RUSSIA'96: THE PEOPLE CHOOSE

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Gennadi Zyuganov's great achievement has been broadening his Communist base to include many who oppose Yeltsin's reforms, including "national patriots" who yearn for the empire's restoration, hard-line Bolsheviks who idolize Stalin, red capitalists who own casinos in Moscow, and "social-democratic" intellectuals. "Creating that coalition was our first priority, and it is why we never refer to Zyuganov as the Communist candidate," says Valentin Kuptsov, Zyuganov's campaign manager and Communist Party deputy. But "Zyuganov is not merely a tactical nationalist," says James Billington, a Russia scholar and currently the U.S. Librarian of Congress. "He is a believer in a form of nationalism replete with conspiracy theories, internal scapegoats and external enemies."

Zyuganov can be enigmatic and vague when it suits his purposes, but his books and articles reveal a moral absolutist who sees Russia in a death struggle with the U.S. When George Bush spoke of a new world order, Zyuganov labeled the idea "geopolitical sabotage," nothing but a plot to "establish the West's global supremacy." Capitalism, Zyuganov has written, "doesn't fit in our flesh and blood, in our everyday life, in our habits and in the mentality of our society."

Listen carefully to Zyuganov on the stump, and you hear more of the same--the old-time Communist religion fraught with a virulent anti-Americanism, a longing for Russia to be treated once again with respect as a great power and constant reminders that Yeltsin's reforms have worked only for a few, the class called New Russians who own Mercedes and patronize expensive restaurants and nightclubs. "Russians have only three rights today," Zyuganov routinely intones in a surefire applause line: "The right to steal, the right to drink and the right not to be responsible."

A large part of Zyuganov's time is spent managing his unruly coalition. Whenever he says anything even mildly soft-line, his hard-core colleagues recoil. "We have an agreement allowing us to run Zyuganov free of the old dogma, to give him room to maneuver," says Kuptsov. "But there are always tensions in so large a coalition." That is perhaps why Zyuganov so often looks uncomfortable at his own rallies. When backers like Victor Anpilov, a rabble-rouser, promise to fight "to the last ounce of blood" to restore the old order, you can almost see Zyuganov wince.

Such talk clashes with the effort to have Zyuganov appear as a reasonable person who wouldn't dream of wrenching the nation back to a past so many revile. "We won't try to renationalize everything," says Zyuganov, ignoring his own party platform. "That could lead to civil war." But, he invariably adds, we would "of course consider" renationalizing those concerns that have been "privatized illegally." All of this is part of the Zyuganov two-step. He rants against capitalism and the West before audiences nostalgic for the Soviet Union--and tamps down the fire when he talks to moderates.