Word: zyuganov
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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...
...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...
Back in the early 1990s, when Russia's Communists seemed to be fading into irrelevance, Gennadi Zyuganov used to visit an apartment overlooking Pushkin Square in Moscow, his arms laden with pastries and other delicacies baked by his wife. The apartment belonged to Alexander Prokhanov, a virulently nationalistic newspaper editor, and the occasion was an unlikely gathering of politicians, generals and intellectuals from the far right and far left of Russia's ideological spectrum. With little in common save a shared conviction that Boris Yeltsin was destroying the motherland, the members of Prokhanov's salon would practice running the country...
What was fantasy just a few years ago is now tantalizingly close to reality. Zyuganov, 51, the head of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, has again emerged as a consensus choice, this time as the presidential candidate representing a broad coalition of opposition parties and movements as well as the C.P.R.F. Leftists of all degrees have joined right-wing nationalists who once viewed communism as anathema...