(b. 1944), Russian politician, chair of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and head of its parliamentary faction since 1993.
Gennady Andreyevich Zyuganov was born on June 26, 1944, in Mymrino, Russia. A member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's (CPSU) ideological department from 1983, Gennady Zyuganov sympathized with the conservative opposition to Gorbachev and helped found the anti-reform Russian Communist Party within the CPSU in 1990. He first gained notoriety as an anti-Gorbachev polemicist on the eve of the August 1991 coup and as a defender of the Russian Communist Party when Yeltsin banned it (from August 1991 to November 1992).
As a prolific opposition publicist from the early 1990s, Zyuganov's achievement was the rehabilitation of communism as a serious intellectual and political force. Ideologically, however, his "conservative communism" came to owe less of a debt to its Marxist-Leninist forebears and instead drew heavily from the idea of a Soviet "national Bolshevism," which justified communist rule more for its service to national greatness than for its promise of a classless future. Zyuganov argued that Marxism was only one of the methods necessary for analyzing modern society, in which defense of Russian cultural and historical traditions, preservation of a global zone of influence, and the forging of broad alliances with national capitalists against the West took precedence over class revolution within Russia itself.
Zyuganov realized that the communists urgently needed new ideas and allies merely to survive during and after the ban on their party, and that following the collapse of the USSR they could ignore issues of personal, ethnic, and national security only at their peril. More perceptively, he judged that Russia's post-1991 intellectual commitment to market liberalism was deeply equivocal and offered in its stead a kind of "state patriotism," based on the idea that communists and non-communists alike could unite in defending Russia's state as the cradle of their common cultural heritage. This, he believed was a unifying vision that could fill the "ideological vacuum" left by Marxism-Leninism. Indeed, Zyuganov sought to reverse the liberal consensus that the period from 1917 to 1991 was a "Soviet experiment." To achieve this, he argued that liberalism itself was the imposition alien to the collectivist and spiritual traditions that had been best expressed under communism. Simultaneously, Zyuganov was an energetic and practical politician; his alliance-building with nationalist and other opposition politicians helped him to become Communist Party leader in February 1993 and to formulate a consistent theme. He based his presidential bids on broad "national-patriotic fronts" that sought to extend the communists' appeal.
Zyuganov has presented a complex figure, whose leadership, ideas, and personality have been much critiqued. The prevalent Western view of him as a plodding party bureaucrat is a caricature, highlighting his lack of charisma while underestimating his tactical and organizational skill. The view of Zyuganov as a fascistic nationalist, most trenchantly argued by academic Veljko Vujacic, identifies his dalliance with Stalinism and anti-Semitism, while underplaying his moderate conservatism. Marxist charges that he renounced socialism and radicalism entirely correctly identify his debts to conservative Russian nationalism, while underestimating the necessity he faced of making ideological and electoral compromises. Even judged by his own aims, Zyuganov remains a paradoxical figure. His leftist critics have alleged that he failed to move Russia "forward to socialism" by failing to provide an intellectually coherent socialist alternative. While his arguments have found increasing appeal, particularly in governing circles, and his party was the most popular in parliamentary elections in the 1990s, he lost to Yeltsin in the 1996 presidential election run-off, and Vladimir Putin beat him by over twenty percent in the first round of the presidential election in March 2000.
Bibliography
Lester, Jeremy. (1995). Modern Tsars and Princes: The Struggle for Hegemony in Russia. London; New York: Verso.
March, Luke. (2002). The Communist Party in Post-Soviet Russia. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
Vujacic, Veljko. (1996). "Gennadiy Zyuganov and the 'Third Road'." Post-Soviet Affairs 12: 118 - 154.
Zyuganov, Gennady A. (1997). My Russia: The Political Autobiography of Gennady Zyuganov. Armonk, NY:M.E. Sharpe.
—LUKE MARCH
