Communist Party of the Russian Federation
The Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF; Russian: Коммунистическая Партия Российской Федерации; КПРФ, romanized: Kommunisticheskaya Partiya Rossiyskoy Federatsii; KPRF) is a communist political party in Russia that officially adheres to Marxist–Leninist philosophy.[3] It is the second-largest political party in Russia after United Russia. The youth organisation of the party is the Leninist Young Communist League.
For other uses, see Communist Party of Russia (disambiguation).
Communist Party of the Russian Federation Коммунистическая Партия Российской Федерации
The CPRF can trace its origin to the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which was established in March 1898. The party split in 1903 into a Menshevik (minority) and Bolshevik (majority) faction; the latter, led by Vladimir Lenin, is the direct ancestor of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and is the party that seized power in the October Revolution of 1917. After the CPSU was banned in 1991 by Russian President Boris Yeltsin in the aftermath of a failed coup attempt, the CPRF was founded at the Second Extraordinary Congress of Russian Communists on 14 February 1993 as the successor organisation of the Communist Party of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (CPRSFSR). It was the ruling party in the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian Federal Assembly from 1998 to 1999.
The party's stated goal is to establish a new, modernized form of socialism in Russia through peaceful means.[9][10] Immediate goals of the party include the nationalisation of natural resources, agriculture, and large industries within the framework of a mixed economy, with socialist relations of production that allow for the growth of small and medium enterprises in the private/non-state sector.[11]
Criticism[edit]
Marxist theoretician Boris Kagarlitsky wrote in 2001: "It is enough to recall that within the Communist movement itself, Zyuganov's party was at first neither the sole organisation, nor the largest. Bit by bit, however, all other Communist organisations were forced out of political life. This occurred not because the organisations in question were weak, but because it was the CPRF that had received the Kremlin's official approval as the sole recognised opposition".[77] Andrei Brezhnev, grandson of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, has criticised the CPRF's Zyuganov's rapprochement with the Russian Orthodox Church.[78]
Demonstration of the party
Party membership card
