CO-OPTION…

President Vladimir Putin’s dominance of the political scene drives his opponents to Splitsville. First the liberals, then the Agrarians, and now even the Communist Party may fracture. A group calling itself the “Union of Peoples of Russia,” and including party stalwarts like Duma Speaker Gennady Seleznev and former Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov, is eager for “constructive mutual action” with Putin’s Kremlin. The group holds its founding Congress in Moscow today and will bash Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov for the party’s poor showing in recent elections and its failure to attract young members. The Kremlin, which engineered the alliance with the Communists in the Duma that left democrats and right-wingers out in the cold, is delighted. The ideological differences between the pragmatic (i.e., unprincipled) Kremlin strategists and the unprincipled (i.e., pragmatic) Communists are non-existent. Putin’s political organization, the Unity movement headed by Sergei Shoigu, praises and emulates the “organizational concepts” of the old Communist Party of the Soviet Union; Unity’s youth movement looks so much like the Komsomol that wags call it the Pusomol–the Union of Putinite Youth.