The elections to the Moscow City Duma, associated with some of the largest protests currently taking place in Russian regions, remain at the center of political life in the Russian Federation. Ideally, after the majority of independent opposition candidates were not allowed to participate, the only reasonable and ethical approach for any real opposition would have been a boycott, similar to the one declared by Ingush public leaders for local elections in their republic. However, leaders such as Alexei Navalny and Ilya Yashin, who called for protests, decided to take a different approach and came up with the concept of «smart voting».
So what is «smart» voting? Theoretically, its main idea is to disrupt the ruling monopoly of United Russia in the upcoming September elections, and to do this, voters should support its opponents who have the best chances of winning. However, as many suspected and as became clear today, Alexei Navalny and his supporters, including Yashin, Gudkov, and others, are essentially calling for support of… the Communists, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), to be precise. This can be deduced from the recently published list of «smart vote» candidates, the authenticity of which the Navalny team did not deny, stating that the official version would be available only on the dedicated website.
According to the list, 35 of the 45 candidates endorsed by Navalny and his team for these elections are members of the KPRF, which makes up 78%. Only 3 candidates belong to the «Yabloko» party, which among all the systemic parties is the most complementary to the interests of Muslims. However, one of these three is an ardent Islamophobe, Sergei Mitrokhin.
In other words, Navalny’s team wants to see 78% of KPRF members in the Moscow City Duma, or in other words, they want to «break the hegemony of United Russia» in order to establish the hegemony of the Communist Party.
But what do Muslims think about this? Can we ignore the fact that this is the party that claimed to be the successor of the regime responsible for the destruction of millions of dissidents, including representatives of all faiths, the deliberate annihilation of Islam, and the imposition of atheism among Muslim peoples, including the extermination of Islamic scholars, the persecution of practicing religious individuals, and the deportation of entire Muslim communities? This is primarily an ethical question, since it could be argued that today’s communists are not the same as the old ones, although it is unclear why they did not rename themselves as social democrats or socialists, like their counterparts in many post-Soviet countries after the collapse of the USSR.
However, it can be agreed that today’s communists are not the same as in the past. But are they a better alternative for Muslims? In the current KPRF, there is perhaps only one person we know personally who defends religious rights, including those of Muslims, in domestic politics — Maxim Shevchenko. Apart from his position in foreign policy, which is to support the Assad regime, he is at least the person who could represent the interests of Russian Muslims in all issues.
However, Shevchenko in the KPRF is a rare exception for Muslims, and he is not affiliated with the Moscow organization of the KPRF. The latter, led by the Islamophobe Valery Rashkin, has shown blatant attacks on Islamic symbols. In addition, there is the history of the most blatant anti-Islamic attacks by Alexandra Andreeva, a member of the Moscow City Council supported by the KPRF. The insults she directed against Islam and Muslims could shame many ideological nationalists and conservatives with their Islamophobia. By the way, after this incident some representatives of the KPRF promised that there would be a party evaluation of Andreeva’s statements, but so far nothing has happened. And there is a more recent incident when a member of the KPRF, who heads the Inter-Parliamentary Assembly of Orthodoxy, provoked unrest in Georgia with his attitude towards Georgians as «younger brothers» who should submit to the «Orthodox Russian world».
Overall, it can be said that the current KPRF is characterized more by a dangerous mixture of Orthodox chauvinism and Stalinism, which could be classified as national Bolshevism. Of all the foreign parties, it is most similar in orientation to the Communist Party of China, whose attitude toward Muslims is well known to our readers.
Whether Muslims should support such an alternative to United Russia is a rhetorical question. The more interesting question is why other participants and supporters of the Moscow protests should vote for this alternative, which, according to these party leaders, is organized by the CIA, the State Department, etc., and is directed against Russia, and therefore they are «enemies of the people»?
Incidentally, representatives of the radical wing of the Russian opposition, such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Garry Kasparov, have condemned the «smart voting» of Navalny and his team for this reason, calling for either voting only for those who represent the interests of the protesters (Khodorkovsky) or not voting at all (Kasparov).