MOSCOW — Despite a great deal of work the non-communist left has so far failed to establish a mass political organisation.
This is despite very favourable conditions. The government's neo-liberal policies have impoverished millions. There is a massive rise in anti-capitalist sentiment.
The Communist Party has shown itself incapable of taking advantage of the disillusionment. As well as failing to carry through any serious internal reforms it has resorted to nationalist rhetoric in favour of "national capital". The new left has to fill this vacuum.
In response the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia (FNPR) has grown quite radical in words, but lethargic in its actions. The bureaucratic leadership has done nothing to build the Party of Labour despite its formal support and has stifled all initiative.
The complacency in the FNPR have been opposed by the United Social Democrats, and by many of the Party of Labour's activists - the best of whom have had to leave their posts in the federation.
A big division between left and right has also opened up in the Social Democratic Party of Russia, which works mostly in the alternative trade unions. The right wing under Anatoly Golov is looking towards a unification with the "democratic centre".
A similar process is occurring in the Socialist Party of Workers.
Not ripe It now argues that conditions in Russia have "not yet ripened for real left politics", and is staking its future on sectors of the state and managerial apparatus dissatisfied with Yeltsin.
In these circumstances new attempts to achieve unification from above can only make matters worse, since the programmatic basis for unifying the new left movement remains unclear.
While the leaders of the traditional trade unions show nothing but caution the rapid growth of the Spring 1994 strike movement shows how much the situation is changing.
This is why both the Party of Labour and the United Social Democrats are trying to shift from operating through leadership structures to "solidarity from below".
It is on this basis that a new left movement in Russia has to be created.
A unification meeting is now