Red Phoenix Rising Over Russia : Hard-liners may imperil democracy movement

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, like the Soviet Union itself, is defunct, but the Communist Party of the Russian Federation has now emerged from the ashes with an unrealistic if ominous promise to “work for Russia’s return to the road of socialist development.”

According to its leaders the successor party is thriving, with a claimed membership of 600,000. Independent observers think this number is probably greatly inflated. A large following or not, the renascent Communists and their allies are both well-organized and highly motivated. These political strengths aren’t to be taken lightly. In the one free election they subjected themselves to, in 1917, Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks received less than 25% of the popular vote; that didn’t stop the fanatically dedicated party from seizing power a few months later and embarking on a brutal reign that lasted more than seven decades.

Leader of the Russian Communist Party is Gennady A. Zyuganov, described by John-Thor Dahlburg of The Times’ Moscow bureau as a talented polemicist and cunning strategist. Not least among his strategic accomplishments has been an alignment with some of the far-right groups that have emerged in the post-Soviet era, among them ultranationalists, monarchists and fascists. This unholy alliance--the National Salvation Front--meets on the common ground of opposition to the reforms favored by President Boris N. Yeltsin.

Many of those reforms have been frustrated or diluted by a Russian Parliament that, elected before communism’s collapse, is overloaded with holdovers from the old regime. The Parliament’s term expires in 1995. Yeltsin for some time has been calling for early elections. In an advisory national referendum last April, two-thirds of those voting indicated they favored having a new Parliament. Now Yeltsin has again called for early elections, some time in autumn. That demand promises another face-off with legislators who plainly have no interest in prematurely putting their political futures on the line. It also almost certainly sets the stage for dangerous confrontations in the streets with anti-reform forces.

New elections, if democrats emerge as the major winners, could break the parliamentary deadlock and lift some of the confusion that has spread across the vast Russian Federation in the two years since the failed coup mounted against then-President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. But nothing is certain in a country beset by ethnic conflicts and threatened with a growing conservative backlash. Yeltsin, never fully secure in power, may soon face the greatest test yet to his survival. The United States and Europe, with their huge stake in a stable and reforming Russia, must be more than just disinterested bystanders.