Communist Party of the Russian Federation

• 1. Introduction

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  The Communist Party of the Russian Federation was born on the 14th of February 1993, barely two years after the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. It arrived into a Russia that was still reeling from that collapse, a country where the old certainties had dissolved and millions of people were struggling to make sense of the new order. Within months of its founding, the party had half a million members. That was more than double the combined membership of every other party in Russia at the time. How had a successor to a banned party grown so fast? And what exactly was it succeeding? The answers stretch back more than a century, through revolution, civil war, the rise and fall of a superpower, and a coup that lasted only three days. They also reach forward, into elections that some say were stolen, into factory towns and university polling stations, and into the rubble of Ukraine.

• 2. A Century-Long Ancestry

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  The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was established in March 1898, and that founding date sits at the root of the CPRF's own family tree. The party split in 1903 into two factions, the Menshevik minority and the Bolshevik majority. Vladimir Lenin led the Bolsheviks, and it was that faction that seized power in the October Revolution of 1917. The lineage runs from Lenin's Bolsheviks through the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, then through the Communist Party of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, and finally to the CPRF itself.

  Boris Yeltsin banned the CPSU in 1991, following a failed coup attempt. That ban created the vacuum the CPRF would fill. The Second Extraordinary Congress of Russian Communists, held in February 1993, formally declared the new party the successor of the CPRSFSR. Several existing groups merged into it at that moment: Roy Medvedev's Socialist Party of the Working People, Alexei Prigarin's Union of Communists, and much of the rank-and-file of the Stalinist Russian Communist Workers Party. The leader of the Russian Communist Workers Party, Viktor Anpilov, refused to join, a sign that the new organisation was already drawing lines between different visions of what post-Soviet communism should look like.

• 3. Gennady Zyuganov

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  Gennady Zyuganov was elected party leader at the very congress that founded the CPRF, and he has held that position ever since. Before the Soviet collapse, he had served on the CPSU Central Committee, where he was known as a sharp critic of Alexander Yakovlev, the man often called the "godfather of glasnost". After 1991, Zyuganov moved toward the Russian "national-patriotic" movement and chaired the National Salvation Front, a trajectory that has shaped the party's character in lasting ways.

  In 1996, with Boris Yeltsin's approval rating sitting in single digits, Zyuganov assembled a "popular-patriotic bloc" of nationalist organisations to back his presidential run. Yeltsin won with 54% of the vote, though in 2012 several opposition politicians, including Boris Nemtsov, claimed that Dmitry Medvedev had privately told them Zyuganov would actually have won if not for fraud. The coalition Zyuganov had built was formalised on the 7th of August 1996 as the People's Patriotic Union of Russia, a body of more than 30 left-wing and nationalist organisations that included Sergey Baburin's Russian All-People's Union, with Zyuganov as its chairman.

  In 2008, during a visit to China, Zyuganov told his hosts: "Had we learned from the success of China earlier, the Soviet Union would not have dissolved." He urged all party members to read the Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping. That alignment with the Chinese model has become a defining plank of the party's ideology.

• 4. Ideology and Internal Tensions

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  Three distinct factions have contested the party's soul since its founding. The left-wing nationalists, whose leading figure is Zyuganov himself, identify socialism historically with Russia and Russia culturally with socialism. They draw on the writings of historian Lev Gumilyov and treat class struggle as having evolved into a clash between civilisations. The Marxist-Leninists hold to a more traditional Leninist framework, are hostile to both nationalism and party reformers, and represent the dominant tendency in the rank-and-file membership. The reformist wing, which actually held a majority at the founding congress in 1993, is composed of Eurocommunists, social democrats, and democratic socialists; it has shrunk considerably since then. Jeff Monson, an anarcho-communist, served as the party's Special Representative for International Cooperation for its sport club.

  The party's programme, updated in 2008, lays out a three-phase plan for transforming Russia. The first phase focuses on achieving workers' power through a coalition led by the CPRF, nationalising property privatised in the 1990s while protecting small producers from "big business, bureaucrats, and mafia groups". The second phase gradually shifts the economy toward socialist forms of organisation while retaining small private ownership. The third phase is the construction of full socialism. The programme also states that the party is guided by Marxism-Leninism and describes the current moment as a "confrontation between the New World Order and the Russian people."

  Marxist theoretician Boris Kagarlitsky observed in 2001 that the CPRF was not originally the largest or only communist organisation, yet it outlasted all the others. He attributed this not to organisational strength but to the fact that it had received what he called "the Kremlin's official approval as the sole recognised opposition."

• 5. Electoral Fortunes

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  In the 1995 legislative election, the party won 22.30% of the vote and 115 seats, making it the leading party in the State Duma. It held that dominant position through 1999, when it claimed 24.29% and 44 seats, and served as the ruling party in the lower house from 1998 to 1999. Then came the 2003 elections, which the party found catastrophic: it fell from 113 seats to 52. Zyuganov called the result a "revolting spectacle" and accused the Kremlin of creating a new party, Rodina, specifically to drain communist votes.

  At the regional level, the picture has been more varied. In February 2005, the CPRF defeated United Russia in elections to the Nenets Autonomous Okrug legislature, taking 27% of the vote. On the 4th of December 2005, the party won 16.75% and 4 seats in the Moscow Duma election, described at the time as the best-ever CPRF result in the capital. On the 21st of May 2007, Communist candidate Roman Grebennikov won the mayoral election in Volgograd with 32.47% of the vote, becoming the youngest mayor of a regional capital in Russia. Grebennikov later switched to United Russia in 2008, a move that many party members saw as a betrayal.

  In all presidential elections since 1991, every CPRF candidate has finished second. Nikolai Ryzhkov took 17.22% in 1991; Zyuganov won 32.03% in the first round and 40.31% in the second round in 1996; in 2024, Nikolay Kharitonov received 4.37%, the party's weakest presidential showing on record.

• 6. Russia, Ukraine, and the War

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  As early as 2014, the party called on Russia to formally recognise the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic, a position that would become official Russian policy in 2022 ahead of the invasion of Ukraine. When the invasion began, the CPRF published a statement in support of it, accusing NATO of planning "to enslave Ukraine" and framing the conflict as a battle against Ukrainian "Banderites and fascists" who had been committing genocide against Russian speakers.

  Fifty-five of the party's 57 Duma deputies, including Zyuganov, were subsequently sanctioned by the United States Department of Treasury, HM Treasury of the United Kingdom, Global Affairs Canada, Japan, Australia, and the European Commission. Two members of the caucus, Vyacheslav Markhaev and Mikhail Matveev, expressed opposition to the war, though both said they supported what they called the protection of the people of Donbass. A small number of younger party members also spoke out against the military campaign outside Donbass, while continuing to endorse the claim that Ukraine is governed by "neo-Nazis." Zyuganov himself called for a general mobilisation from the Duma floor.

  In July 2022, Zyuganov signalled openness to a merger with the left-conservative party A Just Russia - For Truth, but only on the condition that the merged organisation adopt the communist programme. The leader of A Just Russia, Sergey Mironov, had said the day before that he saw no obstacles to building a "large coalition of left-wing patriotic forces" in Russia.

• 7. Finances and the Press

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  The financial report of the CPRF for 2006 shows the party received 127,453,237 rubles, equivalent at the time to roughly 3,998,835 US dollars. That income came from four sources: membership fees accounted for 29%, the federal budget for 30%, donations for 6%, and other income for the remaining 35%. Expenditure that year came to 116,823,489 rubles, or about 3,665,328 US dollars. The largest single spending category was content publishers, media, and educational institutions at 36%. Promotion, including advertising and printing, took 21%.

  The party's flagship newspaper is Pravda, which publishes 81 regional editions. The left-wing nationalist paper Sovetskaya Rossiya maintains close ties to the party without formal affiliation. The ultra-nationalist newspaper Zavtra had supported the party in earlier years, but switched its backing to Rodina in 2005. On the 19th of October 2008, Zyuganov made a public appeal to Russian citizens to donate to the party to help it pursue its policy goals.

• 8. A Congress Rewrites History

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  On the 6th of July 2025, a CPRF congress passed a resolution declaring that Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 report "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" had been erroneous. That report, delivered at the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, had exposed Stalin's crimes and launched the process known as de-Stalinisation. By formally repudiating it, the party's congress took the clearest institutional step yet toward rehabilitating Stalin's legacy, which the party has long celebrated. The resolution is consistent with the party's stated position that Soviet history must not be "slandered," but it also marks a concrete and named moment in how the CPRF chooses to define what came before it, and what it intends to carry forward.