15/7 Tass 382
NIZHNY NOVGOROD, July 15 (Itar-Tass) —— The Russian Communist Party will hold a meeting of the People’s Volunteer Corps in Nizhny Novgorod on July 16. Delegates from 30 regions of Russia will take part in it.
Nizhny Novgorod was the place from where volunteers led by Kuzma Minin and Prince Dmitry Pozharsky went to free Moscow from foreign invaders in 1612. The meeting organizers wore red folk shirts at a Friday press conference to stress their relation to the historic event. “We inherited this wear from the volunteers,” Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov said.
He said the rally would draw many people but the Communist Party guaranteed its security. “We can do that and will stop any provocateurs,” he said. The meeting participants will march to Unity Square where a monument to the Minin and Pozharsky volunteers was erected. “The landmark event will draw many members of the Russian Communist Party and people who are not members of our party but support our programs in defense of working people,” Zyuganov said.
The meeting will present the Communist Party’s anti-crisis program, which is divided into eleven sub-programs covering particular industries. The best academicians, mathematicians, inventors, agrarians and economists, who want to live in this country, worked on the program, Zyuganov said.
The program emphasizes the development of two sectors, which are traditionally Russia’s forte – the defense sector and the mining industry. “A combined potential of these industries will be the salvation of the country,” the party leader said. Research center also need attention and investments, he said. “These investments are a token of the national growth and renovation of industries,” he added.
Regional delegates will use the meeting to convey their proposals for the presidential and parliamentary election elaborated at a people’s referendum. “The referendum covered ten main subjects, which interested every person. About 5 million signatures have been collected,” Zyuganov said.
The People’s Volunteer Corps formed by Zyuganov’s initiative to counterbalance the Russian Popular Front of United Russia, involves over 1,200 public organizations that represent 3.5 million people, the party said. “We want individual membership instead of the admission of whole collectives. For instance, the Gorki Car Plant (GAZ) joined the People’s Front without asking the opinion of its workers. Individual membership is the only way to make the movement genuinely popular,” first secretary of the Communist Party’s Nizhny Novgorod regional organization Nikolai Ryabov said.
A Just Russia leader Sergei Mironov made a comment on the Communist’s initiative in his Friday speech at the party congress.
“We are witnessing the creation of a smokescreen for United Russia, the Popular Front. Our colleagues from the Communist Party were taken in by the trick and invented the People’s Volunteer Corps of their own. A Just Russia could have also done that, but it would not because the move is strategically unfounded. There will be party names on voting papers, and people must not be deceived,” he said.