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In fact, Zyuganov was not the first to replace the class struggle inside a country by the struggle between countries. It was done before him by Enrico Corradini, the cofounder of the Italian nationalist association ANI, which would merge with Mussolini’s movement in 1923. According to Corradini “have” and “have-not” nations competed for economic advantage in perpetual war. “This new imperialist theory did not only legitimate fascist wars of conquest, but offered an alternative to Marxist class theories.”^[8] At the same time the foreign policy objectives of the Communist Party were reduced to a mainly negative policy of systematically opposing the United States. The United States was considered to represent the main global power that could obstruct the reestablishment of the former empire. That the latter had become the ultimate goal became clear from the 1995 election platform of the party, which called on the peoples of the “illegally disintegrated Soviet Union to recreate a single unified state in good will.”^[9] What is interesting here is the use of the expression “illegally disintegrated Soviet Union.” Zhirinovsky described the demise of the Soviet Union in similar words in his book Last Push to the South. It is an expression full of sinister consequences. If you consider the Belavezha Accords of December 8, 1991, in which Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine—the original three signatories of the Treaty of the Union of 1922—decided to dissolve the Soviet Union, to be illegal, this necessarily means that you consider all the subsequent treaties, signed by the Russian government with the new governments (e.g., on the delimitation of the frontiers), to be null and void. Despite the reassuring use of the words “in good will,” it is clear that if one follows the logic inherent in the expression “illegally disintegrated Soviet Union,” the use of military means to reintegrate these territories would not be an act of aggression, as defined in the Charter of the United Nations, but a legal act of a central government to reintegrate rebellious provinces.

The dominant Kremlin party United Russia has treated both the Liberal-Democratic Party and the Communist Party as extremes on a left-right scale with United Russia in the middle. This had the benefit that it attributed to United Russia the role of a “center” party. It was, as so often in Russia, a pure question of labeling. The “liberal-democrats” and the “communists” share essentially the same ultranationalist ideology and form an extreme right bloc in the Duma. The most important difference between the two parties is a difference in style. Zyuganov is a gray party apparatchik who lacks the personal charisma of Zhirinovsky. He is also less outspoken and does not share Zhirinovsky’s more extreme positions concerning a Russian expansion into Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan.

“

Unkulturaufstieg

”: The Spread of

Ultranationalist Ideas

In the first decade of the twenty-first century we can observe in Russia the spread of a new culture and the dissemination of new ideas in society. Sociologists usually describe this as a process of Kultursenkung, which means that “high” culture, starting in the elite, “trickles down” from the elite into the general population. However, such a top-down process does not seem to apply in this case. It is not so much elite culture, as rather Unkultur—a lack of (high) culture—that spreads in society. For this reason it is, perhaps, preferable to call this process Unkulturaufstieg: a bottom-up process in which nonculture spreads from the lower echelons of society to reach, ultimately, the elite circles. An interesting historical example of such a process of Unkulturaufstieg (without calling it so) is given by Andreas Umland. It concerns the spread of anti-Semitism in pre–World War I Germany.^[10] Umland observed that the development of anti-Semitism in Germany was marked by a fundamental discontinuity.