Communists Stumble in Effort to Fill Russian Power Void

The panorama is impressive: wave after wave of Russians carrying red flags, marching to martial music, chanting in unison and demanding a return to socialist ideals.

The Communist Party remains this nation’s most powerful political movement and the only one with a nationwide network capable of drawing hundreds of thousands of protesters into the streets.

Yet with President Boris N. Yeltsin sidelined by health problems, and the political struggle to succeed him already underway, the Communists are far from poised to take over.

To the contrary, although support for the Communist Party is broad, it is also shallow. And more and more, there are signs that it may drain off to other movements--especially an eclectic bloc coalescing around Moscow Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov.

“The position of the Communists is not as strong as it appears,” said Andrei Ryabov, an analyst with the Moscow-based Gorbachev Foundation. “Their bloc has begun to fragment.”

To be sure, the Communists still get far more support in polls than any other political party--about 25% of respondents nationwide. And they scored an important victory when Communists in parliament went eyeball to eyeball with Yeltsin in September and forced him to give up his nomination of Viktor S. Chernomyrdin for prime minister. Only last April, Yeltsin won a similar showdown over the naming of Sergei V. Kiriyenko, who was ousted as premier in August.

But the Communist Party is facing pressures from inside and outside. Internally, the party is beset by a crisis of vision. Externally, it is being challenged by political rivals vying for its core constituency.

Consider Nikolai Orlov, a member of that constituency. The 71-year-old retired bus driver trudged with more than 50,000 others to the Kremlin last month, carrying a red flag he made himself by stapling a rectangle of cotton cloth to a broomstick.

He looked for all the world like a Communist true believer. But he’s not. His flag was red, he said, not because he supports the Communists but because it was the only color cloth he had at home.

“I was a Communist once,” he said, “but that was a long time ago.”

Orlov still talks of the proletariat and the glory of labor, but he said he’s unimpressed by the tired formulas he hears from Communist leader Gennady A. Zyuganov. “If the election were today, I would gladly vote for Luzhkov.”

So would a growing number of others. In fact, the same day Yeltsin was forced to abandon a long-planned trip to Austria last week because of ill health, a group of political parties--including some allied with the Communists--signed a pact to formally create a left-center coalition. They named Luzhkov as their preferred candidate for president in the next elections.

Luzhkov, meanwhile, gave a speech outlining his idea of what such a bloc would stand for--ideas that many latter-day Communists could accept.

“We should work and consume in accordance with the principles of liberalism,” Luzhkov said, “while social security should be based on the principles of socialism.”

The West still tends to see the Communist Party as an ideology-driven monolith of pensioners and apparatchiks nostalgic for the Soviet past. Alarms were raised when the Communists won a strong victory in 1995 parliamentary elections and formed a coalition with smaller nationalist and socialist parties to control a majority in the Duma, parliament’s lower house.

But few Communists spend much time these days thinking about Karl Marx or class struggle or abolishing private property--a change even the faction’s ideology chief acknowledges.

“Our country and social structure have changed, and the ideology of the party has changed accordingly,” said Alexander A. Kravets, the ideologist, who also represents the Siberian city of Omsk in the Duma. “Today, the ideology of the Communist Party reflects the interests of the majority of our compatriots who have been left without any property . . . but also the interests of property owners who realize full well that without a strong Russia, their hopes and aspirations will never come true.”

In other words, despite everything Marx wrote about class conflict, Russia’s Communists today are, in effect, claiming to represent both the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

And that’s far from the only contradiction troubling the party.

Perhaps the most obvious one is that they are no longer clearly the opposition. In recent weeks, several Communists and hard-liners have joined the Cabinet of the new prime minister, Yevgeny M. Primakov. First Deputy Prime Minister Yuri D. Maslyukov, a Communist, has taken over the new government’s economic policy.

As a result, the Communists are limited to complaining about the president; as soon as they take aim at his aides, fellow party members are in the line of fire.

Perhaps most damaging, the party’s rank and file is weakening. Every year more of its staunch elderly supporters pass away, and there are growing political divisions among remaining members.

In fact, in the absence of a consistent central doctrine, the party has become an unstable amalgam of competing ideologies.

Some members are Soviet revanchists who want to throw out the market economy and rebuild the collapsed Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Others are Russian nationalists who blame the West for ruining the country and seek to rescue the defiled Slavic soul. And some are rabid racists, blaming conspiracies of Jews and dark-skinned people for the country’s woes.

Still others are moderates, similar to East European social democrats, who seek to rebuild the welfare state but on the basis of a market economy. Maslyukov, now the highest-ranking Communist in the government, is considered the most prominent of these.

It is hard to gauge which of the groups is the strongest, but it’s clear that the interests of the moderates and the radicals are diverging.

The party denies any fragmentation.

“There is no ideological split in the party today and there never has been one,” said Kravets, the ideology chief. “What we have is constructive discussion about the optimum ways of solving the problems confronting Russia today.”

Some of those discussions are over the emerging left-center bloc. Since the concept was floated shortly after Primakov was selected as prime minister, politicians of many stripes have jumped on the bandwagon. They include prominent Communists such as Gennady N. Seleznyov, speaker of the Duma.

For Communists to break ranks in such an open fashion would once have been unthinkable. And it is a measure of how hard Zyuganov is working to hold the party together that, despite being the Communists’ all-but-declared candidate for president, he has said the party would consider supporting someone else on the left-center.

The left-center man of the moment is Luzhkov--the bald, cherub-faced mayor of Moscow who belongs to no party but runs a powerful political machine admired by Russian hard-liners and liberals alike.

As soon as Luzhkov acknowledged interest in the presidency, his ratings jumped in several polls, from about 12% to 17%. Perhaps most significantly, 35% of respondents who identified themselves as Zyuganov supporters told the Public Opinion Foundation that they welcomed Luzhkov’s move to enter the race.

Zyuganov still beats Luzhkov in key polls, but only barely. The momentum appears to be in Luzhkov’s favor.

Russia’s next scheduled parliamentary elections are still more than a year away and the next presidential ballot not until June 2000. But with Yeltsin’s health on the skids, talk is growing that they may come earlier.

Indeed, the current economic and political crisis has handed the Communists their best chance in years of regaining the political initiative. But for a party that should be riding high, they keep stumbling.

A big protest outside the Kremlin last month provides one small example. Originally, Communists and trade unions planned separate rallies. But the Communists canceled theirs at the last minute and joined the unions; with many Communists also members of trade unions, the party leadership could not be sure their separate rally would draw enough people.

Galina V. Starovoitova, a liberal parliament deputy, said the Communists’ political fortunes may ride on whether they can turn the current crisis to their advantage.

“In a stable country they have no chance of regaining power,” she said. “This is their last chance, and they know it.”

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