The leader of Russia's Communist Party plans to scold Barack Obama about the "cancer" of capitalism when the US president visits Moscow next week, he said in an interview on Friday.

Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov told the Interfax news agency that he had received an invitation to meet Obama. The US president was expected to meet Russian opposition leaders during his trip to Moscow from July 6 to 8.

Zyuganov said that if time permitted he would tell Obama his views on the global economic crisis and its origins in the United States.

"Above all, this relates to the current global economic crisis, which was precipitated by none other than the Americans. It was from Wall Street that the cancer of speculative-financial capitalism spread around the world," he said.

"I would like to hear an admission that patching various holes of this faulty economic policy will not fix the situation — approaches need to be changed at the root in order to achieve economic stability and security."

Zyuganov's Communist Party of the Russian Federation is the successor of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which held a monopoly on power for more than seven decades until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Despite its totalitarian roots the party is Russia's most popular opposition political group, deriving much of its support from promises of generous social benefits. It usually gets more votes than Western-oriented liberal parties.

During his election campaign last year and since taking office in January, Obama has repeatedly been castigated as a "socialist" by rightwing critics at home because of his support for a greater government role in the US economy.

AFP

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