Postscript : Communists Find Life as Born-Again Bureaucrats

By SONNI EFRON

Aug. 24, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

MOSCOW —

An old Communist dies, and God and Satan argue over whether he should be redeemed. At last they agree to send the Communist for two weeks in hell, then two weeks in heaven, before deciding where he belongs.

Two weeks later, God comes out to the Pearly Gates and sees the devil has come alone.

‘ ‘Where’s the Communist?” asks God.

‘ ‘He likes it where he is, he’s staying with me,” says the devil.

“A deal is a deal,” thunders God. “Hand him over, you devil!”

“That’s ‘Comrade Devil’ to you,” retorts the fiend. “And anyway, there is no God.”

Communism as an ideology deemed potent enough to convert the devil died long before the Soviet Union. But the Communist Party remained the world’s largest organization for training political thinkers, economists, managers and leaders--and then placing them in command of a nation of 290 million.

Two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the roughly 600,000 remaining Communist Party members are viewed here as extremists. But with few exceptions, the one-sixth of the world’s land mass that was the Soviet Union is still controlled by the 19 million influential alumni of the Soviet Communist Party.

Unlike most of Eastern Europe, where dissidents became presidents and swept away or even jailed the old guard, most of the Communist officials in the former Soviet Union still have their old jobs.

Their ranks include radical converted democrats such as Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin. But they also include armies of apparatchiks who were trained to command and control, not to liberate and deregulate. Rather than ideology, most of these functionaries are motivated by the desire to cling to the privileges and the power they gained from managing the state-run economy.

“They are obstructing the reforms right now,” said Igor A. Kharichev, a Yeltsin administration deputy chief of staff. “There is sabotage within the bureaucracy.”

Of the 15 former Soviet republics, 10 are run by high-ranking former Communist officials. Five of them once served in the Soviet Politburo.

Only three of the new leaders, Presidents Lennart Meri of Estonia, Levon Ter-Petrosyan of Armenia and Guntis Ulmanis of Latvia, never joined the Communist Party.

“The Communists never left the political arena,” said Constantine V. Pleshakov, a historian at Moscow’s prestigious Institute for the U.S.A. and Canada. “The former party apparatchiks are the most experienced administrators in this country. . .,” Pleshakov added. “The so-called democrats have proved to be politically impotent.”

In fact, since independence, three leaders with dissident credentials who had risen to power on a nationalist brand of anti-communism have been ousted and replaced by their republics’ old Communist Party bosses.

Vytautas Z. Landsbergis, the music professor who led Lithuania to independence, lost his luster in 1992 when he presided over a 61% drop in the gross national product. In hopes that someone with more experience could make the economic train run on time, Lithuanians in February elected former Communist Party First Secretary Algirdas Brazauskas as president.

In Azerbaijan, the first democratically elected president, former dissident and scholar Abulfez Elchibey, came to be widely seen as a political weakling and an economic incompetent. Elchibey was also blamed for humiliating military losses in Azerbaijan’s five-year war against the Armenians. He fled the capital during a coup in June and was replaced by an old-style Communist, Geidar Aliyev, 70.

Like Aliyev, Georgian President Eduard A. Shevardnadze, 65, had a classic Communist Party career that included a stint heading the local KGB. Like Aliyev, he also served in the Soviet Politburo, took over from discredited former dissidents and is trying to rescue a nation wounded by war and economic chaos.

But Brazauskas, Aliyev and Shevardnadze are turning out to be as different as Karl Marx, Adam Smith and Ronald Reagan.

Brazauskas has been described as a “closet social democrat.” He was the first regional Communist leader to chart an independent course from Moscow, a man who tolerated--perhaps even respected--his opposition. He has declared full support for privatization of Lithuanian state property and for sweeping economic reform.

Aliyev, by contrast, was kicked out of the Politburo of former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev for opposing economic reform, or perestroika. Polls show him to be the most popular politician in Azerbaijan. But human rights activists say his short tenure has already been marked by press censorship and beatings of political opponents.

Shevardnadze, foreign minister under Gorbachev, was credited with helping to end the Cold War. Now his diplomatic skills are consumed with trying to end Georgia’s civil war.

The vast differences among these three men show the dangers of categorizing the “old Commies” who are now being accused of trying to curb new freedoms and thwart free-market reforms.

“If I were omnipotent, I would just ban the word Communist from Western newspapers,” said Pleshakov. “It’s not only meaningless, it’s misleading.”

In Central Asia, for example, the Communists followed the example of the czars and built their party atop the structure of the complex traditional clan system.

The first secretary of the Communist Party was almost always the leader of the dominant clan while the second secretary was a Russian sent to be Moscow’s local watchdog, said Olga I. Brucina of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology. State spending was rigidly divided up among the clans, she said.

Now communism has passed, but the same clan leaders still rule in the old authoritarian style. Leaders who once played down their Muslim heritage to smooth their way in the atheistic party structure are now likely to boast of a pilgrimage to Mecca, Brucina said.

In Uzbekistan, President Islam Karimov, formerly first secretary of the Uzbek Communist Party, believes that any change should be gradual.

“Transition to the market economy is not an aim in itself but the means to provide a decent and wealthy life to the population in the first place,” Karimov told Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper.

In fact, change in Uzbekistan is so slow that journalists have dubbed the place “Brezhnevistan” after the late Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev, much of whose rule was characterized by political and economic stagnation. Karimov’s tactics have been condemned by the human rights groups Amnesty International and Helsinki Watch, and this summer the United States expelled a group of visiting Uzbeks to protest the beating of a U.S. Embassy employee in Tashkent.

“I am sometimes called an advocate of strict rule, or simply a dictator,” an unruffled Karimov told Pravda. “I can say only one thing. . . .Law, especially at such a complicated transitional stage, should always come first.”

For 70 years, the Communist Party tried to recruit the best and the brightest of the giant Soviet nation. Since membership was all but obligatory for professional advancement until at least 1988, the party succeeded in recruiting the most ambitious.

Ironically, workers and peasants, who could join at will, were underrepresented. But intellectuals and urbanites stayed on waiting lists for years before being honored with membership.

Now, some people are ashamed to admit they were party members or defensive about it. Others argue that all the devout capitalists on Wall Street would join the Communist Party instantly if membership were a prerequisite for getting a promotion, a car and a country home.

The question, then, is to what extent the former Communists have really changed their mentality, along with their ideology, in light of the cataclysmic collapse of their Soviet world.

Not much, says Sergei A. Arutiunov, an anthropologist at Russia’s Academy of Sciences. Early revolutionaries such as V.I. Lenin were Communists by virtue of what they wanted to accomplish, he said. Today’s ex-Communists have a variety of different goals, from getting rich to holding onto their jobs to bringing free-market prosperity to Russia.

“They all want different things,” Arutiunov said. “They are all Communists because they are all the same in the question of how to do it: crude persuasion, command, force, restriction, ban, confiscation, expropriation. They don’t know any other technology.”

Ex-Communist Gorbachev disagrees.

While some bureaucrats have been resisting market reforms since 1987, he said, most of the old party nomenklatura “have joined the current structures and share reformist views.”

“We had to give everyone a chance to think everything over and make a choice, to do perestroika . . .,” Gorbachev said. “Of course there are those who are in the way of reforms, resist them and drag us backward, but a lot of things are under way.”

Indeed, in Russia today the real political struggle is not between old Communists and reformers. It is between old Communists turned free marketeers at the top echelons of the Yeltsin administration and old Communists who are blocking reform from the conservative Parliament and from inside the Yeltsin bureaucracy.

Russia’s most famous exile, writer Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, began warning last fall of corruption in the former nomenklatura . “We are now going through a stage of the collapse of communism in which its upper floors have fallen in, but the middle level is still alive and well and busy laying its hands on everything around it,” Solzhenitsyn said.

The role of the old Communists inside the apparat is apparently a very touchy subject these days. Seventeen Yeltsin administration officials declined requests for interviews on the issue before Kharichev, an astrophysicist who was not a party member, agreed to discuss it.

Kharichev charged that Parliament Chairman Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, the president’s archrival, has become a mouthpiece for the old Communist interests.

“It’s important that people in America understand that it’s not just a power struggle between two people, it’s a fight between two ideologies--but masked,” Kharichev said. “They don’t call openly for an end to capitalism. They talk about taking care of the workers, about unemployment, about the death of Russian industry.

“It’s the ideology of democratic socialism,” he said. “But I don’t believe that socialism can be democratic or market-oriented.”

Conservatives led by Khasbulatov have launched an all-out war on Yeltsin’s massive program to sell off state-owned industries to workers and private investors. Last month, members of the Congress of People’s Deputies, many of whom represent state-run enterprises that depend on cheap government credits to survive, voted to gut the privatization program.

Andrei Shleifer, a Russian-born Harvard University economics professor now advising the Yeltsin administration on privatization, said bureaucrats are also trying to find new ways to assert control over enterprises that are going private.

“They got rid of these people in Poland,” Shleifer said. “They got rid of these people in Czechoslovakia. They just swept them away.

“But they never got rid of them in Russia,” he said. “They are here. They were quiet for a couple of years, and reform has had momentum. And now they are just coming out of every. . . hole in the ground.”

One of them has come straight from jail. Vasily A. Starodubtsev, one of the infamous coup plotters who tried to depose Gorbachev two years ago this month, was released from prison in February on condition that he stay out of politics.

He was immediately elected head of Russia’s influential Agrarian Union. A longtime foe of private farming, he is now lobbying the Yeltsin government for more money for collective farms, one of the most inefficient and reform-resistant sectors of the old Soviet economy.

“The president is totally impossible to talk to,” Starodubtsev complained at a recent protest rally of about 2,000 farmers and former Communists on the steps of Russia’s White House. His rhetoric shows how slowly the political lexicon of the former Soviet Union is changing.

“He must have forgotten that everyone, be he a president or an ordinary worker, is fed by peasants and not by those who are selling out our Motherland to foreigners for dollars, Mercedes and dachas ,” Starodubtsev said.

EDUARD A. SHEVARDNADZE

Age: 65

Title: Head of the State Council, Georgia

Key Former Posts: Chief, Georgian KGB; Soviet foreign minister

ALGIRDAS BRAZAUSKAS

Age: 60

Title: President, Lithuania

Key Former Post: First Secretary, Lithuanian Communist Party

ISLAM KARIMOV

Age: 55

Title: President, Uzbekistan

Key Former Post: First Secretary, Uzbek Communist Party