More than 25 years after the Soviet collapse, the party vocally appeals to Orthodox Christianity, Russia's dominant creed. The party's sole post-Soviet chairman Gennady Zyuganov called Jesus "the first Communist" more than once.
"It is a holy duty of Communists and the Orthodox Church to unite," Zuyganov wrote in 2012 in his party's first lengthy document on religion, because both institutions shared "common goals and enemies". The goals included censorship of "debauchery and violence" in mass media, eradication of Western liberalism and "its conception of human rights", e-government and sexual education in schools. [...]
Its support has been waning for years; its loyalists are simply dying out. The age of an average party member is 56, and the number of members has fallen to about 155,000 - a trivial number in comparison with the 19.5 million Soviet Communists in 1989. The speeches of Zyuganov - balding, pudgy and famously uncharismatic - hardly attract millennials or middle-class urbanites, the main antagonists of the Kremlin. [...]
"All political forces should be together when it comes to the values of faith, morals, culture and our nation's unity," Russian Patriarch Kirill was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying in 2014 when he handed Zyuganov a medal of Glory and Honour, his Church's top award, on his 70th birthday.
In February, Zyuganov congratulated Kirill on the five-year anniversary of his enthronement. "One of the most serious mistakes of my predecessors was that they fell out with the Church," he told the patriarch.
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