Russia’s Communists Take Aim at Making a Comeback : Politics: Several thousand march on anniversary of 1917 revolution. Polls show party may well finish first in Dec. 17 election.

The marchers, 30 abreast behind red flags, were elderly, nostalgic for the past and angry about the harsh, bewildering present. But Russia’s Communists marked their most sacred day Tuesday in the mood of front-runners in an election campaign they hope will make the future theirs.

“I am pleased to see your honest faces, the faces of so many who have never betrayed our country’s ideals,” party leader Gennady A. Zyuganov declared from the back of a flatbed truck parked between the Bolshoi Theater and a hulking monument to Marx. “The reawakening has begun.”

Before him stood several thousand faithful who had plodded more than a mile through gray, freezing Moscow to the beat of a brass band, one of many crowds across Russia celebrating the anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that eventually brought V. I. Lenin and their party to power.

As election season unfolds here, pollsters say it is this loyal constituency of pensioners and older, poverty-line wage earners--those hardest hit by Russia’s free-market transition--that gives the Communists their best chance of a comeback since the Soviet Union broke up four years ago.

President Boris N. Yeltsin, a former Communist boss who engineered that breakup and outlawed the party for more than a year, declared last month that “our task is to prevent” a Communist victory at the polls.

But Yeltsin lies in a hospital bed now, sidelined by heart trouble, and nearly every voter survey shows the Communists leading the field of 43 parties in the Dec. 17 parliamentary elections, preferred by 10% to 14% of an electorate still largely undecided. Some project the Communists to win more than 20% of the vote, probably enough to finish first.

Such a showing would put Zyuganov, 51, a former rural schoolteacher and Soviet Communist Party propagandist, exactly where he wants to be--positioned to help build or even lead a broad coalition of anti-reform forces in the June, 1996, presidential race.

Since taking charge of a “reborn” Communist Party in early 1993, Zyuganov has softened its rigid tenets, trying to widen its appeal. Zyuganov makes alliances with ultranationalists and is seeking one with Alexander I. Lebed, a retired general and the most popular presidential hopeful on the patriotic right.

The Communist Party now welcomes religious believers among its estimated 500,000 members. So many Communist factory managers have become capitalist owners that the party now stands for a mix of state and private property. It recognizes the right of other political parties to exist.

Still, Russia’s Communists are more reactionary than their Eastern European counterparts. Communists here vow to restore the Soviet Union, though Zyuganov says rejoining would be “voluntary” for the 14 neighboring republics that were once part of the Soviet system with Russia. His party would renationalize the oil industry, slow the pace of Yeltsin-era privatization and reimpose some price controls to protect the poor.

As elections approach, Zyuganov has acquired a deeper voice and firmer handshake. To loud applause on the campaign trail, he portrays himself more as a nationalist than a Communist; he attacks Yeltsin as the man who betrayed and destroyed a great empire, allowing the West to siphon away its wealth.

Then, with the agility of a candidate playing to multiple audiences, he tells foreign entrepreneurs, as he did last month at an American Chamber of Commerce luncheon, that only a Communist government can guarantee order and security for investments.

“He’s an effective politician,” said a Western diplomat in Moscow. “He presents a face to the outside world that even those [party comrades] who are less reconstructed than he is find politically useful at this point.”

Although his party was banned again briefly in late 1993, Zyuganov led it to third place in parliamentary elections that December, with 12.4% of the vote. Since then, he has made the party the best-organized in Russia, held rival factions together and established it, against competing claims, as the Soviet Communist Party’s successor.

That’s important in a country where so many elderly citizens pine for the old order and vote for Communists. “It’s mostly older people who vote,” Zyuganov said. “They will determine the outcome.”

Tuesday’s march was full of such people, such as Maya Grin, 68, who used to make blueprints for Soviet oil pipelines and now struggles on a pension of $42 a month.

“Communism is immortal,” she said brightly, wearing a red scarf, matching gloves and a portrait of Lenin around her neck. “It will return to power, even if this takes 20 years. Nothing can stop the natural course of events.”

But others at the march, noting the dearth of young faces, worried that a party made up mainly of pensioners might not last long. “My daughters won’t listen to me,” complained Vladimir I. Kushov, 53. “The young have fallen for the propaganda of consumerism and the promise of an easy life. They think you can become a millionaire without working.”