Post-Soviet Russia was obviously very anti-communist and the communist party of Russian Federation provides opposition, why allow them to have that much pull, from the Russian Federation perspective? Did they ban the party in the past and it was unsuccessful? Is the current Communist Party shitty and easily manipulated to be allowable in mainstream politics?
We actually have several “communist” parties. CPRF is the best known one, but there’s also “Communists of Russia” and some others I don’t even care to remember.
I would like to let the more knowledgeable comrades to speak first, as I am admittedly not too familiar with their un-publicized actions. Maybe they’ve actually done good things. From an outsider perspective, they seem to perform the same function Dems do in USA - create an illusion of an opposition that cares about us proles, but in reality marches in lockstep with whatever the government line is.
Also, there were debates about permitting CPRF to register at all, AFAIK, all the way back in the 90’s.
Their “un-publicized” actions include holding down their more active low rank members from conducting any activities. They’ve never even created any illusion of caring about anything. Just diverting still politically active youth towards apolitical stance or to activities which are safe and won’t undermine bourgeois authority in any way.
Plus, discrediting communist ideas. It’s not rare to see headlines like “Communist from city X becomes part of a corruption scandal” or “…turned out to be a pedophile” in puppeted media. Stuff like that, usually about mid-tier regional party members of CPRF.
Source for any of this?
The first part is not public sources, obviously. We do have many younger communists in our more “orthodox” circles start out in more popular organizations, like CPRF or “The Union of Marxists” for example. Stuff about CPRF in private talks usually unanimously mentions something along the lines “We wanted to help those guys fighting for their salary by organizing the demonstration, but then were stopped by our superiors” etc. etc etc. This kind of stuff for some weird reason is unique to CPRF, hence why I made the conclusion.
As for the last thing, I can go through the publications over the last couple of years if you need. If you wanna do that yourself - you can try going for Readovka, especially the local news branches of the regions because stuff like that is published in there.
