Communists pull in protest vote as Putin suffers setback

ONLY 20 years ago, they seemed consigned to the dustbin of history. Yet in Sunday’s parliamentary polls, Russia’s Communists drew students, intellectuals, even some businessmen in forging an opposition to Vladimir Putin’s wounded United Russia party.

The Communist Party for most Russians evokes images of bemedalled war veterans and the elderly poor deprived of pensions and left behind in a “New Russia” of consumerist indulgence.

Large parts of society had appeared beyond the reach of the red flag and hammer and sickle.Until Sunday.

Not that the Communist Party’s doubling of its vote to about 20 per cent presages any imminent assault on power. The memories of repression in the old Communist Soviet Union, the labour camps and the regimentation are still too fresh for many. But vote for the party they did, if perhaps with gritted teeth.

“With sadness I remember how I passionately vowed to my grandfather I would never vote for the Communists,” Yulia Serpikova, 27, a freelance location manager in the film industry, said yesterday. “It’s sad that with the ballot in hand I had to tick the box for them to vote against it all.”

For many Russians disillusioned by rampant corruption and a widening gap between rich and poor, the Communists represent the only credible opposition to Mr Putin’s party.

Through all the turmoil of the early 1990s when the Soviet Union collapsed, the party kept a strong national organisation based on regions and workplace. With access to official media limited for the opposition, this has been a huge advantage.

The Communists, ironically, also benefited from the votes of some pro-western liberals who saw little or no hope of kindred parties such as economist Grigory Yavlinsky’s Yabloko clearing the 7 per cent threshold to enter parliament. In the event, Yabloko doubled its vote to 3.3 per cent.

“The Communists are the only real party out there and many people know it,” said one western banker in Moscow. “So they vote communist because they realise it is a real vote for the opposition and against United Russia. This is as ironic as you get.”

United Russia was founded largely as a vehicle for Mr Putin, whose authority suffered a blow with the party’s fall in support from 64 per cent in 2007 to 49.5 per cent, according to official results.

The nationalist LDPR is built around one man, the colourful and somewhat eccentric Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Other parties lack national structure.

“United Russia has angered everybody, so people are looking for an alternative,” said Moscow student Alexander Kurov, 19, who voted Communist.

At the Communist Party headquarters – hung with portraits of Lenin and heavy gold-on-red velvet hammer-and-sickle banners – party leader Gennady Zyuganov complained of fraud and described the election as “theft on an especially grand scale”. He said: “Despite their efforts to break public opinion, the country has refused to support United Russia.”

In a bizarre flip, today’s Communists have benefited from satire on Russia’s vibrant blogosphere comparing Mr Putin’s party to the all-powerful Communist Party of Soviet times.

One image shows Mr Putin’s face aged and superimposed on a portrait of doddering Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, mocking the prime minister’s plan to return to the presidency in March for two possible terms until 2024.

Analyst Masha Lipman of the Moscow Carnegie Centre described votes gained by the Communists as “similar to writing a four-letter word on the ballot”.

“It’s a sign of defiance,” she said. “The government has turned this election into a farce and in response people have turned their electoral choice into a travesty.”