WHEN VLADIMIR OBUKHOVSKY speaks of Josef Stalin, his voice drops a tone in reverence. The 23-year-old is too young to remember life under the Soviet dictator—let alone Russia’s Communist system—but he yearns to see the red flag fly over the Kremlin once more. “Communism is the sole system under which our country had it all,” says Obukhovsky, the leader of the modern-day Komsomol, the Soviet-founded Communist youth organization. “Today’s authorities have destroyed everything that was built up by the Soviets.”
YOU DON’T KNOW UNCLE JOE: The majority of Russians now think Stalin’s bloody rule was a good thing.
EDUARD KORNIYENKO/REUTERS
Obukhovsky isn’t the only one who longs for the return of Russia’s Soviet past. More than a quarter of a century after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Communist ideas remain extremely popular in Russia, where nostalgia for the social safety nets provided by the Soviet system is widespread. As Russians struggle through an economic crisis that has plunged many into crippling poverty, support for the Communist Party is growing in the lead-up to September’s parliamentary elections. Among other things, on its platform this fall is the nationalization of natural resources, as well as the state takeover of the tobacco and alcohol industries to finance more social spending. The party is also pledging to introduce a progressive tax rate to replace the 13 percent flat tax enacted by President Vladimir Putin more than a decade ago. “Why should a cleaner who gets a minimum wage be taxed the same as an oligarch?” asks Gennady Zubkov, a regional Communist Party lawmaker. “This is unacceptable.”