Letter From the Editors
Fun fact: Communist Gennady Zyuganov once came within 3% of winning the first presidential election in post-Soviet history. His share of 32% of the votes in round one of the 1996 race forced a runoff between him and Boris Yeltsin. Even after his defeat, Zyuganov continued to be so popular that he was reportedly on the “short list” of possible successors to Yeltsin. Of course, we know who was chosen instead – and he has been in Russia’s number one spot ever since.
The 2025 local elections showed Zyuganov and the RFCP still fighting for second place, but this time they struggled to make it into double digits in many regional legislatures. In a remarkable show of boldness for these times, the party’s Voronezh Regional Committee Communists issued a statement alleging widespread election fraud. It reads, in part: “We hereby state that the ‘victory’ achieved once again by United Russia is a pyrrhic victory. Thanks to the modern mass media, and primarily the Internet, ordinary voters are seeing quite clearly how the election results were created. They are seeing the persecution of people attempting to eliminate electoral arbitrariness. . . . This leads to apathy and the lack of faith that anything can be changed and, as a result, to ignoring the elections, whose results are known in advance to the majority of voters.”
The RFCP leadership did not say much to back up their Voronezh members, which shows how much has changed since the 2009 local elections: That year, the lopsided victories of United Russia nationwide prompted Zyuganov, the late Vladimir Zhirinovsky and dozens of other opposition deputies to stage a mass walkout from the State Duma. Some may say the Russian political system has become ossified, but Konstantin Kostin puts it in different terms: “Populism and political antics have not only become inappropriate, but are not in tune with society’s moods and demands. This is largely indicative of the maturation of society and the political system as a part of it.”
As for the American political system, Russian commentator Mikhail Shevchuk shares a much graver diagnosis, in the wake of the murder of conservative rising star Charlie Kirk. Citing the escalating atmosphere of political hatred fueled by social media, Shevchuk compares the burgeoning army of “no-name spree killers” in the US to the immune system of the social organism, which “acts in response to the toxins and bacteria proliferating in it.” He continues: “Naturally, you can’t compare political opponents to viruses and bacteria.” A more apt description is that the public space is suffering from “autoimmune disease: The body begins to devour itself.”
Russia’s immune system, too, is busily attacking foreign bodies. A case in point brought up by Aleksandr Urzhanov is McDonalds. Following its initial appearance in Moscow in 1990 – a “bloodless invasion of Western lifestyle into socialist reality” – the American fast-food chain became ubiquitous in post-Soviet Russia. Until 2022, that is, when it started to be rebranded as a Russian chain, Vkusno i Tockha (Tasty, Period). Urzhanov writes:
“Thirty-five years later, McDonald’s is ours in the same sense that the Crimea is ours.” In his view, this was only the most recent in a “series of forceful takeovers”: The military takes the Crimea, and Russian executive Oleg Paroyev takes the Big Macs.
No doubt some Russian political strategists are thinking that the Golden Arches should have been torn down long ago. Looking back to the 2008 “March of Dissent” that protested the election of Dmitry Medvedev as president, we remind our Digest readers that among the first people to be detained by OMON riot police were a group of teenagers from the National Bolsheviks. Guess where they hanging out when they were apprehended? McDonalds! Rebellious youth, Communism, and American consumer culture – now, that’s a dangerous combination.