Communists See Vote as Vindication

There was no red banner, no triumphant march through Moscow. But Monday was a milestone for Russian Communists, the first time since their party self-destructed along with the Soviet Union that many have felt vindicated.

As official returns gave them the biggest vote in Sunday’s parliamentary elections, Communists reacted with a surge of pride and a dose of realism, aware that their victory is unlikely to bring down President Boris N. Yeltsin’s government.

But four years after Yeltsin banned their crumbling party and dismantled the Soviet empire it had ruled for seven decades, those who cling stubbornly to their party cards are again the leading political force here--even if they have renounced the goal of monopolizing all power and property.

Sitting in his office, eerily quiet for a victorious party headquarters, Viktor P. Peshkov, secretary of the Central Committee, went as far as to claim that the party’s comeback signaled the death of anticommunism as a political banner in Russia.

Recalling Yeltsin’s dramatic election eve appeal that voters reject “the forces of the past,” Peshkov said: “It did not work. Today we can state with reason that Russians are not allergic either to the Communist idea or the word communism. They do not view us as bigots obsessed with some harmful doctrine.”

What Russia’s 500,000 Communists are supposed to believe in and what they want for their country were topics of intense discussion Monday in kitchens, apartment hallways and veterans centers--wherever comrades gathered on a winter day to ponder the sudden clout of Sunday’s mandate.

Most of the talk was about moderation and alliances.

The Communists polled 22% of Sunday’s vote with a campaign that appealed to older voters’ nostalgia for the paternalist order of Soviet life. The Communists promised to restore the Soviet Union “voluntarily” and renationalize selected industries cut loose from the state under Yeltsin’s free-market policies.

At a news conference, however, Communist leader Gennady A. Zyuganov said he was willing to negotiate his program in talks with “all possible allies and fellow travelers” seeking to form a majority coalition in the new parliament.

And conversations with party members in Moscow indicated they are not all as bent on sweeping away Yeltsin’s reforms as they are usually portrayed.

Mark I. Ivanikhin, 73, a Red Army colonel during World War II, has voted Communist for more than half a century. He said he voted Sunday not so much for a return to the Soviet past as for a chance that the Communists might finally get it right next time.

“I didn’t vote to start another revolution,” Ivanikhin said. “I didn’t vote for a rollback to Stalinist repressions. I didn’t vote to strangle investors. I voted so we can just evolutionize normally, like other civilized countries do, without breaking things.”

Ivanikhin said it is “hard to be triumphant” about the election because Russia’s economic hardships are so great. What he voted for most of all, he said, was a government willing to set any clear goal, capitalist or socialist, for overcoming them.

“But we shouldn’t change the government to do this,” countered Nina Vasilyeva, 68, a Communist who was hanging out at a veterans aid office in eastern Moscow with the retired colonel and several other old soldiers.

“Every change will entail some really grave shocks, and we’ll have to start everything anew,” she added. “We should ensure the continuity of the political and economic process.”

Zinaida Chukhriy, 50, a pilot during World War II who now runs the veterans office, said she had been fielding inquiries all day about when the lost privileges of the Soviet working class, such as cheap vacations at Black Sea health resorts, were going to be restored.

“So far, nothing is clear,” she kept answering.

Veterans and other pensioners earn an average $25 a month, half the minimum survival wage defined by the government. Embittered by inflation that has eroded their checks, they made up about a third of all Russians who cast ballots Sunday and voted heavily for the Communists.

“This happened without any campaign propaganda,” Vasilyeva said. “Everyone understood what to do.”

The party did run a nationwide door-to-door effort--more like an American campaign than any other party’s--to gather votes. Peshkov, the Central Committee secretary, said 20,000 party cells were involved in the canvassing.

This election was the Communists’ first clear popularity test since Russia’s Constitutional Court lifted Yeltsin’s ban on the party in November 1992. It was banned again before the parliamentary election two years ago but allowed to run a late campaign and finished third with 12.4% of the vote.

Zyuganov said Monday that a drive to rebuild the party’s local cells and regional networks was nearly complete. “It’s a party that has everything that it takes to make a party,” he said.

The next question is whether it has everything to get Zyuganov elected president next June. The 51-year-old Communist leader, who was a minor party functionary when the Soviet Union collapsed, appears to have overcome opposition to his candidacy within the party. But his ability to reach beyond its solid constituency of comrades is untested.