1979). Leiden: E. J. Brill. McDermott, Kevin, and Agnew, Jeremy. (1997). The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Table 1. CPRF election results
Election Vote share Parliamentary seats Dec. 1993 Duma
12.4
47
Dec. 1995 Duma
22.3
157
1996 presidential first round (Zyuganov)
32.0
1996 presidential second round (Zyuganov)
40.3
Dec. 1999 Duma
24.3
113
2000 presidential (Zyuganov)
29.2
The Communist Party of the Russian Federation (Kommunisticheskaya partiya Rossiiskoi Federat-sii), or CPRF, descended from the short-lived Communist Party of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (CP RSFSR). This was formed as an anti-perestroika organization within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1990. Boris Yeltsin suspended it for its tacit support of the August 1991 coup and banned it on November 6, 1991. A group of CP RSFSR leaders headed by its First Secretary Valentin Kuptsov successfully achieved the partial repeal of the ban in the Russian Constitutional Court in November 1992, and the party reconstituted itself in February 1993 as the CPRF. Gennady Zyuganov became party chair at the party’s refoundation as the candidate most likely to unite differing party trends.
The party was modeled on the template of the CPSU as a communist mass party, from primary party organizations (PPOs) in eighty-eight of Russia’s regions, up to a 159-member Central Committee representing divisional leaders, a ruling seventeen-person presidium, and a number of deputy chairmen below Zyuganov. Internally, it operated on a relaxed form of hierarchical Leninist discipline known as “democratic centralism.”
The CPRF’s financial support incited much controversy. Officially it relied on membership subscriptions and the voluntary work of its membership of some 550,000, but the donations of sympathetic “red businessmen,” the material resources of the State Duma, and perhaps even former CPSU funds played a role. Increasingly, as the main opposition party, the CPRF attracted the lobbying of Russia’s chief financial-industrial groups such as Gazprom and YUKOS, and, in late 2002, Boris Berezovsky caused a scandal by offering the party material support.
The party’s internal composition was no less disputed. Although it was publicly unified, and possessed a consolidated leadership troika based around leader Zyuganov and deputy chairmen Kuptsov (in charge of the party’s bureaucracy and finances) and Ivan Melnikov, observers identified horizontal and vertical cleavages throughout the party. In terms of the former, Zyuganov’s “statist-patriotic communists,” who espoused a Great Russian nationalistic position, were the party trend most influential publicly. “Marxist reformers” such as Kuptsov and Melnikov, who espoused an anti-bureaucratic Marxism, were less visible, owing to their vulnerability to allegations of “Gor-bachevism.” Much of the party professed the more orthodox communist “Marxist-Leninist modern-izer” viewpoint. Moreover, whilst the parliamentary leadership was relatively pragmatic, the party’s lower ranks were progressively more inclined to traditionalist militancy.
The CPRF program was adopted in January 1995 and only cosmetically modified thereafter. Though there were many concessions made to Russian cultural exceptionalism, the program committed the party to “developing Marxism-Leninism”
COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION
and a three-stage transition to a classless society with concessions to parliamentary methods and private ownership seen as temporary. The program was strongly anti-capitalist, promising the socialization of property led by the working class, while also promising the replacement of the 1993 “Yeltsin” constitution with a Soviet-style parliamentary republic, and the “voluntary” resurrection of the USSR. In public proclamations and electoral platforms (usually aimed at alliance with a “national-patriotic bloc”), the party was progressively more moderate, promising a mixed economy, not mentioning programmatic aims such as nationalization, and drawing on populist patriotism and social democracy. The contradictions between public and party faces were controversial within and outside the party.
