I was pleased to read your article in the online version of Jacobin on the Russian left and its attitude toward the Ukrainian war, “We Spoke to Russian Socialists Who Are Protesting Vladimir Putin’s War.” It especially pleased me that the latter part of the article was devoted to the Communist Party ofthe Russian Federation (CPRF), led by Gennady Zyuganov. In the past thirty years, after the demise of the Soviet Union, there have been practically no analyses of the politics and ideology of the CPRF published.

Even socialist writers and scholars have not noticed the astonishing metamorphosis of Russian communists. Under the leadership of Zyuganov, they abandoned Marxism in the beginning of the 1990s and replaced it with a geopolitical ideology with conservative or even right-wing connotations. The red flags in May Day demonstrations and other Soviet iconography are but facades. It seems to me that the Zyuganov party has a big responsibility for the nation­alist and chauvinist attitudes that today are surging up in Russia.

 — Vesa Oittinen, Helsinki, Finland