Fight or Run? Elites Fear Win by Communists

At the home of self-made millionaire Konstantin N. Borovoi, it’s the same family argument every night.

“My wife and daughter want to emigrate to Paris, but I can’t see myself living anywhere abroad other than New York,” Borovoi says of his domestic debate over what to do if the Communist Party regains power.

At the home of another successful entrepreneur, Oleg V. Kiselev, the strategy for that same perceived disaster is completely different.

“I will do everything necessary to protect my wealth,” says the scientist turned financier, who plans to stay put. “I think almost all people will fight to save what they have achieved.”

Will they fight or will they run?

The wily and the wealthy who have made Russia’s raw democracy work for them see only those paths to survival if the party that once wielded absolute power is restored to supremacy in Sunday’s presidential election.

Some, like Borovoi, say another bout of communism would crush all hopes for democracy, that a life of promise and dignity would have to be sought elsewhere. Others, like Kiselev, insist that they will dig in for battle to defeat those who would lead Russia backward.

“I’ve reinvested most of my profits here. I had the opportunity to put my money abroad, but this is my country. I want to be successful here. I want Russia to be successful,” Kiselev, president of ImpeksBank and a husband and father, explains from behind a vast birch desk fitted with brass and malachite.

There is the odd moderate who argues that a shift back to communism could be weathered without violence, perhaps only because Russians are exhausted by upheavals.

But the preponderance of opinions, fears, forecasts and wild imaginings puts Russia on a collision course with economic and social disaster if Communist Party challenger Gennady A. Zyuganov beats incumbent President Boris N. Yeltsin.

“There is going to be a hemorrhage of people and money out of Russia, even if the Communists don’t change anything significantly,” says Vladimir N. Voinovich, a dissident writer expelled in the 1970s who returned to his homeland five years ago.

While business people fear that a new Communist leadership would destroy the fragile market economy with price controls, money-printing and property confiscations, those who suffered at the hands of the party’s repressive forebears worry more about their newfound freedoms.

“It would probably be gradual, maybe starting with an attempt to prevent the loss of talent and materials abroad by requiring new passports, or government permission to travel. Maybe we would need exit visas again,” Voinovich says. “Then they would have to reintroduce censorship to control the public reaction.”

What is at stake is what too many now take for granted, he says: the right to say what one thinks, the freedom to choose a livelihood and lifestyle, the liberty to explore a world limited by finances instead of barbed-wire fences.

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Like others who take a grim view of the consequences of a Communist victory, Voinovich warns that the instability would hardly stop at Russia’s borders.

“This historic undertaking could fail, and if it does it will be a catastrophe not only for Russia but for all the world,” he says. “But I believe there is an instinct for self-preservation that will prevail. If Yeltsin wins, this will create a kind of stability. It will be corrupt and stagnant, but stable.”

Yeltsin himself has been brandishing scare tactics along the hustings, claiming he alone can ensure social peace after the election.

Communist Party strategists dismiss such claims as election propaganda, but the vagueness and inconsistency of Zyuganov’s platform are fanning fears about his intentions.

In interviews and at international events, the Communist candidate talks of continuing reforms, reviving the economy and restoring social justice. On the campaign trail, Zyuganov speaks of combating conspiracies and foreign plots to denigrate Russia.

At a rally in the former gulag city of Perm, just west of the Urals, Zyuganov blamed the collapse of the Soviet Union on a “secret plan” devised by President John F. Kennedy. He has also suggested that Russia’s widespread alcoholism and health problems are inflicted by foreign enemies.

“Those who claim there is a fog around Zyuganov, that we don’t know his intentions, are fools,” says the 48-year-old Borovoi, founder of Russia’s first commodities market and leader of the pro-business Party of Economic Freedom. “There would be a full restoration of the old system.”

Doublespeak and evasion on economic policy have given rise to suspicions that the Communists themselves are undecided about how they would proceed with the incomplete transition.

Zyuganov told the weekly Argumenty i Fakty that “market mechanisms cannot be introduced in the vastness of Russia.”

He has repeatedly said that the party favors a balance among state, collective and private property rights but makes clear to loyalists that he is against land reform and privatization.

Communists have stirred up an angry following among pensioners and blue-collar workers by casting the sell-off of state assets as a grand larceny committed by reformers against the people.

Some senior party officials--such as legislator Anatoly I. Lukyanov, who took part in the 1991 coup attempt against Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev--are unabashedly anti-Western.

Lukyanov casts Russia’s recent $10-billion loan from the International Monetary Fund as a capitalist attempt to enslave this country, and he accuses Western governments of exporting food to Russia at dumping prices to destroy domestic production and undermine national security.

“You want to turn our country into a kind of colony, a raw-material-supplying appendage of the West,” the lawmaker accused one American, the glint of Cold War animosity in his eyes.

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Party economists such as Yuri D. Maslyukov, the last planning czar of the Soviet Union, argue that capitalism is unsuitable for Russia and will be its ruin if unrevised.

“Forty percent of the poor in this country are 20 to 50 years old, in the prime of their working years, but they have no jobs,” Maslyukov laments, blaming the switch to a market economy for the devastating drop in production instead of the loss of captive Communist markets.

Party economic strategists talk of giving budgetary credits to idle factories so they can restart production--a move market economists say would rekindle hyper-inflation.

Maslyukov also claims that if a Communist government took power, it could entice back hard-currency earnings taken out of the country by successful Russian business people by declaring an “amnesty” and creating opportunities here for investment. Zyuganov’s supporters contend that capital flight has been as high as $140 billion, at least three times the government estimate.

“This money was stolen from us, and we must get it back,” insists former Gen. Albert G. Makashov, a hard-line Communist lawmaker and leader of the armed attack on the state television building during an October 1993 clash with Yeltsin. “We will simply call upon people to cooperate voluntarily. Many of those who have taken money out are now feeling guilty.”

More disturbing than the sometimes illogical reasoning of Communist politicians have been indications that the party’s strident left wing wants its share of power in a Zyuganov government.

In May, the daily Moskovsky Komsomolets printed what it said were Zyuganov’s choices for Cabinet appointments in the event of his victory. The report gave the post of defense minister to Makashov, who was imprisoned for his role in the failed 1993 uprising but pardoned several months later.

An economic program published by Komsomolskaya Pravda and purported to have been drafted by the Zyuganov campaign team included calls to curb foreign travel and seize private property.

Reformers such as Maxim Boiko, director of the Russian Privatization Center, insist that today’s population would never tolerate such a reversal.

If the Communists return to power, Boiko predicts, “We will see a major economic crisis in six months to a year, possibly earlier. And this will lead to some sort of political reaction.”

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Whether the reaction would take the shape of a talent-depleting exodus or an uprising of those whose prosperity is threatened is the subject of dispute.

But even some allied with Zyuganov concede that a confrontation is brewing.

“The psychological condition of Russia today is driven by a fear of revenge and the promise of revenge,” says Alexander A. Prokhanov, editor of the Communist Party mouthpiece Zavtra and a close friend of and advisor to Zyuganov. “It is the revenge of people who are extremely poor, who have been deprived of everything by Yeltsin.”

Zyuganov has amassed a following, Prokhanov says, by plucking the people’s heartstrings over the lost power of the Soviet Union, tapping the anger of have-nots toward the new class of the ostentatiously wealthy and appealing to the idle to pick up their hammers and sickles to rebuild Russia.

Like most who circulate in the still-secretive Communist hierarchy, Prokhanov makes vague allusions to a reemerging Soviet Union that are upsetting to Russia’s newly independent neighbors.

“The problem of Estonia, where half the population is Russian, will be resolved like it was resolved in divided Germany,” says the editor, implying unification. “Russians cannot be a divided nation.”

He speaks of private property being “a burden” and of the need to restore land to state ownership because the people are unable to work it.

“De-privatization is a negative process, and Zyuganov doesn’t want to have anything to do with this. But if a factory that once produced medicines is now being used to store American chewing gum, the state will have to make it return to production, even if that means renationalization,” Prokhanov says.

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Outside Russia, property seizures might be seen as undemocratic, but the Communists have cast themselves as the rectifiers of injustice, empowered by Yeltsin’s own disregard for law and morality.

“Who fired tank rounds into the White House?” Prokhanov demands, referring to Yeltsin’s 1993 attack on the parliament building to end a standoff with Communist opponents. “Those who killed thousands are still in power.”

That Yeltsin’s enemies from that deadly confrontation are now aligned with Zyuganov may cause little worry among the angry laborers and disillusioned pensioners who are the Communist voter base. But the backing of hard-line coup-plotters like retired Gens. Valentin I. Varennikov, Alexander V. Rutskoi and Makashov unsettles the undecided masses whose first priority is to preserve the stable, albeit corrupt, status quo.

Analysts from Soviet-era think tanks such as the Institute of International Economic and Political Studies dismiss warnings of confrontation as anti-Communist hysteria fanned by Yeltsin.

Institute Director Oleg T. Bogomolov says Zyuganov is unlikely to heed the advice of reactionary hard-liners in the party who insist that private property should be renationalized and Russians’ newfound freedoms to travel and trade revoked.

Like others clearly opposed to the Yeltsin regime, Bogomolov insists that the government is bleeding the country of its rich natural resources to maintain consumption despite a drastic fall in industrial production.

“It is possible to eat on the national wealth only for so long,” the former party Central Committee advisor concludes. “Half of our foodstuffs are being imported now, while we’re exporting oil, gas, gold, diamonds and timber. This cannot go on forever.”

Economists more supportive of the current reform course, however, attribute the imbalance between consumption and production to income hidden to protect it from Russia’s voracious tax collectors.

Although many expect economic damage under a Communist leadership, there is serious doubt among observers that Zyuganov would seek to limit personal freedoms.

“All this anti-Communist hysteria that is being heated up by our wise TV commentators and analysts is stupid. Zyuganov is not Stalin, and not even Brezhnev,” says Vadim V. Bakatin, a former KGB chief under Gorbachev.

Any attempt to oppress dissenters or revoke individual rights would hasten the final demise of the party, he adds.

“If they put ideology ahead of everything else, they will lose,” Bakatin predicts. “If they start tightening the screws, they won’t be in office for four years--maybe not for one. Russia is already a different country.”