Some old habits die hard. Eighty years after Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Bolshevik Party, the KPRF is still afraid of Trotskyists. The Moscow Times reports that Anatoly Baranov, the KPRF’s webmaster, has been hauled in front of the Party’s Central Control Commission and charged with stubbornly pushing “the Communist Party from the victorious Leninist path onto the false Trotskyist path of a rapid revolution, effectively carried out in the interests of the pro-Western bourgeoisie, rather than in the interests of the Russian people, and leading to the total occupation of Russia by NATO forces.” Baranov called the charges “schizophrenic raving.”
To quote Kyle’s mom, “What! What! What!?” Trotskyism? You gotta be fucking kidding me.
Yes, Trotskyism is alive and well in the KPRF. Now dubbed “neo-Trotskyism,” the followers of the shunned revolutionary appear to continue to pose a severe threat to the Communist Party’s path to revolution. In a resolution titled “On the Dangers of Neo-Trotskyist Manifestations in the KPRF”, accused Baranov of the following:
The particular danger lies in that the site’s editor A. Iu. Baranov is using the internet resources of the KPRF (central and regional sites, internet portals) not for the organizational fulfillment of the decisions of Party organs, but for the purpose of discrediting the KPRF program on the solidarity and inseparable connection between socialism and patriotism, and also against the unification of social-class and nationalist movements into a single mass resistance movement in opposition to the destruction of Russian civilization and the oppression and exploitation of its people.
Talk about a blast from the past.
It seems, however, that Baranov has appealed. In a statement posted yesterday, the KPRF stated that the Secretariat has decided to look into the question of the Control Commission’s decision. In the meantime, the text of “On the Dangers of Neo-Trotskyist Manifestations in the KPRF” has been removed from the KPFR website.
