1991 is the year of Zyuganov’s descent into the field. It is the year of the publication of two harsh open letters on the Sovetskaya Rossiyaone addressed to Aleksandr Jakovlev, the perestroika ideologue, and one to the emerging Boris Yeltsin. The letters are proof that Zyuganov, until then a semi-unknown and uninfluential official, cultivated presidential aspirations.
When the Soviet Union came to an end, and with it the CPSU, Zyuganov organized himself to give life to the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, of which he first became co-secretary and then, in 1993, president. Aided by Yeltsin’s authoritarian ways, disregard for social problems and mismanagement of the economy, which would in time drag the fledgling Russia into a near-civil war, Zyuganov emerges as the ringleader of the opposition.
The recipe for salvation proposed by Zyuganov is based on the mixture of communist elements – state control of the economy, planning of productive activities, renationalization of large enterprises that have been privatized – and patriotic – the cult of Russia as a replacement for the defunct revolution -, and wants to create a common front against Yeltsin that transcends the concepts of left and right. People like the idea, as suggested by the numbers on registrations and demonstrations, and by Zyuganov runs for president in 1996.
The possibility that Zyuganov can win and follow through on promises to restore the Soviet Union is very real. He is a crowd-puller, he has just won the majority in the Duma, while Yeltsin is hated by the impoverished middle class and the starving popular classes by his policies which have led to the so-called “economic genocide”. Zyuganov will be stopped, this they will swear to do i seven bankersbecause it poses a threat to the (new) system that emerged from the ashes of the Soviet Union.
In that same year, while Zyuganov is convinced that he feels the taste of victory in the air, the “Davos Pact” between the seven bankers and their Western sponsors. The declared objective of the pact, the existence of which would only come to light years later, was to prevent victory of Zyuganov by financing Yeltsin’s electoral campaign and transforming the entire world of information into an anti-communist propaganda machine.
On June 16, at the last ballot examined, the bitter surprise for Zyuganov: second place, with 32% of the preferences. Yeltsin and the new system had prevailed, albeit only slightly (35%), gaining a further mandate. But the revived deep state, which had survived the purges and was undergoing reorganization, would soon bring Davos’s rule over Moscow prematurely. He would have done so on the last evening of 1999, a highly symbolic date, forcing Yeltsin to hand over the scepter to an obscure and semi-unknown securocrat named Vladimir Putin.