World View : The Last of the True Believers : The Berlin Wall is down, but Marxism-Leninism is alive and well in a handful of nations. They are the Holdouts. How long will their walls stand?

Just before concluding a 1984 visit to Beijing, President Ronald Reagan passed through Tian An Men Square, which was decorated for the city’s annual May Day celebration with pictures of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, V.I. Lenin and Josef Stalin.

At that time, Reagan and his aides were inclined to belittle such symbols of traditional Marxist ideology in China, which Reagan himself that week branded a “so-called Communist country.” “He (Reagan) thought they were the Smith Brothers,” White House Press Secretary Larry Speakes joked, referring to the bearded pair depicted on boxes of American cough drops.

They misjudged. Six May Days later, China ranks as the largest and one of the few remaining Communist states to cling to the tenets of old-fashioned, traditional Marxism-Leninism. It is the leader of what might be termed the Holdouts Club, the group of Communist regimes striving to resist the political changes that have swept Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union over the past year.

The other major nations in the club are North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba. The club also includes such smaller countries as Albania and South Yemen and three nations that are racked by insurgencies or civil war--Afghanistan, Angola and Mozambique.

In each of these nations, the ruling Communist parties still refuse to tolerate any significant political opposition or to permit open elections and other democratic reforms. China’s Communist Party, for example, still speaks proudly of its style of government as the “people’s democratic dictatorship.”

Most of the Holdouts maintain an ideological commitment not only to Marxism as an economic theory but also to Leninism, the doctrine that a Communist party should incorporate all the functions of a state and systematically eliminate dissent and organized opposition.

How long will the Holdouts be able to resist the tide that has swept over the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe? In each case, the answer may depend on a variety of factors ranging from geographical location to the age of the Communist leadership.

As one Communist regime after another has toppled in Eastern Europe and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s Communist Party has veered sharply from the political path Lenin blazed seven decades ago, the members of the Holdouts Club have been moving to support one another.

North Korean President Kim Il Sung hurried to Beijing after the upheavals in Eastern Europe last fall, and Chinese Communist Party Secretary Jiang Zemin recently paid a return visit to Pyongyang. China and Cuba have signed a new trade agreement. North Korea recently heaped praise upon “the correct leadership of the Communist Party of Cuba headed by Comrade Fidel Castro.”

Even China and Vietnam, two longtime adversaries that waged war against one another in 1979, are trying to show some ideological sympathy for each other. “We place great hopes on new breakthroughs in . . . Vietnamese-Chinese relations during the year of 1990,” Vietnam said in a January radio broadcast.

Despite such efforts toward solidarity, the members of the Holdouts Club are struggling with political and economic problems that reflect, to a considerable extent, the changes elsewhere in the Communist world over the past year.

The Soviet Union has cut back on its economic aid to Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea. Cuba has lost some of its markets in Eastern Europe. Soviet-style perestroika has spilled over into Mongolia, on China’s borders, and may also have helped cause unrest in Xinjiang, the huge region in northwestern China bordering on the Soviet Union.

North Korea has been forced to watch in frustration as its increasingly wealthy enemy, South Korea, makes steady inroads among Kim Il Sung’s former Eastern European allies, which covet South Korean investment and other financial help.

Earlier this year, Poland sent a military observer to the annual Team Spirit exercises carried out by South Korea and the United States. In March, Kim Young Sam, a leader of South Korea’s ruling party, visited Moscow, where he was greeted by Gorbachev. (That brought a furious outburst from North Korea that the Soviet Union “must not go to the length of becoming a friend of the enemy of our people.”)

Even China, North Korea’s closest ally, has been courting South Korea. South Korean ships have been spotted in Chinese ports, and businessmen from Seoul scout for prospects even in Manchuria, the region of northeastern China alongside North Korea.

What do the members of the Holdouts Club have in common that has enabled them to hold back the forces of change?

Over the past few months, some observers have suggested that there is something special about communism in Asia that makes it fundamentally different.

“The center of socialism has moved east,” declared one commentary in the official Chinese press. Picking up this theme, the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Hong Kong-based English-language news weekly, ran a cover story entitled, “Asian Communism: Why the East Is Still Red.”

According to this theory, the Leninist regimes in Asia have endured longer than those in Eastern Europe because they were home-grown, not imposed by the Soviet Union. And in each country, the Communist Party was closely linked with nationalist forces that sought to oust foreign powers from their soil.

The trouble with this theory is that it does not quite fit some of the facts and does not explain others.

It is true that the Chinese and Vietnamese Communist parties developed largely on their own, independent of the Soviet Big Brother. But North Korea’s regime was imposed under the shadow of Soviet troops after World War II, much like the regimes in Eastern Europe.

The Asian communism theory does not account for the persistence of Cuba’s Castro regime, which seems to be engaged in essentially the same battle to preserve its Leninist political structure.

If geography matters at all in determining what happens to a Communist regime, then the key factor is not location in Asia but rather distance and isolation from Eastern Europe, which has served as the focal point for the political explosions of 1989. Over the past year, every nation in Eastern Europe has abandoned Leninism except Albania, which is itself geographically isolated from the rest of the region.

Another theory about the Holdouts rests on the age of Communist Party leaders. “In China, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea, you have the founding generations of the Communist Party still leading their own revolutions,” said Roderick MacFarquhar, director of the Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies at Harvard University.

Yet the generation theory has its own limits. It doesn’t answer why it took at least three generations of Communist leadership in the Soviet Union to abandon conventional Leninism, or why China went through its Cultural Revolution while the first generation was still in power. It may well be that local factors are so important that no one theory can explain what happens in each country.

For how long will the old-style Leninist regimes continue to hold out? Are the Communist parties of China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba permanently entrenched, or will they in the end prove to be merely slower to change than others in the world?

Few experts are willing to place any bets on China. Over the past 41 years, the Chinese Communist Party has been prone to sudden and dramatic turnabouts, both in its leadership and in its ideology.

The Chinese regime now confronts much greater political and ethnic unrest than any other member of the Holdouts Club. Furthermore, over the past decade China opened its doors to the West in a way unmatched by Vietnam, Cuba or North Korea. Chinese intellectuals have broad exposure and close ties with their counterparts both in the West and in Eastern Europe.

No one would be surprised if at some point over the next decade, perhaps after Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping and his fellow octogenarian revolutionaries pass from the scene, the Chinese Communist Party abandons Leninism and embraces some political reforms.

In its remarkable isolation, North Korea has been politically stable, particularly when compared with China. But its stability results largely from the personal domination of Kim Il Sung. He is now trying to groom his own son, Kim Jong Il, as his successor. If his effort succeeds, the two Kims will have achieved something the world has never seen before--a family dynasty under communism.

In Vietnam and Cuba, the threat to the current Communist regimes appears to be primarily economic. These two countries have been affected much more than the others by the changes in the Soviet Union, which has served notice that it does not plan to continue what it now considers to have been wasteful and inefficient aid programs.

“Until recently, for example, you could see in Haiphong port, turned into a pile of trash and not claimed by anyone, once-valuable equipment that was delivered by the Soviet Union to Vietnam,” asserted the Soviet newspaper Izvestia two months ago. “ . . . Starting in 1991, during the next five-year plan, Vietnam must start repaying the Soviet Union about 7 billion rubles for credits granted earlier. It is already clear now that it is not in condition to do this.”

In the face of these changes, the Holdouts Club may not last forever. But for today, at least, the Holdouts will be celebrating May Day just as they have in the past.

The Holdouts’ Club

From Africa to Asia to Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. The last of the Marxist-Leninist nations.

1. China: Largest of the traditional Marxist-Leninist states, but facing severe political and ethnic unrest and open to foreign influence since its recent opening to the West.

2. North Korea: Politically stable and isolated from the rest of the world, but dependent on the ability of Kim Jong Il to take over from his all-powerful father, Kim Il Sung.

3. Vietnam: Patching up its longstanding differences with China, but threatened by the Soviet Union’s intention to reduce its allotment of foreign aid.

4. Cuba: The last bastion of communism in the Western Hemisphere, but vulnerable to economic unrest if the Soviet Union, as promised, cuts back on its financial aid.

5. Angola and Mozambique: Former Portuguese colonies that are relatively recent converts to communism and have so far frustrated guerrilla-led insurrections.

6. Albania: Rigidly isolated from the rest of the world, unlike its Communist neighbors, but beginning to feel the pressures that transformed Eastern Europe.

7. Afghanistan: A Marxist regime that has barely held a host of guerrilla groups at bay since the Soviets withdrew their supporting troops last year.

8. South Yemen: A Soviet-sponsored regime, torn by civil strife between Communist factions, it has begun to permit some private enterprise.