Encyclopedia of Russian History

Zubatov himself was not a gendarme officer, but a civil servant who attained only the seventh rank (nadvornyi sovetnik), or lieutenant colonel in military terms. Had he risen through the hierarchical, regimented military, he probably would not have conceived of “police socialism.” This policy advocated not the redistribution of wealth but the backing of workers in economic disputes with employers. In 1901, with the patronage of senior Moscow officials, he organized societies that provided cultural, legal, and material services to factory workers. Within a year, analogous societies sprang up in other cities, including Minsk, Kiev, and Odessa.

In the fall of 1902 Zubatov was invited to reorganize the nerve center of the Russian security police. As chief of the Special Section of the Police

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Department in St. Petersburg, he created a network of security bureaus in twenty cities from Vilnius to Irkutsk. He staffed many of them with his proteges trained in the new methods of security policing and encouraged to deploy secret informants within the revolutionary milieu.

Meanwhile, however, his worker societies slipped out of control. In July 1903 a general strike broke out in Odessa and labor unrest swept across the south. Zubatov advocated restraint, but the Minister of Interior, Vyacheslav Plehve, used troops to restore order. Disillusioned with Zubatov’s labor policies and suspecting him of personal disloyalty, Plehve banished him from the major cities of the empire. Zubatov refused invitations to return to police service after Plehve’s assassination in 1904. A monarchist to the last, he fatally shot himself following the emperor’s abdication in 1917. See also: PLEHVE, VYACHESLOV KONSTANTINOVICH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Daly, Jonathan W. (1998). Autocracy under Siege: Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1866-1905. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Ruud, Charles A., and Stepanov, Sergei. (1999). Fontanka 16: The Tsar’s Secret Police. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Schneiderman, Jeremiah. (1976). Sergei Zubatov and Revolutionary Marxism: The Struggle for the Working Class in Tsarist Russia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Zuckerman, Frederick S. (1996). The Tsarist Secret Police in Russian Society, 1880-1917. New York: New York University Press.

JONATHAN W. DALY

ZYUGANOV, GENNADY ANDREYEVICH

(b. 1944), Russian politician, chair of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and head of its parliamentary faction since 1993.

Gennady Andreyevich Zyuganov was born on June 26, 1944, in Mymrino, Russia. A member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s (CPSU) ideological department from 1983, Gennady Zyuganov sympathized with the conservative opposition to Gorbachev and helped found the anti-reform Russian Communist Party within the

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

ZYUGANOV, GENNADY ANDREYEVICH

CPSU in 1990. He first gained notoriety as an anti-Gorbachev polemicist on the eve of the August 1991 coup and as a defender of the Russian Communist Party when Yeltsin banned it (from August 1991 to November 1992).

As a prolific opposition publicist from the early 1990s, Zyuganov’s achievement was the rehabilitation of communism as a serious intellectual and political force. Ideologically, however, his “conservative communism” came to owe less of a debt to its Marxist-Leninist forebears and instead drew heavily from the idea of a Soviet “national Bolshevism,” which justified communist rule more for its service to national greatness than for its promise of a classless future. Zyuganov argued that Marxism was only one of the methods necessary for analyzing modern society, in which defense of Russian cultural and historical traditions, preservation of a global zone of influence, and the forging of broad alliances with national capitalists against the West took precedence over class revolution within Russia itself.