ABSTRACT
The Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) fortunes also underwent a profound if more positive type of transformation. From a party still struggling to recapture a public image of legitimacy, it suddenly became a respected parliamentary fraction in the new Russian State Duma. This was in large part due to the policy choices made by CPRF chairman Gennadii Ziuganov. As for geopolitics, the crux of Ziuganov’s view was that Russia was “the pivot and chief bulwark of the Eurasian continental bloc, the interests of which conflict with the hegemonic tendencies of the United States ‘ocean power’ and the greater Atlantic seaboard.” The CPRF’s Marxist-Leninist modernizers and Ziuganov nationalists as well as the extra-parliamentary Communist Party attributed the collapse of the old communist order and the Soviet state itself to the bourgeoisification and betrayal of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union elite, with Gorbachev and Yeltsin the arch traitors.
