It would be a great stretch to identify the Communists from Stalin to Zyuganov as the Left proper, as the term was understood at the beginning of the century. A future Linnaeus of the political sciences will someday invent a new classification for them. On the other hand, there has always been a real leftist opposition to real socialism in Russian society. From the Kronstadt rebels [in 1921 the sailors at the Soviet Navy’s Baltic Fleet headquarters in Kronstadt rebelled against the Soviet authorities; the uprising was mercilessly crushed] to underground Marxist circles from the 1930s to the 1970s, the desire to oppose genuinely leftist ideals to the existing state was one of the driving forces behind the liberation movement in the USSR.

In Leningrad of recent decades one can name such influential dissident Marxist groups as Revolt Pimenov’s circle, Valery Ronkin and Sergei Khakhaev’s Kolokol [Bell] groups, Viktor Sheinis and Irma Kudrova’s seminar. Sympathy for socialism with a human face led to Gendler and Kvachevsky’s attempt to stage a demonstration on Palace Square against the sending of troops into Czechoslovakia. The last Marxist commune that we know of, that of Skobov and Reznikov, was uncovered by the KGB in the mid-1970s.

It was at this time that oppositionist social consciousness was inclining increasingly toward the right. Not only the October Revolution, but even the February Revolution was becoming steadily less popular, and the ideas which inspired the White Cause were opposed to the existing regime. Igor Ogurtsov’s liberal-rightist group was the first swallow of this spring of change in Leningrad. The leftist idea became the turf of marginals and provincial youth, who were still reading Lenin for lack of Solzhenitsyn and Berdyaev.

There was a certain upsurge of non-traditional leftism during perestroika. To a significant degree this was determined by the evolution of the press during Gorbachev’s glasnost and began, as is well known, with the rehabilitation and heroification of "illegally repressed" Bolsheviks like Leon Trotsky. Mikhail Shatrov and Anatoly Rybakov [popular writers of the Gorbachev era] showed how one could revile the "hawks" in the Communist Party with relative safety.

LENINGRAD: LEFTIST CAPITAL?

In Leningrad, a Eurocommunist stance was taken by the famous "Perestroika" club, whence such visible figures in the present-day political world as Anatoly Chubais emerged. As it turned out, however, Communism with a human face was for most of them a means for gradually attaining their own political goals without breaking with the establishment. Let us remember that during this same time the future leader of the liberals, Yegor Gaidar, was working as an editor at the journal Kommunist.

There were also important processes under way on the other flank of the political leadership. From the mid-1960s, a national patriotic faction within the Communist Party for whom Soviet imperial might was much more important than proletarian internationalism was steadily gathering strength. The ideological foundation of this tendency, whose organ was the magazine Molodaya Gvardiya [Young Guard], was the Russian imperial idea, the world view of the Union of the Russian People [a ultra-nationalist organization founded with the support of Nicholas the Second’s courtiers]. The lineage Rousseau-Marx-Lenin-Stalin was replaced by the geneaological tree Alexander Nevsky-Ivan the Terrible-Fyodor Dostoevsky-Joseph Stalin. This line, this sphere of ideas, attracted the "new opposition"—those who opposed perestroika from traditionalist positions. When the Communist regime collapsed in August 1991, it was around just this anti-Gorbachev nucleus that structures opposed to the "democrats" who had come to power began to form. These new Communists take from traditional leftism only an inclination toward nationalization of private property. In terms of the European context, they are rather closer to the National Front of Le Pen than to the Italian Communists. Nonetheless, by force of tradition and self-identification, we conventionally rank them among the leftists.

LEFT-WING PETERSBURG TODAY Contemporary left-wing Petersburg can be divided tentatively into three generations and four categories, the members of each these groups differing in terms of politics, aesthetics, and demographics.

The CPRF [Communist Party of the Russian Federation] is the largest of the left-wing political parties in Petersburg. Gennady Zyuganov’s followers to one degree or another are, or want to become, a part of the political establishment. They have offices (such as they are), money, printed publications. These organizations are comprised mainly of people over 40 (the majority are over 50). They enjoy strong support from those Petersburgers who experience the changes that have taken place as the collapse of the lifestyle and customs they were used to. In the new social system they feel like immigrants: everywhere there’s a demand for people "under 35, with a higher education, a knowledge of computers and experience working in business," and strangely garbed pop stars frolic on television. They can no longer take an all-expenses-paid trip to a union spa, and the old days when they could discuss workplace intrigues over a couple of glasses of vodka smuggled into a cafe have vanished. The familiar lexicon of Communist newspapers and the speeches of their leaders, rich with the clichйs of "the golden `70s," the very atmosphere of party meetings, the celebration of the anniversary of the Revolution and Red Army Day have a psychotherapeutic effect on them. They return to an environment where they feel like human beings.

Most of the current Communist leadership are devoid of the generic defects of the nomenklatura. Those who knew how and wanted to make a career have long since gone into business or the city administration. So today’s Communist exposes the vices of the regime quite sincerely and boldly. These people remind one of the heroes of `70s Soviet films; the social realists were fond of describing these kinds of Communists. It’s another matter that earlier they didn’t exist, that they have appeared only now. By virtue of the reasons we’ve mentioned, the official Communists are the only political structure that looks like a real party. Belonging to the Communists means not simply voting for Zyuganov; it means feeling that you stand shoulder to shoulder with a friend, that you are not alone. It means participating in meetings of the "prime" [primary Party organization], receiving and sending messages of congratulations on official Soviet holidays.

In Petersburg, the official Communists are weaker than in any other major Russian city. At best, during the mayoral elections in 1991 and the presidential elections of 1996, they won no more than 20% of the votes. In the Legislative Assembly there are only four Communists (two represent Kolpino, a working-class suburb of Petersburg). In the first round of the most recent mayoral elections, the Communist candidate received only 11% of the vote. Parallel to this, the Communist electorate is steadily diminishing for natural and unavoidable reasons. The young oppositionists shun contact with this party of grandmas and grandpas.

Nina Andreeva’s Stalinists and the members of the RPK [Russian Party of Communists, one of many Communist parties in present-day Russia], who are socially similar to the official Communists, stand slightly at a distance. If we compare the Communist movement with the Russian Old Believers—and there is a surprising similarity here—these people are the Filippovists and Fedoseevists, those schismatics who continued persistently to believe that the Czar was the Antichrist and refused to register themselves and get passports. Both Zyuganov and Yeltsin are, for them, the servants of Satan. Stylistically speaking, their writings do not resemble the smooth texts of Brezhnevist propagandists, but the sharp speech of plenum resolutions from the 1940s and early 1950s. "Decision of the Second Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. Resolved: to expel V. N. Kaspiev from membership in the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks for organizing an attempt to disrupt the congress; to remove A. A. Lapin from the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks for schismatism and for forfeiting the trust of his comrades." Among official Communists there prevails a poetics of the possible restoration of the past, an attempt to imitate the comfort of the 1970s. But among the "old believers" one senses the Komsomol mercilessness of the 1930s. These games are not for grandfathers and grandmothers: the average "Andreevist" is a robust 50-year-old retired naval officer.

You won’t find Communists in the age group 30-50. Here the protest votes go to the Yabloko party. The Yablokists don’t like to be counted among the leftists, but, as has already been pointed out more than once, in Russia they occupy the niche that traditionally belongs to social democrats. The Petersburg Yabloko electorate for the most part consists of those engineers, research workers, and doctors whose youth coincided with the years of Gregory Romanov’s administration [Gregory Romanov was the Leningrad Communist Party boss during the Brezhnev era], who attended numerous anti-Communist meetings in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and who gathered on the square in front of the Mariinsky Palace during the night of the August 1991 coup. The majority of them fell victim to the leaders and the regime they themselves engendered. They remember the Communist regime well and hate it. Along with their leader, Gregory Yavlinsky, they think that in essence that regime hasn’t fallen. They therefore consider their dissatisfaction organic, their convictions firm and unchangeable. For Petersburg, the figure of the schismatic Yuri Boldyrev—who turned up on the far-left flank of Yabloko and later broke with the party—is characteristic. Petersburg is the most anti-Communist city in the country and the most Yablokist. In the first round of the 1996 presidential elections Yavlinsky received more votes here than did Yeltsin, while Yabloko and its allies won the local State Duma seats. Their success might become a potential trap for the Petersburg branch of Yabloko (Regional Party of the Center). Having supported the current city governor, Vladimir Yakovlev, against Anatoly Sobchak, whom they hate, in the second round of the most recent elections, they in effect became the ruling party in the city and were thereby partly deprived of the advantage of being in opposition.

On the whole, it is those who are now 25 to 35, the "Pepsi generation," who have benefited the most from the changes the country has gone through. Cynical Komsomolists [Communist Youth League members] or apolitical rockers in the early 1980s, they prefer the values of the consumer society, enjoy life, and don’t vote. If they do, they are more likely to cast their ballots for the Gaidarists or Our Home Is Russia. The leftist potential is huge within the generation after them, those who are now university students and secondary school pupils. Here there are several important circumstances: the generation of the `90s is the first in many years which isn’t afraid of Communism-they don’t remember it. Their older brothers are the children of the `60s generation, the most "co-opted" Soviet generation. But they are the descendants of the sullen 1970s generation. Hostility to the authorities is for them a family tradition. One recalls the 1910s, when the children of the "cadets" [the Constitutional Democrats] swelled the ranks of the Social Revolutionary and Social Democrat parties.

The situation in the labor market has changed. No joint venture or American consulate is waiting for anyone with open arms any longer. A command of English and Word for Windows no longer guarantees 200 dollars a month. The chance of starting one’s own business nowadays is practically nil. As recently as five years ago the existence of 25-year-old millionaires was almost a norm, but now it is the exception. The ideological situation has changed. "Authority is as disgusting as the hands of the barber" (Osip Mandelstam)—no one entertains any illusions about it. The ideological rotgut concocted from spirituality, superpowerism, the blessing of bank offices and police Mercedes by the padre from the neighboring Orthodox church, is no more convincing than Komsomol shock brigades and memorial vigils.

As a result, young left-wing flowers are blossoming before one’s eyes, in Russia and in Petersburg. Here we find the entire palette of left-wing variations, from anarchism and Trotskyism to Western-style social democracy. Although, of course, radical tendencies are stronger than moderate ones in the youth culture. What is essential is that international leftist culture, based on the traditions of that unforgettable year of 1968, offers its own pantheon of heroes (from Che Guevara to the Baader-Meinhoff gang), a pattern of behavior and a style of clothing, fashion, music, film—an enormous cultural context, new for Russia, and therefore seemingly fresh.

Generally speaking, left-wing radicalism during one’s student years means nothing. As one cynical politician has said, "Whoever wasn’t a socialist at twenty is a scoundrel; whoever remains a socialist after forty is a fool." In pre-revolutionary Russia almost the entire student population was leftist; leftists predominate among thoughtful students from Boston to Seoul. The problem is that the existing social rhetoric of the "adult" political parties hasn’t adapted to incorporate these Petersburg "new leftists." If social and political reality are not able provide them with a sufficient amount of social mobility as they grow older, Petersburg may be fated to give birth to new Ignaty Grinevitskys and Leonid Nikolaevs [the young terrorists who killed Alexander the Second and Sergei Kirov, respectively]. And that is something we really wouldn’t want to happen.