Russia’s once-tame Communist Party is becoming an opposition force

EKATERINA ENGALYCHEVA never got her badge showing Lenin as a child. The week she was supposed to join the (“little Octobrists”, a reference to the revolution of 1917), as all Soviet children did at the age of seven, the Soviet Union fell apart. But 30 years later Ms Engalycheva is a member of the Communist Party and a Moscow city councillor. She campaigns against Vladimir Putin’s crony capitalism; Lenin would no doubt have approved. But he would have been horrified by her other demands: for fair elections and impartial justice. She has been detained and fined for protesting against the jailing of Alexei Navalny, Russia’s opposition leader, and recently had to barricade herself in her office while police waited outside to arrest her.She is far from the stereotype of a Communist. She is not a red-flag-waving pensioner, and does not care about Stalin. Nor does she feel any attachment to the Soviet-era Communists who “betrayed our country and our people, switched sides and settled in United Russia” (the vehicle through which Mr Putin now controls the Russian parliament). She is not bothered that the Communist Party today is led by Gennady Zyuganov, a Stalin-praising former Soviet ideologue. What matters more to her is that the party is showing signs of becoming a genuine opposition. And this is making the Kremlin, and indeed Mr Zyuganov himself, nervous.