Despite Law against Regional Parties, Komi’s Communists are Acting Like One, Showing Vitality of Forces They would Represent, Shtepa Says

Paul Goble

    Staunton, Mar. 15 – Before Vladimir Putin pushed through a law in 2001 banning regional parties, such organizations existed across the Russian Federation. But in the years since, even the possibility of their reemergence has generally been thought of as inconceivable, Vadim Shtepa says.

    Politicians in the federal subjects had to run either as members of all-Russian parties or independently, the editor of the Tallinn-based portal Region.Expert says; and only the case of Sergey Furgal in Krasnoyarsk seemed to be an exception to the ability of regional politicians to act on their own. 

    But Furgal has been ousted from office and imprisoned, and there have been no exactly analogous cases. However, the situation of the KPRF organization in the Komi Republic shows how a variant of regional parties might in fact return (moscowtimes.ru/2025/03/15/paradoks-kommunistov-komi-a158149 reposted at region.expert/paradoks-kommunistov-komi/).

    The story begins in 2014 when ecologist Oleg Mikhaylov, 27 and the head of the KPRF fraction in the Komi Republic parliament, took the lead in organizing the environmental protests at Shiyes, where the Kremlin planned to send Moscow trash to be buried in that northern republic.    

Mikhaylov denounced Moscow’s plans as “a colonial policy,” and his fraction organized protests from across the political system, putting him and itself at odds with the KPRF leaders in Moscow and with the Kremlin. But he became so popular that the KPRF was forced to nominate him as a candidate for the Duma – a position he then won in 2021. 

  When Mikhaylov was elected to the Duma, he was replaced as head of the KPRF fraction in the Komi Republic assembly by Viktor Vorobyov, 32, a lawyer and rights activist who wasn’t a member of the KPRF. He denounced the closure of Memorial and Putin’s war in Ukraine and backed more rights for the federal subjects and a new Scandinavian-style republic flag.

    For his outspokenness, Voroboyov was labeled a foreign agent by Moscow and then forced to resign from the Komi legislature after the Duma passed a law saying that no one identified as a foreign agent could serve.  He was then replaced by Nikolay Udoratin, 33, who had been part of the Shiyes protests and was equal in his radicalism to his predecessors

    In short, Shtepa suggests, what has happened with the KPRF fraction in Komi is the emergence of a kind of regionalist party without the name; and he suggests that such developments are possible elsewhere and would be a far better protection against a new round of neo-imperialism after Putin than the plans for Moscow Russian oppositionists now propose.