yuganov and company are not the well-dressed, relatively charming ex-leftists who have been coming back to power in Eastern Europe in recent months. The Russian communists still call themselves that – communists – and they wave Stalin posters at their rallies and spout frighteningly anti-Western views. They’re expected to win a plurality in Sunday’s elections, from a field of 43 parties. But no one is sure what will come next. Though they threaten to undo the modest gains of Russian private business, the communists and their ultranationalist allies are unlikely to have the two-thirds majority in the Duma, or lower house of the Russian Parliament, to override President Boris Yeltsin’s veto. Still, a strong showing by these reactionaries is a bad sign for the more significant presidential elections next June – and for the state of Russian democracy overall. “When Americans vote for president, they are electing a leader,” says Igor Golembiovsky, editor of the liberal daily Izvestia. “When Russians vote, they are electing a system.”
What system, exactly, do the Russians want? Nikolai Savelyev, a leading economist in the Communist Party, advocates seizing property from those who cannot prove they obtained it with legal earnings – something few Russian capitalists could probably do. He also promises to subsidize food prices, increase spending on social services and offer soft loans to factories and collective farms on the brink of bankruptcy. The program actually plays on the kind of generalized popular disgruntlement that swept the communists out of power in the first place. The top concerns of most Russians now are rising crime and declining living standards. Says Nikolai Prokofyev, a pensioner at Zyuganov’s rally in Nizhny Novgorod, “I can barely afford bread, and I am going to have to forget that milk even exists.”
Yet Zyuganov shows a different face to different audiences. When addressing Western and local businessmen, he casts himself as merely a social democrat, eager to help the poor but equally committed to attracting foreign investors. Some people believe him. In a recent report called “Russian Politics: Not That Scary Any More,” Salomon Brothers investment bank dubbed the Zyuganov crowd “bourgeois in their outlook.”
Whatever the communists say more privately, their rhetoric on the hustings seems sure to push political debate in a more conservative direction. That’s precisely what happened after the wild-eyed nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky made such a strong showing in the Duma elections two years ago. Boris Yeltsin’s team was spooked into taking a tougher line toward the West. Zhirinovsky himself has peaked; his party will likely win less than half of its 23 percent showing last time. But he changed the terms of the game. The communists, no matter what they actually accomplish, will likely do the same.
