Party Next To Power

Every year after November 7 I want to look the Communist leaders in the eye. Fine. They might have been fanatics sincerely devoted to their great idea of rescuing humanity by costs of mankind itself or cynical politicians intent on taking power using their most progressive ideology and enjoy the happy life of dull dictators. But now they are neither. It is merely one of the parties used by the authorities, happy to serve those authorities, not knowing how to prove again its necessity to the First Person. The struggle of Russia’s two Gennadies, ludicrous Ziuganov and conceited Selezniov, for Comrade Putin’s heart — what kind of Communism is this?

To think of it, they have always been the same. We knew only our Communists thinking not so much of ideology as of economic responsibility. They had to strictly manage everything: schools, hospitals, housing. They were a universal power, a real triumph of a cook appointed to lead the miserable state. And what about their Western dependents? They did not cook at all. Comrade George Marche of the French Communist Party stuck in our memories by the huge diamond on his finger and labor rhetoric, comrade Gus Hall of the US one by the huge skyscraper where Marxist do-nothings were spending Soviet money together with FBI agents who, as they say, constituted up to half of the members of the CPUSA National Committee. Now, when our cooks have rid themselves of responsibility, why should they behave any differently?

Karl Marx might say that the Communist Party is an organization created by a group of bungling petty-bourgeois nomenklatura exploiting the workers to preserve their own living standards. Immediately after their victory in 1917 the Bolsheviks started creation of an elegant life for themselves and for their servants against the background of a starving state, which they themselves robbed. Today, after its disgraceful loss of power, this party still is near it: its leaders live in state dachas, negotiate with presidents; now they want not power but to preserve the living standard they got used to in their regional party committees. And the power understands them because it has come out of the same offices, saunas, and health spas. Only this regime is now democratic. Moreover, they are all related. And they can always come to agreement.

There is one good side in this situation: this party is not the same Communist Party it was. The dragon’s teeth are rotten and dropping out, it is warming itself peacefully at the fireplace, concerned only with its pension; sometimes it comes out for demonstrations but not for long — it would not want to catch cold. Someday it will die just like that, quiet and unnoticed, like pensioner Viktor Grishin (former Moscow Party Committee secretary) did standing in line at a social security department. It is not dangerous anymore. The dangerous thing is the poison it left in all of us.