| JRL HOME | SUPPORT | SUBSCRIBE | RESEARCH & ANALYTICAL SUPPLEMENT | |
Old Saint Basil's Cathedral in MoscowJohnson's Russia List title and scenes of Saint Petersburg
Excerpts from the JRL E-Mail Community :: Founded and Edited by David Johnson
#12 - JRL 2008-61 - JRL Home
Communists Content With Zyuganov's Result In Presidential Race, Frustrated By Elections Themselves

MOSCOW. March 22 (Interfax) - The Russian Communist Party believes the number of votes its leader Gennady Zyuganov garnered in the recent presidential elections - 17.72% - was quite a decent result, but the party is frustrated by the way the elections themselves were organized.

"We performed significantly better than in the 2004 presidential elections and made a substantial step forward from recent elections to the State Duma, compared to which we had 5 million votes more," Communist Party Central Committee First Deputy Chairman and State Duma Deputy Speaker Ivan Melnikov said at a plenary session of the party's Central Committee outside Moscow on Saturday.

However, "we cannot and will not call what happened in Russia on March 2 elections. There were no elections. There were no conditions to reveal the strongest candidate. What happened was in fact the appointment of a figure that had been handpicked and agreed upon beforehand within a narrow circle of the ruling team," Melnikov said.

The presidential candidates were in unequal conditions during the election campaign in the media, and the authorities took advantage of any methods "to gauge up the voter turnout and voting results to previously planned figures," Melnikov said.

"The authorities did all they could so that the necessary result be present in the ballot boxes even before the vote counting," he said.

However, the Communist Party does not regret that it ran even in these conditions, Melnikov said. "Giving up now would have meant to show society that the authorities were right, that there was no alternative, and that we did not have any claims for power and did not believe in ourselves or in our people. This would have implied our readiness to renounce the opportunities for working with the population available during an election campaign," he said.

Talking about the Communist Party's primary goals following the elections, Melnikov said it should demand that the constitutional provision on the people's right to hold nationwide referendums be confirmed practically. "The elections also put an end to legal bans that prevented us from organizing an all-Russian referendum. We have not dropped this goal. Now we have time, and we need to reanimate the idea of holding an all-Russian referendum, taking into account our experience," he said.

The Communist Party "is seeking to rise to power sooner or later," Melnikov said. To this end, the party needs to appeal to new, young and well-educated cadres so that it become "as efficient an opposition force as possible," he said.