Viktor Anpilov, a communist politician who was an ardent opponent of Russian President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, has died at the age of 72 after suffering a stroke.

Friends and colleagues of Anpilov told Russian media outlets that the leader of the radical leftist Working Russia movement died on January 16.

Anpilov's group is associated with the Communist Party and was created in 1992, a year after the Soviet Union's collapse.

In the early 1990s, when he was a Moscow City Council member, Anpilov founded the newspaper Molniya (Lightning) and led a series of protests against Yeltsin and in support of the Communist Party.

After the standoff between Yeltsin and Russian parliament members that ended with an assault on the parliament building in October 1993, Anpilov was arrested and spent several months in jail.

Up until days before his death, Anpilov attended rallies held by leftist opposition groups. Last week, he was seen at demonstrations in support of Pavel Grudinin, the Communist Party candidate in Russia's March 18 presidential election.

A journalist by profession, Anpilov was fluent in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. In the Soviet era, he worked as an interpreter in Cuba and at the Latin American service of the Soviet Union's international broadcasting corporation, Inoveshchaniye.

With reporting by TASS and Interfax

