Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
Thursday, Aug. 30, 2001

The once-despised party that murdered millions and imprisoned millions more in the dreaded gulags where few survived is once again a political force to be reckoned with, according to journalist Fred Weir.

Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, Weir reported that the party, once believed to be dead and gone thanks to Boris Yeltsin's vigorous campaign against it, somehow has managed not only to survive but to prosper.

"Today," Weir wrote, "it is the country's largest political organization, runs about 40 percent of regional governments, and controls a third of the seats in the national parliament."

As NewsMax.com's John L. Perry wrote Aug. 1, the election of Communists to governorships has broad implications.

Considering its revolting history as the world's most vicious tyranny, the re-emergence of the Communist Party has surprised many. Observers say its new popularity is largely due to a deep-seated nostalgia for what many Russians see as the glory days of the Soviet Union as a superpower.

"How can you destroy an idea that is so deeply rooted in Russian society and culture?" Vladimir Lakayev, second secretary of Moscow's powerful Communist Party, told Weir. "Yeltsin only strengthened the party with his constant attacks."

Yeltsin's war against the party rose out of the attempts of left-wing members of parliament to challenge his anti-Communist decrees in Constitutional Court.

"In the stormy trial in 1992, the Kremlin's lawyers argued that the party should be banned for leading Russia down a tragic path," Weir wrote. "They charged that, during its rule, the Communist Party supervised mass murders, built the vast gulag prison camp network, and systematically suppressed human rights.

"The court ruled that communists had the right to organize. The party was revived in 1993, grew swiftly, and today claims to have some 600,000 members.

"Our party preserves the best traditions of the Soviet Communist Party, including its ideology and principles," Lakayev told Weir. "But, unlike Soviet times, when most members were just opportunists, all those who join us now are sincere activists."

The party tends to lie low, avoiding any kind of radicalism that would revive memories of its murderous past, Weir noted. As a result it has won local elections and done well in national elections.

"This is not a party, but a vestige of the Soviet state," Svyatoslav Kaspe, a political analyst with the independent Russian Public Policy Center, confided to Weir.

"It is a cultural club, where people fondly remember the good old days and venerate the symbols of Soviet times. As a political force, it is deeply conformist and not at all a threat to the regime."

The party wants to change the name of the central Russian city of Volgograd back to Stalingrad, allegedly in honor of the great battle won by Soviet forces in World War II.

"This is nostalgia raised to the level of a political crusade," Kaspe said. "But, even if they win, it will alter nothing essential."

The Monitor notes that most of the party's members are either elderly veterans of World War II or people who grew up in the post-war years of reconstruction and the struggle to reach superpower status.

But the stubborn pride of lifelong Communists, and widespread nostalgia for the Soviet Union, do not fully explain the party's phoenixlike recovery, Weir said.

"The original cause of communism was capitalism, and Yeltsin created one of the nastiest versions of capitalism ever seen," Boris Kagarlitsky, a left-wing sociologist in Moscow, told Weir. "It shouldn't be surprising that people who were experiencing harsh impoverishment and social humiliation would turn to the party that symbolized resistance to capitalism."

In the Yeltsin years. out-of-control inflation wiped out the savings of millions of ordinary Russians. The corrupt privatizations of state assets, in which holdings were sold to insiders for pennies on the dollar, made multimillionaires out of a handful of a tiny cadre of oligarchs, and the majority of Russians were driven into poverty. The financial crash in 1998, caused by Kremlin incompetence and corruption, reduced the buying power of near-starvation wages by almost two-thirds.

As a result, the part began its revival. In 1997 and in subsequent parliamentary elections, the Communists roared back, often taking a quarter or more of the votes. In 1996, Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov won more than 40 percent of popular support in an election that Yeltsin won by a slim margin.

"Yeltsin liked confrontation, it was his political style," said Mikhail Ilyin, deputy editor of Polis, an independent Moscow-based journal of political studies. "But this had a polarizing effect on society. In effect, he forced people to choose between him and the Communists, and that did nothing to broaden the country's political choices."

Weir concluded that Russia's current president, Vladimir Putin, "could succeed in killing the Communist Party with compromise where Yeltsin's antagonistic approach failed."

Putin, he wrote, has restored such old symbols as the Soviet anthem and has promised not to remove Lenin's body from his Red Square tomb.

"Traditional values are very important for Russians, and this accounts for the endurance of the Communist Party," Ilyin explained.

"But few want to really go back to the past," he said. "Putin will probably respect the Communists as long as they stay in their place."

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