The Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) is a left-conservative,Bozóki, A and Ishiyama, J (2002). The Communist Successor Parties of Central and Eastern Europe. p. 241-245. Soviet patriotic and Marxist–Leninist political party in Russia. It is the second-largest political party in Russia after United Russia. The youth organisation of the party is the Leninist Young Communist League.
The CPRF can trace its origin to the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) established in March 1898. The party split in 1903 into a Menshevik (minority) and Bolshevik (majority) faction; the latter, led by Vladimir Lenin, is the direct ancestor of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and is the party that seized power in the October Revolution of 1917. After the CPSU was banned in 1991 by Russian president Boris Yeltsin in the aftermath of a failed coup, the CPRF was founded at the Second Extraordinary Congress of Russian Communists on 14 February 1993 as the successor organisation of the Communist Party of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (CPRSFSR). It was the ruling party in the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian Federal Assembly from 1998 to 1999.
The party's stated goal is to establish a new, modernized form of socialism in Russia through peaceful means. Described as left-conservative, immediate goals of the party include the nationalisation of natural resources, agriculture, and large industries within the framework of a mixed economy, with socialist relations of production that allow for the growth of small and medium enterprises in the private/non-state sector.
History The CPRF was founded on 14 February 1993 at the Second Extraordinary Congress of Russian Communists, where it declared itself to be the successor of the Communist Party of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (CPRSFSR).American University (Washington, D.C.), and Moskovskiĭ gosudarstvennyĭ universitet im. M. V. Lomonosova. Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization, volume 4. Washington, D.C.: Quality Press of the Southern Tier, 1996. p. 174. It formed through the merger of successor groups to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), including Roy Medvedev's Socialist Party of the Working People (of left-socialist orientation), Alexei Prigarin's Union of Communists; and much of the membership of the Stalinist Russian Communist Workers Party (although party leader Viktor Anpilov rejected the new party).Richard Sakwa, Russian Politics and Society, Routledge, 1996, p. 85. The CPRF quickly became the largest party in Russia, with 500,000 members soon after its founding, more than double all the other parties membership combined.Bozóki & Ishiyama, p. 242.
Gennady Zyuganov, a co-founder of the party along with senior former Soviet politicians Yegor Ligachev, Anatoly Lukyanov and others, was elected to be party leader at the Second Extraordinary Congress.Bozóki, A and Ishiyama, J (2002). The Communist Successor Parties of Central and Eastern Europe. p. 245. Zyuganov had been a harsh critic of Alexander Yakovlev, the so-called "godfather of glasnost", on the CPSU Central Committee. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he became active in the Russian "national-patriotic" movement, being the chairman of the National Salvation Front (some authors call him a nationalist).
Following the CPRF's success in the 1995 legislative election, it emerged as the primary opposition to incumbent President Boris Yeltsin for the 1996 presidential election, whose approval rating was in single digits.Bozóki and Ishiyama, p. 249. In order to oppose Yeltsin, Zyuganov organised a "popular-patriotic bloc" of nationalist organisations to support his candidacy. After the election—which Yeltsin won with 54% of the vote—on 7 August 1996 the coalition supporting Zyuganov was transformed into an official organisation, the People's Patriotic Union of Russia (NPSR), consisting of more than 30 left-wing and nationalist organisations, including the Russian All-People's Union, led by Sergey Baburin. Zyuganov was its chairman. It went on to support Zyuganov in the 2000 presidential election. The NPSR was meant to form the basis of a two-party system, with the NPSR opposing the ruling "party of power". Yeltsin appointed a Yuri Maslyukov to his Cabinet, improve his testy relations with CPRF-dominated legislature.
The party suffered a sharp decline in the 2003 legislative election, going from 113 seats to 52. Zyuganov called the 2003 elections a "revolting spectacle" and accused the Kremlin of setting up a "Potemkin party", Rodina, to steal its votes. The CPRF was endorsed by Sergey Baburin's People's Union for the 2007 Russian parliamentary elections.
In the 2012 presidential election, Zyuganov denounced election irregularities in the 2011 legislative election, but he also expressed his opposition to the organisers of the mass demonstrations of December 2011, which he viewed as orchestrated by ultra-liberals exploiting unrest. The party played only a minor role as a catalyst in the protests. Party rallies on 18 December 2011 in protest of election irregularities in Moscow and Saint Petersburg were attended by only a few thousand, mostly elderly, party supporters.
In 2014, the party called for Russia to formally recognise the separatist Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic, something that would happen in 2022 preceding Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
After Russia was sanctioned for systematic doping in the run-up to the 2018 Winter Olympics, Zyuganov proposed sending Russian fans to the Games with a Soviet Victory Banner.
In 2021, the party's headquarters were raided by Russian authorities and a party official was barred from entering his office in the State Duma after it refused to accept the results of an online parliamentary election vote and attempting to file a lawsuit against the results.
Following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the CPRF published a statement in support of the invasion and accused NATO of planning "to enslave Ukraine" and thus creating "critical threats to the security of Russia". It called for the "demilitarization and denazification" of Ukraine. The party framed the conflict as that between the Ukrainian Banderites and fascists, who have been perpetrating genocide against Russian speakers, and liberating Russian forces. The CPRF also accused the United States and NATO of deploying European fascist sympathizers and Middle Eastern terrorists to Ukraine to fight the Russian army. Two members out of 57 of CPRF's Duma caucus, Vyacheslav Markhaev and Mikhail Matveev, have expressed opposition to the war, although they support the "protection of the people of Donbass".
A few younger members of the CPRF spoke publicly against the war in Ukraine, although their criticisms only refer to Russia's military campaign outside of Donbass, while they fully support the narrative that Ukraine is governed by "neo-Nazis".
As a result of the party's actions of endorsing the invasion of Ukraine, 55 of the 57 CPRF lawmakers, including Zyuganov, have been sanctioned by the United States Department of Treasury, HM Treasury of the United Kingdom, Global Affairs Canada, Japan, Australia and the European Commission.Office of Foreign Assets Control. "Notice of OFAC Sanctions Actions" published 17 March 2022.
In July 2022, CPRF leader Gennady Zyuganov allowed the party to propose a merger with the left-conservative party A Just Russia — For Truth, but only if the new party adopted the communist program. The day before, the leader of the A Just Russia Sergey Mironov said that he "does not see any obstacles to the creation in Russia of a large coalition of left-wing patriotic forces".
On 6 July 2025, a CPRF congress adopted a resolution calling the 1956 report "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" made by Nikita Khrushchev erroneous.
Ideology
The party advocates for a socialist transformation of Russia through peaceful means within a pluralistic political framework. The CPRF considers the multi-sector socialist market system as developed in China to be a model which should be emulated within Russia. The party supports state ownership over major industries, the renationalization of businesses privatized after the collapse of the Soviet Union, giving out subsidies to currently existing state-owned firms and maintaining large welfare benefits. The CPRF has also maintained stable relationships with many businesses, including small and large private companies, worker cooperatives, and organizations which trace their lineage to the Soviet era. In 2002, it was described as left-wing nationalist.
The CPRF's current programme was adapted in 2008, where the CPRF declared that it is the only political organisation that consistently upholds the rights of the workers and national interests. According to the programme, the strategic goal of the party is to build in Russia a "renewed socialism, Socialism of the 21st century". The program of the Communist Party declared that the party is guided by Marxism–Leninism, based on the experience and achievements of domestic and world science and culture. According to the party, there comes a "confrontation between the New World Order and the Russian people with its thousand-year history, and with its qualities", "communality and great power, deep faith, undying altruism and decisive rejection of lures mercantile bourgeois liberal-democratic paradise".Зюганов Г. А. Кадры партии в действии. — М.: ИТРК, 2001. — с. 11. — .
According to its program, the CPRF considers it necessary to reform the country in three phases. In the first phase, it is needed to achieve workers' power through representation by a coalition led by the CPRF. Achieving this goal will help eliminate the devastation from the standpoint of the party, the consequences conducted in the past decade of reforms, in particular by the nationalisation of property privatised in the 1990s. However, in this case small producers will remain and moreover will be organised to protect them from robbery by "big business, bureaucrats, and mafia groups". It is planned to reform the management of enterprises through the creation of councils at various levels. The party also plans to transform Russia into a Soviet republic. In the second stage, the role of councils and trade unions will increase even more. A gradual transition in the economy will be made to a socialist form of economic activity, but a small private equity is still retained. Finally, the third phase is to build socialism.
The First Secretary Gennady Zyuganov also expressed that they should learn from China's successful example and build Russian socialism. He also encouraged all party members to read "Selected works of Deng Xiaoping". He said during his visit to China in 2008: "Had we learned from the success of China earlier, the Soviet Union would not have dissolved".
Marxist theoretician Boris Kagarlitsky wrote in 2001: "It is enough to recall that within the Communist movement itself, Zyuganov's party was at first neither the sole organisation, nor the largest. Bit by bit, however, all other Communist organisations were forced out of political life. This occurred not because the organisations in question were weak, but because it was the CPRF that had received the Kremlin's official approval as the sole recognised opposition".
Party programme
Under the present conditions in the Russian Federation, the CPRF calls for the following proposals: Stop the extinction of the country, restore benefits for large families, reconstruct the network of public kindergartens and provide housing for young families. Nationalise natural resources in Russia and the strategic sectors of the economy; revenues in these industries are to be used in the interests of all citizens.