Get Back to You on Economy, Zyuganov Says

After a week of scandal and speculation over what Communist presidential contender Gennady A. Zyuganov has in mind for this country’s economy should the party of planners regain power, his message to voters is clear: Trust me on this.

The absence of a blueprint for the Communist candidate’s vow to wrest Russia from its deep crisis has fanned speculation that Zyuganov, who has recently seen his lead slip, cannot forge a consensus among the varied movements supporting his bid to unseat President Boris N. Yeltsin.

Since an anti-reform program said to have been drafted by top Communists was published last week by the respected newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, Zyuganov’s economic advisors have been scrambling to distance the candidate from that controversial document.

At four news conferences called Tuesday and Wednesday, leading Communists sought to assure followers that the party does have a plan.

“Today we considered the final draft, which is being finalized by the team of our scholars and specialists,” Zyuganov told reporters Wednesday, buying time by noting that the plan must first be debated among the 200 or so allied political movements that support him.

On Tuesday, a senior economist working with the party said there is no “concrete program” because there is too little time left to draft one before the June 16 election and because statistics on Russia’s financial affairs are unreliable.

“A concrete program, speaking scientifically, can be worked out only by a government,” Tatiana I. Koryagina explained at a news conference called to unveil the Communists’ platform.

The party’s vagueness would be less disturbing to Russian voters if not for the Komsomolskaya Pravda report that the Communists would renationalize some private property, move to eliminate the U.S. dollar as a parallel currency and impose restrictions on foreign travel to staunch capital flight.

Deputy Communist Party chief Alexander A. Shabanov immediately denounced the program published by the newspaper May 15 as a “fake” and threatened to sue. Koryagina described it as “psychological pressure” being applied by political opponents.

But no sooner had the party called the purported plan a fabrication than the head of an allied Communist movement, Viktor I. Anpilov of the hard-line Working Russia party, appealed for state confiscation of banks and closure of hard-currency exchange businesses to banish the U.S. dollar from the Russian market.

Zyuganov’s campaign chief, Valentin A. Kuptsov, acknowledged differences with Anpilov but denied there is any threat to the unity of the pro-Communist bloc.

The newspaper editor who obtained the draft program and is confident it was worked out by top party leaders said Zyuganov’s denunciation of the document is a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the party’s credibility.

“If the version they eventually come out with is significantly different from the one we have published, they will lose their own backers and potential electorate,” said Yevgeny Anisimov, the paper’s economics editor.

“If their program is the same, they will be demonstrating their incompetence with the denial and sowing the seed of suspicion in the minds of the Russian people.”

The Communist Party’s top economic expert, Yuri D. Maslyukov, a member of the ruling Politburo during the Soviet era, said Wednesday that the program being put together by Zyuganov’s backers would aim to subsidize some fuel and raw material prices and work to halt the import of foreign goods that compete with less efficient Russian producers.

Maslyukov and Koryagina insisted that some private property would be retained in their vision of a “mixed” economy and that there would be no confiscation of recently privatized state assets as long as the sales were conducted according to the law.