Whatever happened to... the communist party.(in Russia)(Brief Article)

You would expect Oleg Kulikov and his comrades in the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) to be grateful to Vladimir Putin for resurrecting the ghosts of soviets past. But Kulikov, ideology chief for the party's Central Committee, is having none of it. "It's an attempt to exploit nostalgia. By introducing these symbols, the president is trying to show that he's heir to that epoch, to its best qualities. It's a kind of political advertising," rails Kulikov. "The patriotic rhetoric should be reinforced by real deeds."

For a while Putin and the communists seemed to get along well enough. Putin even made common cause with the reds in Parliament for a time. His first state-of-the-nation speech last year contained plenty of talk about "patriotism" and "strengthening the state"-- the sort of thing you never heard from Boris Yeltsin. But these days the communists are feeling jilted. They point to Putin's most recent message to the Parliament; a few weeks ago the president announced an ambitious program of liberal economic reforms that made the communists blanch. Kulikov ticks off the list of horrors: tax and customs reform; proposals to enable the free sale and purchase of land; the restructuring of state-run monopolies. "Yeltsin was afraid to set out such a deeply ...