COLUMN ONE : Soviet New Order Has Old Look : Life without the Communist Party differs little so far from life with it. Many ex-Communist apparatchiks have tapped into new sources of power and privilege.

The artist in Valery Lepikura gets the better of him as he tries to explain why the banned Communist Party, stripped of its riches and branded as criminal, will still be the guiding force in Soviet life.

The bearded radio personality pulls a clean sheet of paper before him to draw what he cannot describe.

On the left side, he sketches a hierarchy representing the management of Ukrainian Radio and Television, where he has worked for 26 years. On the right side, he pens an identical pattern for the parallel Communist Party Central Committee staff charged with controlling the media.

Lepikura’s pen darts from diagram to diagram as he recounts who was censoring and harassing whom--until the broadcast and party functionaries are bound in a web of ink.

“They are not here anymore,” the commentator said of the Communists, jabbing his pen at the party side of his drawing. With a dramatic sweep across to the broadcast chain of command, Lepikura bellows with disbelief, “Now they are all here!

“Their psychology is alive. Their style is alive. The only thing that has changed since the banning is that the Central Committee has just moved over to our building.”

The fate of the Communist censors mirrors that of most of the party’s footmen. Rather than bowing out of the Soviet bureaucracy, the apparatchiks have simply donned new government hats.

The Communist Party, which touched every facet of life from the surrogate christening ritual in which a baby is “red-starred” to the assignment of burial plots, has been wholly absorbed by the labyrinthine state institutions created over the last 74 years in the party’s image.

Many of those fighting for a genuine overthrow of communism complain that life after the Communist Party seems very much like life with it.

Take the case of Mikhola Okhmakevich, the former Central Committee censor for broadcast media who now heads Ukrainian Radio and Television.

His car and driver continue to collect him each morning from his Kiev apartment or his country dacha --both perks that come with what is now a government job. Should he fall ill, he would be rushed to the same elite hospital for Communist Party bigwigs that he was accorded access to before the party was banned.

Okhmakevich defends his position and privileges as his due as a government minister. But reform advocates within the state-run broadcast empire accuse him of being an unreconstructed ideologue who is now spouting democracy to save his skin.

Because the party bureaucrats who granted favors in the past--handing out media promotions and other benefits--are now comfortably re-established at the state broadcast center, former party and Komsomol youth group activists still must please the same masters to get ahead.

When assistant editor Petko Karpenko--a former party member--next goes abroad, he must get approval from those former Communists whose job it was to decide who was worthy of privilege.

“Now they are part of the militia,” Karpenko said of the party travel monitors recently transferred to the network’s security division.

Karpenko concedes unequivocally that without his party membership he would never have attained his senior position and that without its connections he would likely never have entered the realm of relatively easy living he still enjoys.

While the death of the party would seem to threaten its members’ prospects, most shrug off the disbanding as no cause for worry. They forged contacts during their years within the exclusive Communist club that now give them influence with the government that has inherited the party’s absolute power.

“There’s no connection between my party membership and what I have achieved,” Karpenko said with a wink and a nod, regaling a visitor with the tale of how he exacted his apartment from party and government honchos by plying them with cognac. “I also have a five-room brick dacha , but this too is a reward for my work.”

Should Karpenko want to ensure a coveted place at Kiev University for either of his two children when they are old enough to attend, he doubts the absence of the party network will affect his chances.

“I have personal connections there because I am a lecturer,” Karpenko said, conceding that the influential post would never have come his way if he hadn’t joined the party.

“The atmosphere at our enterprise hasn’t changed one bit because the same leadership is still with us,” complained Vasil Levchenko, a radio editor at the broadcasting monopoly that employs more than 3,500 people.

“The Communists are all still in place, and they will fight to stay in control,” said Levchenko, who, like Lepikura, never sought membership in the closed political club.

From his cubbyhole of an office adorned with the lacy paper carvings that are his creative escape, Lepikura expounds on the unflinching legacy of the Communist Party.

More insidious than the “bio-robots” he says the party created to control information, the Communist fiefdoms in the countryside will take decades to dismantle, he contends.

“This is the real Ukraine, where the local party committee is both God and czar,” he said of the provinces. “The first secretary of the party has his own state farm to grow his food, his own construction brigade to build his houses, his own supplies of vodka to keep the workers drunk and docile and even a staff charged with getting him women.”

Over the last year, as the party’s fortunes have fallen, most of its officials have transferred their posts and property from party to government control.

“Communism will persevere because it planted a great terror on the genetic level,” Lepikura, a staunch opposition activist, said in explaining why he believes those in rural areas will be unable to break with the Communist system.

“For 74 years, we were born, lived and died under the Communist flag. We heard of nothing but communism. . . . There is a piece of communism in all of us, and this is what will be hardest to kill.”

Any social recovery will be long in the making, party opponents uniformly contend. They point to the systematic destruction of non-party culture, including religion, the intelligentsia, private enterprise and social traditions.

The Communists’ ban on religious practice has been lifted, yet the rites of passage remain in their hands.

At Kiev’s Palace of Registrations, all newborns and married couples still march through a party-written routine. It is nicknamed the “Wedding Factory” for the assembly-line pace at which brides and grooms are turned out. A state mistress of ceremonies welcomes each couple into “our socialist republic” from behind an altar emblazoned with the Communist hammer and sickle.

Although a giant bust of V. I. Lenin was recently removed and the wedding text has been stripped of direct references to the party, ideological imprints remain indelible, from the red cover over the marriage license to the necklace of party insignia worn by the ersatz clergy.

Child-registration inspector Anya Gusinska explains the “red-starring” ceremony that celebrates the birth of a child, a ritual that mimics a christening except for its replacement of God with the socialist state.

Asked if a religious ceremony would be permitted in the cathedral-like complex erected for important social occasions, Gusinska laughed incredulously and replied, “No.”

Some believe the party’s shadow is retreating but too slowly and with much resistance.

“We didn’t want their recorded music or the karavai (traditional bread) they forced on us, but that’s their routine,” 20-year-old Oksana Podrutskaya said as she exited her rote, 100-ruble state wedding that lasted less than three minutes. “Hopefully this inflexibility will disappear with time.”

After more than seven decades of omnipotent communism, many fear the indomitable party will reorganize underground and return to threaten those striving for democracy.

“The apparatchiks are still out there, and they are dreaming of revenge,” said Vladlen Gorodetsky, a 35-year-old whose given name reflects how Soviets have been indoctrinated to revere Lenin. Gorodetsky last year gave up his party membership and his career as an army officer to join the Ukrainian anti-Communist movement, Rukh.

“I spoke with a friend high up in the party, who said they would shoot everyone in Rukh if they can regain power,” Gorodetsky warned. “I won’t name him because I have no witnesses, but on my word of honor, that’s what he said.”

Many fear a Communist comeback is still possible because the road to democracy will be difficult and a natural reaction to hardship is nostalgia for the past.

A 65-year-old farm woman selling vegetables at Kiev’s Bessarabian Market said she longed for the days before Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev was in power because “then we had everything.”

She refused to give her name, claiming party reactionaries were likely plotting another coup.

“They could kill me,” she shuddered, drawing a finger across her throat. “You know what kind of times we are living through.”

A pervasive fatalism afflicts many Soviets, but last month’s failed Kremlin coup has sparked hope that someday the party will be truly unseated and the age of Communist terror will come to an end.

“What we need from the West to overcome communism is not food aid,” said Lepikura, discussing the future between calls from his censors. “We would only eat the food, then we’d be hungry again. Maybe we don’t even need the West’s technology. We’d only start pounding nails with computers. What we need, realistically, is for our children to live a few days in the free world.

“An adult who goes to the West only sees supermarkets. He can stay for a year, and he’ll still return only with stories about how many kinds of sausage there are there,” said the anti-Communist rebel. “But our youth are more open, they are capable of seeing freedom where older people see only sausages.”