Anarchists protest against the conduct of the elections in Moscow. (AFP)

Moscow, Dec. 5 (Reuters): Just 20 years ago, they seemed consigned to the dustbin of history. At yesterday’s parliamentary polls, Russia’s communists drew students, intellectuals, even some businessmen in forging an opposition to Vladimir Putin’s wounded United Russia party.

The Communist Party (CPRF) for most Russians evokes images of bemedalled war veterans and the elderly poor deprived of pensions and left behind in a “New Russia” of glitzy indulgence. Large swathes of society have appeared beyond the reach of the red flag and hammer and sickle.

Until yesterday.

Not that the Communist Party’s doubling of its vote to about 20 per cent presages any imminent assault on power. The memories of repression in the old communist Soviet Union, the labour camps and the regimentation are still too fresh for many. But vote for the party they did, if perhaps with gritted teeth.

“With sadness I remember how I passionately vowed to my grandfather I would never vote for the communists,” Yulia Serpikova, 27, a freelance location manager in the film industry, told Reuters. “It’s sad that with the ballot in hand I had to tick the box for them to vote against it all.”

For many Russians disillusioned by rampant corruption and a widening gap between rich and poor, the communists represented the only credible opposition to Putin’s United Russia.

Through all the turmoil of the early 1990s when the Soviet Union collapsed, the party kept a strong national organisation based on regions and workplace. With access to official media limited for the opposition, this has been a huge advantage.

Also the communists, ironically, benefited from the votes of some pro-western liberals who saw little or no hope of kindred parties such as economist Grigory Yavlinsky’s Yabloko clearing the seven per cent threshold to enter Parliament. Yabloko doubled their vote to 3.3 per cent.

“The communists are the only real party out there,” said one western banker in Moscow. “United Russia is a joke, Just Russia is a joke and the LDPR is a joke and many people know it. So they vote communist because they realise it is a real vote for the opposition and against United Russia. This is as ironic as you get.”

“I don’t particularly like the communists but there is no one else (to vote for) and I don’t want my vote to be stolen,” Alexander Kurov, a student of physics, told Reuters.

At the Communist Party headquarters hung with portraits of Lenin and heavy gold-on-red velvet hammer-and-sickle banners, leader Gennady Zyuganov complained of fraud and described the election as “theft on an especially grand scale”.

In a bizarre flip, today's communists have benefited from satire on Russia’s vibrant blogosphere comparing Putin’s party to the all powerful Communist Party of Soviet times.

One popular image shows Putin’s face aged and superimposed on a portrait of doddering Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, mocking the Prime Minister’s plan to return to the presidency in March for two possible terms until 2024.

Voters wary of United Russia said their decision was purely a matter of cold electoral arithmetic, backing the party most likely to cross a seven per cent threshold and win enough seats to act as a counterweight to Putin’s party.

“I am voting against Putin to weaken his party, so it makes sense to vote for a party that will make it in,” Sergei Yemilianov, 46, a mathematics professor, said.

Analyst Masha Lipman of the Moscow Carnegie Centre described votes gained by the Communist Party as “similar to writing a four-letter word on the ballot”.

“It’s a sign of defiance,” she told Reuters. “The government has turned this election into a farce and in response people are turning their electoral choice into a travesty.”