Copyright 1998 ABC-CLIO, Inc.
Kaleidoscope
COUNTRY:
Russia
PERSON: Gennady Zyuganov
HEADLINE: Biographies
The leader of the Russian Communist Party, Gennady Zyuganov was a leading
candidate in June 1996 presidential elections in which he was narrowly defeated
by the incumbent, President Boris Yeltsin.
Gennady Adreyevich Zyuganov was born in 1944 in the Mymrino village in the
provincial Orel region. He was
trained in philosophy at the Orel Pedagogical Institute and the Academy of
Social Sciences of the Soviet Communist Party. He worked as a math teacher at a
secondary school from 1961 to 1965 and was a Communist Party and trade union
functionary in 1967. He worked his way up the regional
bureaucracy of the Orel branch of the Communist Party, becoming the head of its
propaganda division during 1974-83. In Moscow, he was an instructor and head of
the propaganda division of the Communist Party Central Committee from 1983 to
1989 and was a deputy head of the party's ideology division during 1989-90.
Beginning
in 1991, with the breakup of the Soviet Union and a ban on the Communist Party,
Zyuganov persisted in shepherding the party through its various transformations
while other members either retired, defected to the government of Boris
Yeltsin, or sought opportunities in business and banking.
By 1993, he had become the
chairperson of the party at its restorative congress and was elected to the
State Duma. In December 1995 parliamentary elections, the party led all others
in the number of Duma seats it won. Zyuganov trailed Yeltsin by just three
percentage points in the first round of presidential
balloting in June 1996. In runoff polls in July, Yeltsin, using the powers of
incumbency and a blistering anticommunist advertising campaign, defeated
Zyuganov by a much wider margin.
By virtue of not abandoning the Communist Party when it was discredited and
moribund, Zyuganov has
benefited from its new rise in popularity. Helped by the party's mythology,
Zyuganov has advocated collectivism, social equality, and the restoration of
the Soviet Union, appealing to many Russians who feel cheated by the capitalist
reforms of the Yeltsin government. In his 1994 book Derzhava (Great Power), he
argues that
capitalism is incompatible with the Russian character and that the fall of the
empire can be traced to
"geopolitical sabotage." Zyuganov is supported by the manufacturing and industrial sectors, which are
still reeling from the collapse of the Soviet Union, having been bypassed by
the trend of privatization that made the banking and natural resources
industries successful under Boris Yeltsin.
[Sources:
International Who's Who; The New York Times]
LOAD-DATE: February 18, 1998
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1998 LEXIS-NEXIS, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.
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