Communists Go on Trial With Blast at Yeltsin

As a political trial unparalleled in Russian history opened Tuesday, Communist die-hards seeking to overturn the ban on their party launched their initial courtroom gambits: a defense of communism’s record and an attack on President Boris N. Yeltsin’s “legal barbarism.”

The trial before Russia’s new Constitutional Court, convened to rule on three Yeltsin decrees and the party’s right to exist, is expected to serve as a forum for passing judgment on the entire seven decades of Communist rule in the Soviet Union.

Communist Party lawyers argued that the case will also show whether Russia is willing to live by its laws or follow its tradition of bending them to fit politicians’ whims.

Yeltsin, by banning the party last summer without court sanction, “exceeded his authority, created a presidential do-it-yourself court and stooped to legal barbarism,” prominent jurist Boris Kurashvili contended.

The Constitutional Court itself had something of a do-it-yourself air, with the 13 judges, arrayed in spanking-new black robes around a semicircle of desks, showing a tendency to break into consultative whispers in the midst of testimony. Several times, Chairman Valery Zorkin resorted to banging a small gong to call for order.

Outside the court building, several hundred pro-Communist demonstrators branded the court “fascist,” while a sprinkling of anti-Communist protesters held signs calling for judgment on “The Communist Party--Party of Cannibals.”

Inside, an impressive cast squeezed into the courtroom, from Yegor K. Ligachev, the former No. 2 figure in the Politburo and considered the most hard-line member of the party leadership in the late 1980s, to American Sovietologist Richard Pipes.

“I think it’s a watershed in Russian history,” Pipes said during a break in the proceedings, “because if the presidential decrees stand and the party is outlawed, then we’re facing a new era and democracy can flourish.

“There was nothing like this ever in Russian history,” he added. “It’s a historical first.”

The party’s defense lawyers see the trial differently.

“This case is so extraordinarily important because our country’s most massive party’s activity has been stopped--and, in effect, banned--and its property has been expropriated,” said Victor Zorkaltsev, the leadoff lawyer to speak on behalf of the party.

Communist lawyers also contended that the party had been wrongly implicated in the hatching of last August’s attempted coup against then-President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

If anyone staged a coup, claimed Russian lawmaker Dmitri Stepanov, it was Yeltsin, and “if legal attempts to depose the anti-people president and the present Russian leadership fail, we shall turn to the methods that our opponents . . . used to seize power in the country.”

Yeltsin first issued decrees banning the Communist Party and confiscating its property just after the coup attempt, and he backed them up with a final ban in November.

His legal team, which had not yet presented its case Tuesday, is expected to argue that the Communist Party was not really a party but an entire parallel government that dominated the country and, in effect, ruined it.

Zorkaltsev, preempting the Yeltsin team’s assault on the party, pointed out that Communists “lifted the people to victory over the fascists” during World War II and turned the country into a superpower.

His colleagues also emphasized that whatever may have been true of the Communist Party in the past, it had already reformed itself into a nearly normal, Western-style party by the time it was banned last year.

“It was cut off at the moment it was resolving its problems,” Zorkaltsev said.

Gorbachev, the man who oversaw the party’s reform, refused to attend the trial, although he had been summoned.

Yeltsin’s team members “are trying to make (the court) participate in a political battle,” the former Soviet president and Communist Party general secretary said last week at a meeting with the staff of the weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta. “Both sides will lose because this will lead to a schism in society.”

Yeltsin also appeared to have no intention of attending, but his opponents accused him of trying to manipulate the proceedings nonetheless, pulling political strings to make the outcome go his way.

The court is to rule on the constitutionality of his decrees, as well as on whether the Communist Party itself should be considered unconstitutional. The trial is expected to last several days and could run into weeks if Yeltsin’s team insists on introducing evidence on Communist crimes through the decades.

Ultimately, said law professor Alexander Yakovlev, the content of the verdict will not be as important as the perception that it was arrived at fairly and objectively.

“This court is holding the line against political passions,” Yakovlev said. “We must distinguish between politics and law, and if we can’t make that distinction, then we’re dead.”

Communist historian Roy Medvedev said he thinks the court will be caught in such a bind that it will not be able to issue a clear decision--but that perhaps that is just as well.

“The main thing is the court of history,” Medvedev said. “It will judge this court too.”