Putin drops, Communists Gain in Polls

It starts the way these things always do—not with fire, but with emptiness. Empty shelves, empty wages, empty promises. A pension gutted. A war sold as patriotism. A flag used like a bandage to cover up rot. People notice. Not all at once, but enough of them. And in Russia, when enough notice, they remember.

They remember the old songs—not the anthems, but the ones their parents hummed in factories. They remember how the rent was once fixed, how schoolbooks didn’t cost, how you could get a doctor without selling a cow. The KPRF doesn't shout. It doesn't need to. It walks back in like it never left. Ten percent in the polls. Then eleven. Then twelve. Just numbers, unless you know what numbers mean in Russia.

And Putin knows.

He sees it in the rallies—not big, but steady. Faces that don’t blink. Students who stopped laughing at Marx. Workers who stopped pretending United Russia gave a damn. He hears the red rising, and he hates the sound. Because it’s not nostalgia. It’s not old men clinging to 1975. It’s cold, present anger. It’s hungry, and it remembers who fed it before.

So he tightens the media. Arrests the loudest. Throws medals at the army and rubles at the oligarchs. He talks about NATO and tradition and holy Russia. But he never says the word communism. He avoids it like a wound he can't close.

But the people say it.

And they say it louder now.