Europe | Lenin would be baffled

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

The Kremlin and the party’s own leader are worried

Confusingly, young Communists are often democrats now
|MOSCOW

EKATERINA ENGALYCHEVA never got her badge showing Lenin as a child. The week she was supposed to join the Oktiabriata (“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.

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline “The new Communists”

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