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Immediately after its foundation, in February 1993, the party—while still clinging to the old communist symbols and keeping “leftist” demands in its program—took a chauvinist-nationalist course that was not much different from the Liberal-Democratic Party of Vladimir Zhirinovsky. In both cases the party labels were misleading. Like the Liberal-Democratic Party, which was not liberal and not democratic, the Communist Party was not communist. Outward-looking Communist internationalism had been replaced by inward-looking Russian chauvinism. Stephen D. Shenfield wrote that many observers declared that the “ideology dominant within what still goes under the name of the communist movement is no longer communist, but fascist or close to fascist. The most unequivocal of these observers go so far as to claim that ‘the CPRF is in effect a fascist party, both at the top and at the provincial grassroots’ . . . or that ‘the CPRF has for a long time been following the ideas not of communism and socialism, but of national-socialism.’”^[2] This opinion was confirmed by Dmitri Furman, an analyst of the Gorbachev Foundation, who wrote: “In the ideology of the largest party, the CPRF, fascistoid features are so salient that one has to be blind and deaf not to notice them.”^[3] In a report of the Moscow-based SOVA Center, the cooperation between the CPRF and the extreme right (and now forbidden) Movement Against Illegal Immigration, DPNI, has been amply documented. Aleksandr Belov, the leader of the DPNI, and one of the agitators of an anti-Caucasian pogrom in the Karelian town of Kondopoga in the summer 2006, was invited as a speaker by the CPRF.^[4] On the list of the CPRF for the municipal elections in Moscow in 2008 were at least thirteen candidates who were members of extreme right organizations.^[5]

Gennady Zyuganov, the general secretary of the CPRF, no longer seems to be interested in the world revolution or in the realization of Marxism-Leninism. Like Zhirinovsky, his sole interest has become the restoration of the former Soviet empire. Like the former Slavophiles he indulged in “Third Rome” fantasies. Moreover, could one imagine a general secretary of the former CPSU, opening his autobiography with the sentence: “I am Russian by blood and spirit and love my Native land”?^[6] Certainly not. Zyuganov, however, had no problem with this exaltation of his “Russian-ness.” Nicole J. Jackson, referring to Zyuganov’s “extreme nationalist discourse,” wrote:

Gennady Zyuganov promoted a form of national socialism which argued that the class struggle had been replaced by a clash of civilizations between Russia and the West which threatened Russia’s existence. This mix of ideas allowed Zyuganov to promote an alliance of communists and nationalists, “the red-brown alliance,” which demanded that Russia be allowed to pursue its own unique path of development based upon spiritual values—although the content was mostly unspecified.^[7]