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“Many see nonsystemic leftists as rejects and losers who secretly jerk off somewhere and have nothing serious to offer,” said Sergei Udaltsov, the leader of the Left Front, as he concluded his plea for Russian leftists to support the Communist Party candidate Pavel Grudinin. “Let’s abandon the [Eduard] Bernstein approach that’s about process and not results. Enough masturbating in the corner, let’s embrace this system to the death!” Udaltsov’s speech, delivered at an early February forum on the Russian presidential election, pointed to a dilemma that leftists have debated throughout history — to what extent should a left-wing movement participate in the system it ultimately seeks to destroy? The issue before Udaltsov and others was whether to support Grudinin or join the liberal opposition leader Alexey Navalny’s call to boycott the election. Challenge the system from within or from without. It’s an old question. What to do about the Russian presidential election is just one of many questions that have plagued Russia’s small and fractured left. In a country where Lenin’s body still lies mummified on Red Square, Communist iconography adorns the facades of many buildings, and polls suggest that a majority of the Russian population would welcome a return to socialism, the Russian left’s battle for political relevance nevertheless looks Sisyphean.

What is Left? Like the Left elsewhere, the Russian left is struggling with its identity. What is the Left and what does it mean to be left today? The question is even more pressing in Russia given the Communist Party’s seventy-year hegemony over “the Left” and the collapse of its political and economic model. Though proponents of alternative politics existed within Soviet socialism, especially after Stalin’s death, these groups were a small and fractious part of Soviet intellectual culture, and their unorthodoxy was routinely persecuted. The dismantling of Communist Party orthodoxy in the late 1980s and the collapse of the Soviet system in 1991 opened space for articulating a different socialism. Russian left groups simply lacked the capacity to fill the vacuum. Support for the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) waned following Gennady Zyuganov’s electoral defeat in 1996, and in the 2000s the KPRF became a mere political facade. Since then, left groups have bobbed aimlessly along, receding further into a small corner within Russia’s already small political opposition. Even as the organized Russian left remained adrift, the intellectual left remained vibrant. Translations of Western Marxist and poststructuralist texts found a Russian audience, injecting new perspectives and intellectual innovations. Left-leaning intellectuals forged networks with Western academics, writers, artists, and activists. The first decade of Putinism had paradoxical consequences: it provided left-wing intellectuals the means to reflect on the Soviet system and reconfigure socialist politics, just as Putin’s oil boom was robbing it of a potential constituency. The 2011–2012 mass protests against electoral fraud, in which Russian leftists were key participants, offered a brief resurgence. But the state struck back with manifold forms of repression: harassment, detention, blacklisting, surveillance, and manufactured crimes targeting nationalists, liberals, and leftists alike. But it was Russian leftists who received the brunt of the state’s assault following clashes between protesters and police at Bolotnaya Square in May 2012. The Left Front’s Sergei Udaltsov and Leonid Razvozzhayev were eventually convicted of organizing the violence at the Bolotnaya (many say on trumped-up charges) and sentenced to four and a half years in prison. The Left Front virtually ceased to exist as a result. Moreover, among the protest participants convicted for the violence were anarchists, antifascists, and members of the Left Front and Russian Socialist Movement. Today, besides scores of unaffiliated sympathizers, academics, artists, intellectuals, politicians labor unions, websites, media, and others who might identify with the Russian left, left-wing organizations outside the KPRF include tendencies ranging from anarchists to neo-Stalinists. Groups include the Anarchist Black Cross, the Left Front, the Left Bloc, the Russian Socialist Movement, the Revolutionary Workers’ Party, Socialist Alternative, the United Communist Party, the Communist of Russia, and the Russian Communist Workers’ Party–ROT Front, to name a few. These organizations’ memberships range from a few hundred to a few thousand and are mostly centered in Moscow or St Petersburg, though some have branches in the provinces. Most try to highlight social and political struggles, particularly labor issues, and some are more active than others, mostly in staging protests and rallies. In fact, the Russian left is mostly an activist-centered movement that tries to connect local struggles to larger issues of corruption, labor rights, ecology, political rights and freedom of speech, poverty, and income inequality. Few groups seek to participate in Russia’s restrictive electoral system. Almost none are officially allowed — except, like the Communists of Russia in the recent presidential election, as clownish foils. Some trace their lineage to one or another aspect of the Soviet system, a practice with a clear generational divide. Those who identify with the Soviet Union tend to be older, even elderly. A few are “communist” in name only and represent more a mixture of Soviet nostalgia and patriotism taken to the point of parody. Those groups that don’t directly hearken back to Soviet symbolism are younger, with members in their late teens and twenties. As in the West, this new generation of young leftists will be crucial for reinvigorating Russia’s left politics. Some groups are more Western oriented — emphasizing issues of race, gender, and sexuality, for example — and are social democratic in tone. Most engage in media, and a handful are little more than online communities. What unites all of these under the banner of the Russian left? Though far from programmatically or institutionally united and representing a broad spectrum of opinions, methods, and activities, all identify with some left-wing tendency—anarchism, antifascism, Marxism, socialism, Leninism, Trotskyism, communism, or anything in between. There is a general consensus on the capitalist, and even neoliberal, character of the Putin system; the gluttony of the Russian elite and its dependency on corruption; the use of repression and lack of democracy; and a narrowing of political and cultural pluralism in Russia’s political system. Virtually all reject the privatization and liberal reforms of the 1990s, advocating nationalization of Russia’s commanding economic heights, with the surpluses steered to society’s benefit.