#7
BBC Monitoring
Russian Communist leader comments on merging congress
of power party
Source: TV6, Moscow, in Russian 0800 gmt 1 Dec 01
[Presenter] Another political event is happening in Moscow as well. The fourth plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Russia is taking place behind closed doors in the capital today. This makes the meeting quite secretive and mysterious, but the topic on the agenda sounds quite harmless - deciding on the date and venue of the next extraordinary congress of the party. The agenda of the congress has not been revealed so far. Perhaps, this is the question that is being discussed behind closed doors. As far as the date of the congress is concerned, it is due on 19 January 2002.
Before the beginning of the plenary meeting, the leader of the Communist Party [Gennadiy Zyuganov] commented on the founding congress of Unity and Fatherland. The position of the Communists remains unchanged.
[Zyuganov] I thought they would publish their vision of lifting Russia out of the crisis and will make their view known to the people of Russia. I expected to see their main ideological principles, their social basis - but so far, there is nothing like it. In the past 10 years the party of power has not offered the country any ideology. It has betrayed everything it could. They are uniting around an executive chair and a money bag. Such unions do not live long. Just imagine, Putin will leave tomorrow, and the party of power will collapse within a week.
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