CAMPAIGN '96 RUSSIA: THE UNDEAD RED

• Share

IF ANY CITY DESERVES TO BE called the mausoleum of Soviet communism, it is Ulyanovsk, the industrial center on the Volga where Vladimir Lenin, ne Ulyanov, was born in 1870. It contains a varied assortment of Lenin shrines, from his parents' apartments to his classroom to a modernistic museum complex on a bluff overlooking the river. The city is so resistant to political and economic reform that some Russians refer to it as a "communist preserve." It has been ruled since 1990, except for a brief interval, by its "Red Governor," Yuri Goryachev, who was once First Secretary of the region's Communist Party. He continues to operate in the peremptory style of a party boss from his colonnaded, four-story administration building on Lenin Square.

But Goryachev is a government official now, not a party leader, and his building is no longer Ulyanovsk's party headquarters. Instead the Communist Party of the Russian Federation makes its regional base in a single-story wooden house next door to an animal hospital on a rutted, dead-end lane. The Second Secretary here is Zhavdets Ilyasov, 49, a retired colonel of Interior Ministry troops. The peeling wallpaper and crumbling ceiling in his office do not discourage him. He takes pride in the obvious differences between his austere communist organization and the fat cats of the old Soviet nomenklatura, who in the new Russia have profited from their high positions. "It is a myth," he says, "that we have a 'Red Governor' in Ulyanovsk. Those in charge here are former party secretaries who are now comfortably well off."

In Russia as in Ulyanovsk, politicians like Goryachev represent communism past. Lean and hungry ones like Ilyasov claim they are the country's communist future. The new reds became the largest party in parliament with 22.3% of the vote in last December's elections, and they are mobilizing their national network to take the presidency, the really important post, in June. If they manage it, they intend to do communism right this time. They plan to reconstruct and revive the monster of the Soviet Union as a communist state. They would reimpose price controls and central economic planning, renationalize key industries and, probably, turn back toward authoritarian rule. If they pull it off, they would inflict immense damage on Russia and its relations with the rest of the world.

The Communist Party's standard-bearer in the presidential race is Gennadi Zyuganov, a smooth customer and an opponent of Boris Yeltsin's in the last days of the U.S.S.R. As observers both Russian and foreign point out, Zyuganov can preach it round or flat. He sounds like a social democrat when he meets with Western businessmen and diplomats, reassuring them that he favors a "mixed economy." To the party faithful, however, he puts forth a harsher anti-Western, sometimes anti-Semitic message.