The Party on Trial

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The new tricolor flag of democratic Russia looked as if it had been hastily tacked to the courtroom wall underneath a metal emblem with the Soviet hammer and sickle. The 13 judges, seated at a nearby tribunal, did not appear to be completely comfortable in their new black robes with white linings. Minutes after the hearings opened, the court became embroiled in a free-for-all about how to deal with the fact that former President Mikhail Gorbachev had refused to show up. Show trials have always been a staple of Soviet political discourse, but the proceeding that began in Moscow last week is different. This time the Communist Party is in the dock, as Russians struggle to come to terms with seven decades of history. At issue is whether President Boris Yeltsin acted legally when he banned the party and seized its assets after last year's failed coup attempt. But the political stakes are higher. The trial will consider the high crimes and misdemeanors attributed to the party and perhaps outlaw, once and for all, the kind of totalitarian system it created.

Amid moments of drama and confusion, Russia's Constitutional Court, established only last year, heard the first evidence in a case that was certain to test the mettle of the country's fledgling democracy and establish important legal precedents. The hearings raise issues about Yeltsin's power to rule by decree. They will expose the party's checkered past and pose painful questions about retribution and punishment in future trials. And they could provoke a surge of resentment among the party faithful that could spill into the streets -- and heighten anxieties about another putsch attempt.

Yeltsin won a major victory over hardliners in August 1991, but many democratic supporters fear that the second Russian revolution did not go far enough in suppressing the communist past and hope that the court will close out the chapter. In fact, what happened to the party remains something of a mystery. It controlled almost every aspect of life and counted more than 20 million members in its prime, yet seemed to vanish overnight after the failed coup. A year later, the legacy of communist rule has proved difficult to erase. Democrats may be in control of the tip of the pyramid of power, but the middle levels are still dominated by bureaucrats from the old nomenklatura, who may have taken down their portraits of Lenin but pay only lip service to the new regime. In a show of strength last month, a coalition of hard-line communists and extreme nationalists tried to occupy Moscow's main television studio. Now party members have gone to court to try to repeal Yeltsin's ban.

The plaintiffs argue that Yeltsin overstepped his authority when he dissolved the party by decree and opened the way for a dictatorship in democratic disguise, where no political group will be safe from a presidential ban. They disclaim any responsibility for crimes committed by party leaders in the past and want to limit the scope of the hearings to the period after they renounced their monopoly on power in 1990. They also hope to shift the focus by dwelling on the party's achievements in defeating Nazi Germany and building the Soviet Union into a superpower.