Russia needs a modern, democratic left-wing political force – this what we increasingly hear from political analysts and the Russian media, which not so long ago viewed slogans about defending workers and their rights as a hangover from the past. So, what’s behind Russia’s “turn to the left”?
First, growing inequality and the removal of social guarantees are, at last, hitting Russian media headlines (against the wishes of liberal commentators). Second, it has become less easy to ignore the word “neoliberalism” as a left-wing ideological label – it’s now a standard term in international economics and politics. And lastly, we have more and more reasons to ask what a party system in “Russia’s bright future” might look like.
The issue of a political force that could unite a struggle for democratic rights and freedoms with decent conditions for working people and vulnerable sections of the Russian public - while providing an alternative to both pro-Soviet politics and market liberalism - has been around since Perestroika. Back then, left-wing dissidents, together with supporters of “socialism with a human face” from the Communist Party and politicised Soviet citizens, created a community which in the 1990s gave birth to all sorts of left-wing democratic projects and, of course, intense ideological discussions.
Many well-known political writers and politicians were part of this milieu – from commenetators Roy Medvedev and Boris Kagarlitsky to General Alexander Rutskoy, politicians Ivan Rybkin and Andrey Isayev (who is today a United Russia functionary). In 2001, the initiator of one of these social democratic projects, the Social Democratic Party of Russia, was a certain Mikhail Gorbachev. The last ambitious effort was probably the Russian Labour Party, which, thanks to a disagreement between Oleg Shein and Sergey Khramov, later turned into the insignificant Patriots of Russia.
By the mid-2000s, after another purge and division of Russia’s political field, the prospect of an independent left democratic alternative was effectively removed from the political agenda. It was replaced by “managed democracy”, the supporters and beneficiaries of which included the Communist Party and Just Russia party. Both of these political parties had a number of left democratic points in their programmes, but lacked the ability to put them into practice. Their conservative, right-populist ideas and slogans also disqualify them from membership of the modern left, though this didn’t stop Just Russia from joining the Socialist International. Ironically, this fact came to light in 2011, just as Yelena Mizulina, one of its members, was actively lobbying for an ultra-conservative anti-abortion law.
In any case, any social tension or mass protest in Russia raises the question of a left-wing agenda and its political agents. And we now have a new generation of left democratic politicians who are free from the traumatic legacy of both the 1990s and the left-wing underground scene.
“The left-democratic agenda today is the complete antithesis of the ruling order in Russia,” says one of these politicians - Alexander Zamyatin, a councillor from Moscow’s Zyuzino district. “In terms of politics, it’s democracy at a grassroots level, self-organized and populist, the opposite of our country’s authoritarian, vertical and technocratic regime. And in terms of economics, it’s a battle with inequality and our obvious and almost caste-ridden property-based society. As for the social sphere, we’re talking about state social guarantees instead of biopolitics.”
At the time of Russia’s 2012 protest cycle, the opposition’s fight for the inclusion of socio-economic demands into the political agenda felt more like haggling: the left tried to concentrate on incomes, labour rights and social guarantees, while Russian liberals feared a watering down of their general democratic agenda. The result was a series of compromise resolutions between the two forces.
The situation has changed in the last few years: Russia’s so-called “social agenda” has become common sense for the opposition. This is in part to do with the growth of urban movements whose members, fighting against the merging of schools and closing of health centres, as well as commercial development are involved in municipal and local campaigns as candidates, team workers and volunteers – and they now make up an active core of the opposition.
Kirill Medvedev
Click here to subscribe to our weekly newsletters in English and or French. You will receive one email every Monday containing links to all articles published in the last 7 days.