The Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) is a Marxist-Leninist political party in Russia, founded on 14 February 1993 as a successor to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The party was formed through the merger of Communist Party of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (CPRSFSR) splintergroups such as the Socialist Party of the Working People, the Union of Communists, and the Russian Communist Workers Party, quickly becoming the largest party in Russia with over 500,000 members.
The party became popular in the "Red Belt" - agricultural areas of Central Russia (Smolensk Oblast, Bryansk Oblast, Kaluga Oblast, Orel Oblast, Kursk Oblast, Belgorod Oblast, Ryazan Oblast, Lipetsk Oblast, Tambov Oblast, Voronezh Oblast, Penza Oblast, Ulyanovsk Oblast, Saratov Oblast, Volgograd Oblast and Astrakhan Oblast), the national republics of the North Caucasus (Karachay-Cherkessia, Dagestan, and North Ossetia), and southern regions of Siberia and the Far East (Orenburg Oblast, Kurgan Oblast, Omsk Oblast, Novosibirsk Oblast, Chita Oblast, Altai Krai, the Altai Republic, Irkutsk Oblast, and the Jewish Autonomous Oblast) - with agricultural workers, destitute industrial workers, unemployed people, and people who held nostalgic views towards the Soviet era serving as the party's voter base.
While the party's presidential candidate Gennady Zyuganov was projected to destroy the unpopular President Boris Yeltsin at the 1996 presidential election, the involvement of American advisors in Yeltsin's campaign, their cultivation of Yeltsin's image as "the lesser of two evils" and a provider of stability, and the Russian public's hesitancy to undo the neoliberal and democratic reforms that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union led to Zyuganov losing with 40.73% of the vote to Yeltsin's 54.4%. Support for the Communists weakened once the economic depression of the 1990s ended and both economic and political stability returned in the early 2000s.
At the 2003 legislative election, the CPRF fell from 113 seats to 52 after the Kremlin set up the left-wing nationalist Rodina party to steal the CPRF's voters. Additionally, Vladimir Putin had United Russia move away from its initial liberal-democratic orientation to adopt a more centrist, nationalist, and statist platform, allowing the party to appeal to former CPRF voters by incorporating some left-leaning economic policies such as ensuring social welfare provisions and strengthening the role of the state in the economy. The party also tapped into Soviet nostalgia through fulfilling its stability and social guarantees, presenting itself as the party that could restore a sense of order and national pride. Through a combination of political maneuvering, media control, and selective use of administrative resources, United Russia was able to marginalize the influence of the CPRF and other opposition parties. United Russia was also able to build strong connections with local-level political and business elites, as well as with segments of the population that had benefited from the economic and social changes of the 2000s, enabling United Russia to offer tangible benefits and personal incentives to former CPRF supporters.
The CPRF became the largest opposition party during the Putin era, advocating for a peaceful transition to socialism, state ownership over major industries, the renationalization of businesses privatized after the collapse of the USSR, giving out subsidies to state-owned firms, and maintaining large welfare benefits. The party's internal factions included left-wing nationalists like Gennady Zyuganov, Marxist-Leninists who held traditional Leninist understandings of class struggle and socialism, and social democrats and reform-communists who criticized the USSR and once held a majority during the party's Second Extraordinary Congress.
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