Mounting Woes Spur Soviets to Quit Party

After 13 years as a loyal member of the Soviet Communist Party, Leonid Vinogradov stood before his fellow factory workers, gave an impassioned speech about his decision to turn his back on the ideals he had long held sacred and handed in his party card.

“Communism is a good fairy tale, but in 70 years it has not given us anything,” said Vinogradov, 44, a worker on the assembly line at Moscow’s big Automatic Calculating Machines Plant, which produces electronic goods primarily for military use.

“As little as a year ago, the idea of quitting the party did not even occur to me,” he said. “I thought the problems in this country were the fault of individuals--of (Josef) Stalin and (Leonid I.) Brezhnev and others--but just recently I’ve come to realize it was the fault of the system itself.”

Vinogradov is one of 43 people from his factory, almost all of them workers, who have quit the party this year. Although that represents only about 5% of the factory’s 880 Communists, the resignations are significant because no one had ever quit the factory’s branch of the party until last year, and no new members have joined since then.

The problem is widespread. As of mid-June, 130,000 people had turned in their party cards this year across the country, according to official figures. In a recent public opinion poll, half of the Communist workers in Moscow who were surveyed said they planned to quit.

There was evidently another wave of resignations after the conservative victory in last month’s Russian Party Conference. Although official figures are not yet available, reformist Vyacheslav N. Shostakovsky, head of the Moscow Higher Party School, said that about 20,000 of the 1.1 million Communists in the capital resigned in just two days last week.

The exodus has caused concern among officials of the Communist Party, which is facing competition from several new political parties for the first time since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution; in a historic shift, it gave up its constitutionally enshrined monopoly on power earlier this year.

“The number of people resigning from the Communist Party is growing, and this is a matter for serious analysis,” Vadim A. Medvedev, a member of the Politburo, told a press conference at the start of the party congress this week. “Many members of the intelligentsia are withdrawing from the party for political or ideological reasons. We have to work with these people and explain that this is a different party.”

Officials say many retired or apolitical members are leaving the party so they do not have to continue paying dues, but they admit that many others have quit because they blame the party for the miserable state of the country’s economy and its ethnic conflicts. A much greater exodus is likely after the conclusion of the party congress unless dramatic reforms are made.

“If there are no improvements in people’s lives in the near future, then in the next elections they may not vote at all for the Communist Party, and it could end up in the minority,” Yuri A. Prokofiev, leader of Moscow’s Communists, told a recent news conference.

But many people have stopped believing the party is capable of reforming itself or the country. Although party leaders repeatedly say they want rank-and-file Communists to play a greater role, most people doubt that the party’s officialdom, known collectively as the apparatus, will ever share its power. In a recent public opinion poll in Moscow, 62% of those polled said the apparatus alone runs the party.

“They say it’s a worker’s party, but in reality it represents only the views of the class called the party apparatus,” Vinogradov said. “I finally understood that the rank-and-file members can do nothing to change the party, so the only thing I could do was quit.

“Although the conservatives say the party is strengthened when liberals leave, I say no party ever becomes stronger when it loses its rank-and-file members. The more who leave, the faster the rest will understand and quit too. Soon only the party bureaucrats will be left.”

The party congress under way at the Kremlin is a prime example of the domination of the party by jowly, well-fed bureaucrats. Although workers make up almost half of all party members, they account for less than 12% of the delegates to the congress.

“No one ever cared what the rank-and-file party members said. They wanted our dues and that’s all,” Valery A. Khomyakov, a 41-year-old engineer, said, explaining his reason for quitting the party two months ago.

Khomyakov intends to fight back. He has already joined the newly formed Democratic Party of Russia and hopes to win power from the Communist Party in his country’s new “political marketplace.”

But other recent dropouts find all politics distasteful.

“When I joined the party 10 years ago, I believed in the bright future promised by communism,” said Lyubov V. Kuzmina, 32, a quality-control worker at the same plant where Vinogradov works. “We were taught that our government was the most democratic, most humane and richest government in the world. I believed it completely, and I raised my 12-year-old daughter by these principles.”

Kuzmina recalled proudly wearing her red Pioneer (youth organization) tie as a young child, leading her school’s Communist Youth League, or Komsomol, as a teen-ager, and promptly paying her Communist Party dues throughout her adult years.

“ Glasnost is most responsible for my decision to quit the party,” she said, referring to President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s policy of political openness. “If I knew 10 years ago what I know now, I never would have joined the party.”

In the last few years, Kuzmina says, she learned about the tens of millions of people who died at the hands of party leaders during the Stalinist purges and the collectivization of land and during World War II.

“I learned the party was built on the blood of millions of people,” she said. “How could I remain a member of such a party?”

Although she is disillusioned with Gorbachev, she still considers Lenin “the only bright light left” in her country’s history.

Quitting was not easy for Kuzmina, and she cannot imagine joining a new party.

“I suffered very much in coming to this decision. It was very difficult for me personally,” she recalled. “I didn’t want to believe that I had been so mistaken for 10 years.”

Vinogradov also had trouble making his decision because it meant acknowledging uncomfortable truths about the party’s role in his own life and facing his family’s history after denying it for more than 20 years.

Vinogradov’s father had denounced his own father to join the Komsomol in the 1930s. Later, Vinogradov’s grandfather, a Siberian priest, disappeared and is presumed to have been shot or to have perished in a concentration camp.

In 1968, Vinogradov was among the soldiers sent to Czechoslovakia to quash the “Prague Spring” movement that was trying to institute “socialism with a human face.”

“I really believed we were helping keep Czechoslovakia free for true socialism,” he recalled recently with a pained look on his face.

But the main reason Vinogradov and others quit the party is that they are looking toward the future and not back on the past.

“I have a 14-year-old son,” he said, “and I think about how horrible his life will be unless everything changes in our political system.”

THE SHRINKING COMMUNIST PARTY IN THE SOVIET UNION About 18 million members as of June. Including candidate members, about 19 million as of December, 1989. In first quarter of 1990, about 80,000 members quit party nationwide; in first 5 1/2 months, a total of 130,000 quit, including 6,000 in Moscow. Social composition of party: Workers: 45.3% Farmers: 11.6% Office employees, other: 43.1%