Zyuganov Tapped as Communists’ Candidate

The huge red flags and portraits of Lenin were missing, but the event had some hallmarks of a Soviet-era party congress: Speeches were dull and sounded alike, the vote with pink party cards was unanimous, and aging comrades in ill-fitting suits doddered home after singing “The Internationale.”

But Russia is no longer a one-party state. The Communists, having fought back from near-oblivion to become this aspiring democracy’s strongest political force, chose party leader Gennady A. Zyuganov as their presidential candidate Thursday in an uncertain mood that hovered between that of a front runner and that of an underdog.

After hearing Zyuganov dismiss President Boris N. Yeltsin as “a weak rival,” many of 211 delegates wondered aloud whether their man, the leader in all opinion polls so far, can find enough support outside the party’s core constituency of poor pensioners to defeat the unpopular but shrewd incumbent.

“The atmosphere in there is a bit on the euphoric side,” Mikhail I. Lapshin, whose Agrarian Party of Russia has joined with the Communists, said outside the hall. “It should be more businesslike. We need 50% of the vote plus one to win. So far we can count on no more than 30%.”

Party leaders say their strategy is to run a fierce anti-Yeltsin campaign, hoping to knock the president out in the first round of voting June 16. Although Yeltsin trails liberal economist Grigory A. Yavlinsky, ultranationalist Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky and retired army Gen. Alexander I. Lebed in most polls, many Communists said they fear the incumbent most in a two-man runoff.

“Yeltsin is our most serious opponent. If he is not eliminated in the first round, he will win in the runoff,” predicted Pyotr Romanov, a leading Communist politician.

In his address Thursday, Zyuganov spoke more about the “despair and pain” of Yeltsin’s Russia, which he described as deeper than that of the post-World War II era, than about his party’s own program; he wants to keep it vague while he cobbles together a coalition of all Yeltsin opponents.

So far, 20 smaller Communist groups have closed ranks behind Zyuganov, but Lebed and other non-Communists have resisted overtures.

Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, a former prime minister who leads one of the allied parties, sounded a critical note at the congress, saying “we’re losing time” in the search for allies.

Speaker after speaker at the congress said that, to win, the Communist Party must take full advantage of its superior nationwide organization.

“We have to reach every heart, wake every person, go into every home and tell them where this criminal regime has taken us,” said Vasily A. Starodubtsev, a plotter of the 1991 hard-line Soviet coup. “If we don’t throw this regime out, we’ll live in the darkness for many, many years.”