MOVEMENT IN SUPPORT OF THE ARMY

The movement, In Support of the Army, War Industry, and War Science (DPA) was founded in July 1997 on the initiative and with the guidance of the chair of the Duma defense committee, Lev Rokhlin, a hero of the war in Chechnya. With the degradation of the army, it soon became a significant anti-government force. After the murder of Rokhlin a year later, his successor as chair of the committee, Viktor Ilyukhin, became head of the party. Ilyukhin was famous for having brought a legal action, during his days as prosecutor, against Mikhail Gorbachev. Next in line to Ilyukhin was Colonel General Albert Mashakov, former commander of the Privolga military district, candidate in the 1991 presidential elections, and notorious for his anti-Semitic statements (he once suggested, for instance, that the DPA should be unofficially called the DPZh, or "Movement Against Jews"). Among the strategies considered by the Left on the eve of the 1999 elections, the "three-columns" idea would have had the DPA at the head of one column. Another strategy called for the formation of a bloc of national-patriotic forces consisting of the DPA, the Russian Popular Movement, the Union of Compatriots "Fatherland," and the Union of Christian Rebirth. The second idea had the DPA join a united oppositional bloc with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF). A third proposal, the one adopted, had the DPA enter the elections independently. The first three places on the DPA list were taken by Ilyukhin, Makashov, and Yuri Saveliev, rector of the Petersburg Technical University, whose popularity rested on his having fired a professor from the United States because of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. The DPA list disappeared, but Ilyukhin and one other candidate were elected to the Duma.

In the early twenty-first century the DPA has little influence and is essentially a satellite of the Communist Party. Ilyukhin, its leader, is a member of the Central Committee of the CPRF. He takes entirely radical positions and plays a certain role in the leadership of the National Patriotic Union of Russia (NPSR).

See also: communist party of the russian federation

bibliography

McFaul, Michael. (2001). Russia's Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

McFaul, Michael, and Markov, Sergei. (1993). The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities, and Programs. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press.

McFaul, Michael; Petrov, Nikolai; and Ryabov, Andrei, eds. (1999). Primer on Russia's 1999 Duma Elections. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press.

Nikolai Petrov