Communists Looking for a Capital Ally : Russia: After collecting only $6.50 at its 29th congress, the party is in need of a business partner to help raise cash.

His invective against money-grubbing capitalists duly delivered, the head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union raised a more immediate concern--finding a wealthy foreign partner to help fill the party’s empty coffers.

“We’re thinking of maybe starting a joint venture, perhaps a publishing company,” Sergei Skvortsov said, just minutes after denouncing Russia’s tentative steps toward a market economy.

Putting the country back on track toward a socialist utopia will take slightly more than the 770 rubles--about $6.50--that the Communists collected at their 29th party congress this weekend, said Skvortsov, a rumpled, mild-mannered newspaper editor who serves as the group’s coordinating secretary.

And thus, the party that waged a war against capitalism for 75 years is looking for a business partner.

“I guess you could call it an irony of fate,” Skvortsov commented with a rueful grin.

The 29th party congress, which met in the small town of Pushkino on July 4, was full of such ironies.

Only five years ago, one in 10 Soviet adults belonged to the Communist Party, which monopolized politics and enjoyed the constitutional right to play a leading role in society. Today, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union--still stubbornly bearing the name of a country that no longer exists--is one of at least half a dozen socialist political groups in Russia and claims only 130,000 members.

Although the group is launching an enrollment drive to sign up half a million new members, the 29th party congress underscored that the Communist Party has become merely a sideshow--at times, a comedy of errors--in Russian politics.

Delegates from Uzbekistan, Ukraine and parts of Russia got lost on their way to the congress’ secret location and missed the entire daylong session.

Representatives from Georgia and Kazakhstan sent telegrams saying they couldn’t afford train tickets to Moscow.

And the 83 delegates who did gather under the hammer and sickle were constantly harassed by drunken hecklers, Skvortsov said.

Citing the case of a representative who sold his gold wedding ring to pay for the train ticket, Skvortsov added that membership in the Communist Party, which once guaranteed political success and material comfort, today brings only hardship.

“We are discriminated against and locked out of some professions, such as teaching in grammar schools, serving in the military and working for the government,” said Skvortsov, wearing a blue-and-white polka-dot shirt and a wrinkled brown suit and conspicuously lacking a Lenin pin.

Yawning and whispering among themselves during a news conference Monday afternoon, even Communist Party leaders seemed bored with the Marxist rhetoric and the endless quotations from V. I. Lenin as their comrades presented the congress’ “anti-crisis” program. It is designed to drag the country back into socialism by reinstituting price controls, state subsidies of factories and guaranteed employment for everyone.

Their assertions of leadership seemed irrelevant, even absurd, as they again insisted that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was illegal and refused to recognize the Commonwealth of Independent States, even as leaders of the Commonwealth’s 11 member republics met across town to discuss security issues.

A post-congress rally Monday night in Gorky Park drew only a few hundred die-hard Communists.

“They believe only out of inertia--because they believed for 70 years, and they’re not capable of believing in anything else,” said Alexander Klemetyev, 42, who left the party in 1990 after 19 years of membership.

But some managed to put a positive twist on the small turnout.

“All the bad people, the ones who didn’t really believe, have left the party,” said Moscow student Dmitri Guryevich, 23.