Communist Party of the Russian Federation

The Communist Party of the RSFSR was created in June 1990 as the Russian republic organisation within the CPSU, but Boris Yeltsin’s decrees of 23 August and 6 November 1991 suspended and then terminated its activities. The CPRF was founded as the re-established party at the Second Extraordinary Congress of Russian Communists, held on 13–14 February 1993 at the Klyazma holiday centre near Moscow. Roy Medvedev’s Socialist Party of the Working People, Alexei Prigarin’s Union of Communists and much of the Russian Communist Workers Party joined it, and it soon became Russia’s largest party with 500,000 members. According to the Russian-language source, Valentin Kuptsov had been considered for the leadership, but under pressure from nationalist radicals led by Albert Makashov Gennady Zyuganov was elected instead; Yegor Ligachev and Anatoly Lukyanov were also co-founders.

During the October 1993 crisis the party backed the Supreme Soviet, although its organisations did not take part in the events of 3–4 October; its activities were suspended again from 4 to 21 October. According to the Russian-language source, in State Duma elections it won 12.4% in 1993, 22.3% in 1995 (157 seats, first place) and 24.29% in 1999 (113 seats, first place). Zyuganov lost the 1996 presidential election to Yeltsin, and the coalition that had backed him was organised on 7 August 1996 as the People’s Patriotic Union of Russia. After winning several governorships in 1996–1997 the party formed the so-called “red belt”, and it has always declared itself in opposition except from September 1998 to May 1999, when Yuri Maslyukov served as first deputy prime minister in Yevgeny Primakov’s government.

The party suffered a sharp decline in the 2003 election, though the sources give different seat counts: the English-language source says it fell from 113 seats to 52, while the Russian-language source gives 12.61% and 61 seats. In 2007 it won 11.57% and 57 seats. Its 2008 programme set the building of “socialism of the 21st century” as its strategic goal, declared Marxism–Leninism its guide, held up China’s multi-sector socialist market system as a model and demanded the nationalisation of natural resources and strategic industries. The party describes itself as the legal successor of the CPSU on the territory of the Russian Federation.

In the 2021 Duma election the party refused to accept the results of electronic voting in Moscow. It supported Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, as a result of which 55 of its 57 Duma deputies, including Zyuganov, were sanctioned by the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Australia and the European Union. On 6 July 2025 a party congress adopted a resolution calling Khrushchev’s 1956 report “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences” erroneous.