International

Capitalist infiltration

Russian millionaires are finding a home in the Communist party, The Washington Post reports.

The party of Lenin has gone bourgeois as it struggles to survive in the new Russia. At least a quarter of the Communist candidates running in Sunday’s election are businessmen — dozens of them millionaires, according to official disclosure records, including at least five of the 18 on the party’s federal slate.

A party official explained that the new Communist Party no longer opposes all private property.

This, he argued, was in keeping with the party’s roots. “Marx was very rich,” he said, referring to the theorist Karl Marx, adding that Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin cooperated with some Western capitalists after gaining power.

Marx was very rich? I thought Engels was the rich one.