The parliamentary elections in Russia held on September 17–19 brought another nominal victory for President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party. Yet the most remarkable result was the leap in support for the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), which came in second with 19 percent of the vote.

Despite the usual fraud favoring Putin allies, the KPRF managed to win over a new electorate — especially young people in large cities who regarded voting for the party as their only opportunity to say no to the existing order. Since the 1990s, the KPRF’s official program has remained rooted in a mixture of Stalinism, nationalism, and social-democratic paternalism. However, in the last few years, a generation of young regional leaders has emerged within the KPRF, turning it more to the rhetoric of defending democratic rights, social equality, and ecology.

One of the most telling parts of the election in this respect was the campaign by Mikhail Lobanov, a thirty-seven-year-old mathematics instructor at Moscow State University. Mikhail was nominated by the KPRF but positioned himself as an independent democratic socialist. He beat Putin’s United Russia candidate by over ten thousand votes (a 12 percent margin) though the tally was then manipulated to deny him election to parliament.