True Soviet Believers Rally Round Communist ‘Truth’

Communism is banned across the Soviet Union, its monuments toppled and its ideology discredited. But Anatoly Kryuchkov still believes.

“Eventually, people will be forced to see the truth,” says Kryuchkov, an Interior Department lawyer. “When, tomorrow, they see what the so-called democrats have done to them, and they won’t be able to blame it all on the dark forces of communism, then they’ll start to ask, ‘Where is the bright capitalist future we were promised?’ ”

Amid the political wreckage of last month’s aborted coup--the suspension of Communist Party activities, the freezing of its bank accounts and the nationalization of much of its property--Communist true believers such as Kryuchkov are already picking themselves up and plotting tactics.

Kryuchkov, a former member of a Marxist faction in the Communist Party, is launching a new party he plans to christen the Party of Communists. It will retain Marxist ideals but bring them up to date by allowing for some private property and business competition.

Leonid Biryukov, who wears the medal of the forest partisans who battled the Nazis during World War II, is helping to found the new Marxist-Leninist Workers and Peasants Party, which is calling for the resignation of the country’s leaders on the ground that they have led the economy to ruin.

And Nina Andreyeva, the most notorious of the Communist hard-liners, has become the driving force behind a group of the party ultra-orthodox known as the Bolshevik Platform.

The basic idea they all preach is the same: The Soviet Union never gave communism a real chance.

“We never had communism here,” says Vladimir Khazanov, Kryuchkov’s comrade in the Party of Communists. “We never even had socialism.”

“We have very hard work ahead of us explaining what communism really is,” Khazanov adds. “It’s hard to change someone’s opinion when everyone has been explaining to him what communism is and telling him it’s bad.”

Over the weekend, 23 like-minded Communists gathered in a run-down building in central Moscow for what the state-run news agency Tass called “the first illegal meeting of the organizing committee for re-creating the Communist Party.”

The headline, “Back to the Underground,” evoked the Soviet romanticism of Lenin’s long years of exile and struggle, but participants say it was overdone. They are not in hiding and do not consider their meeting illegal, although Khazanov admits, “We were prepared for someone to come in and say, ‘Who are you? Communists? Hit the street!’ ”

Communists who attended reportedly distanced themselves from the outlawed national Communist Party but said the country needs a new, slimmed-down party to fill the political vacuum left by the old one. They called for grass-roots groups of Communists to begin forming once again.

That they had been reduced in less than two years from the nation’s single legal party to a dispossessed national scapegoat did not seem to bother them much.

“It’s healthy for any party to be in the opposition,” Khazanov said.

What hurts more is lack of funds and the unwillingness of much of the Soviet news media to cover them, says Kryuchkov. “Everything they say about pluralism is nonsense,” he complains. “The power of information is now all in the hands of leftist forces.”

Because he has given up hope of getting the media’s attention, ex-partisan Biryukov says he is on the verge of appealing to the United Nations with his plan for solving the Soviet Union’s economic crisis by restoring a fully planned economy and cutting off oil exports.

Even though the media are not on his side, he says, he nonetheless believes he has the support of the masses of workers whose living standard is dropping from poor to miserable.

Because the government has freed the price of many goods, Biryukov says, “all a worker can do is buy food for himself. He can’t afford clothes or a cafe or a taxi. And a Soviet bourgeoisie has grown up that, because of free prices, has been taking from the worker’s pocket to put in his own.”

Communism as a label may have a bad reputation now, he says, but it still promises what the workers want: guaranteed jobs and relatively similar salaries for all.

Kryuchkov and Khazanov also say they expect to gain most of their support from the working class. Along with the right to work, they propound free education, free medicine and free housing.

All the hard-line Communist groups seek support with their merciless attacks on President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Kryuchkov, arguing that Gorbachev should be considered the leader of the “capitalist party of the Soviet Union,” accuses him of working to replace democracy with a nascent dictatorship known as presidential rule.

And Biryukov blasts him for meddling in the economy when he knows nothing about it, for neglecting the country’s energy production and for giving the “dark forces” in the country free reign.

The different groups have developed their own rationales for why communism failed.

Biryukov traces the beginning of the end all the way back to the start of Stalin’s purges in 1937. Competence in such key fields as energy and economics began to be replaced by “zoological careerism,” he says, and party functionaries began to step into jobs they could not hope to handle.

“These incompetent people moving into power only hurt the great computer of the planned system.”

Khazanov says the Soviet Union was last on the right road to communism in the late 1920s, before Stalin tried to put the entire economy under iron central control.

And Andreyeva, who first gained fame in 1988 with an anti- perestroika letter published in the daily Sovietskaya Rossiya, blames the current leadership for the final demise of the Communist Party, saying it deviated from founder V. I. Lenin’s dictates.

For all their selling points, however, the Communist organizers acknowledge that the way ahead is a difficult one.

“I don’t have illusions that things will go quickly,” Kryuchkov says. “The party that was called Communist wasn’t one. On the level of the leadership there were renegades, and most of them were not real Communists. That load of mistakes will serve a long time against the authority and credibility of the party.”