First of all, KPRF is not communist or socialist. All of the remotely relevant “communist” parties are just social-democrats and, like the KPRF, actively shun any actual radicals.
Is it just mass apathy? Most people in the post-Soviet world have somewhat positive feelings towards the Soviet Union, but this very rarely translates to any actual leftism, the most you’ll get is some vague vibes based non-ideological “communism”, again like the KPRF or even somewhat in United Russia (less so since they had the White Army chevron on their election posters recently lmfao)
Like i said, the dominant sentiment is this kind of “we tried everything, everything failed” style of apathy. We’ve tried “democracy”, we’ve tried fascism in the form of Nazism in Russia, Ukraine and in the Baltics Salazar-esque semi-fascist dictatorships, we’ve tried communism and all of them failed (not me saying this). There was genuine popular anti-communist sentiment in the Soviet Union and in eastern Europe in the 80s and 90s (although not the majority), people entrusted the new regimes that they had themselves fought for, then those same regimes brutally betrayed them. The same Yeltsin they had helped empower to “save Russia from communism” and usher in “democracy”, brought aboat dictatorial and oligarchic rule, literally shelling the fucking parliament. To an observer it might have been obvious this would be the outcome, but the people on the ground were shattered. Election participation struggles to reach above the 60s, sometimes even dropping to below 40 percent like in the 2008 Romanian parliamentary elections where only 39 percent participated.
How is this mended? How do you get people to care? Do we have to wait half a century for us to be “reset” and to start over again? It just seems so bleak.
I think that people have been domesticated into inaction, because as bad as the circumstances are now, they haven’t yet reached the crescendo of Post WWI levels of bad. So while the majority still have food to eat and some “treats” to consume socialists won’t be able to politically turn the majority of the liberals/conservatives into class conscious proletarians.
Someone said before that because the state socialists structure was smashed, the left has no way to politically organise. But it’s not like socialists had better state structures during monarchists theocracies, they just had better conditions favourable for organising as everyone was getting trampled into the dirt.