MOSCOW: After nearly a century of dominating Russia, raising the Soviet Union to the status of a world power, the hammer and sickle finally faded into political obsolescence on Monday.

The Communist party took 12 per cent of the votes in Sunday’s parliamentary elections, almost halving its number of MPs. The result drew the curtain on the communists’ role as the only real political opposition and could herald the breakup of the party.

Yet, like most events in Russian political life, its demise did not occur without the Kremlin’s direction.

Vladimir Putin’s plan finally to rid Russia of communism and create a parliament in his own image began four months ago. The party, led by Gennady Zyuganov and peopled on the whole by older and poorer Russians pining for the powerful state benefaction of the Soviet era, had for years provided a comfortably harmless opposition bloc in parliament. Yet Mr Putin’s desire for unmitigated power required that parliament be loyal, particularly if the constitution was to be amended to permit him a third term in power.

Oksana Gaman-Golutina, professor of the Academy of State Management, said: “The communists were only occasionally voting against the Kremlin’s bills, but in the strictly centralized regime being built by President Putin, even such innocent behaviour caused strong irritation. So the Kremlin staged the operation ‘End the Communist Party’.”

The result of the Kremlin operation was the creation of the overtly nationalist Rodina, or Motherland, party, which took a large part of the communists’ agenda. It pledged to raise company taxation and return to the people the fortunes made by the hyper-rich oligarchs in the privatization deals of the 1990s.

Rodina was founded four months ago by the experienced economist and former communist, Sergei Glazyev, and the Kremlin’s rising star, Dmitri Rogozin.

Mr Rogozin, the president’s personal envoy to the troublesome former military enclave of Kaliningrad, also headed the international affairs committee in parliament and vociferously defended the need to protect Russian interests abroad, particularly during the Iraq crisis.

Mr Glazyev maintained a heavy presence on state-run television during the final three weeks of the election campaign. The TV rejoiced in telling the electorate how many big businessmen were running for parliament on a communist ticket, juxtaposing this with Rodina’s plans for the redistribution of wealth. It brought Rodina 9 per cent of Sunday’s vote, mostly taken from the communists.

Mr Glazyev and Mr Rogozin provided a dynamic alternative for voters who were sick of the communists’ tired, discredited stance and bored with the crazed nationalist rhetoric of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the misleadingly named Liberal Democratic party.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.