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| | AEI - Short Publications - The Decline of the Communists |
 | | Overlooked in the victory of the pro-Kremlin party, United Russia, in the Duma election last December and President Vladimir Putin's overwhelming victory in the presidential election three months later was a milestone in Russia's post-Soviet political history: the precipitous decline of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF). |
 | | The forerunner of the KPRF, the Russian Communist Party (RCP), was founded in 1990 by the members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) opposed to General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms.[1] After the failed August 1991 coup by Communist hardliners, the president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, banned the CPSU and the RCP. |
 | | As over 50 percent of the vote was cast for parties and blocs that failed to overcome the 5-percent threshold for representation (including 9.6 million votes, or 14 percent of the total, cast for the badly fragmented pro-reform parties and blocs), only four of the forty-three parties competing in the election entered the parliament. |
| www.aei.org /publications/pubID.21318,filter.all/pub_detail.asp (3322 words) |
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