"Reds" in Ukraine

Abstract

After the ban against the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] in 1991, many people were convinced that communism had been "tossed onto the rubbish heap of history" and that never again (at least not in the foreseeable future) would a Communist movement of any significance arise in the USSR and its successor states. But such assumptions have proved entirely false. At the moment, eight years after the ban on the CPSU, the situation of the Communists is not unlike the position of the Catholic Church in France after the persecutions of the late eighteenth century. At the time, the French revolutionaries had no doubt that religion was no more than mass deception and that, as soon as the deception was exposed and the wealth of the Church confiscated, it would die a natural death. But the Church revived. Some people probably will not like this comparison. I will not insist on its accuracy, still less make any predictions on this basis, but I can make one point with certainty: the Communist Party, in Russia and in Ukraine, has shown considerable political vitality, not to mention the fact that it is now one of the few (at least in Ukraine) parties with its own electorate—that is, an electorate that votes not for a popular activist but for this party's candidate.¹