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 together. They would form a mock Cabinet, dividing up the various portfolios among themselves. Deciding who got which job was never easy, but the consensus pick for the top post was always the same.”We chose Zyuganov,” says Prokhanov. “Every time.”
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.
As his success in those mock Cabinets shows, Zyuganov’s politics are malleable. He is, at once, red enough for old-style Communists and white enough for hard-line nationalists. At a late-April meeting with the candidate in the town of Sosnovy Bor, due west of St. Petersburg, an old man with damp eyes and a Soviet-flag pin stuck in his lapel reverently described Zyuganov as ”one of the best leaders our party has ever had.” At a May Day rally in Moscow, the heads of various nationalist movements praised Zyuganov as someone who shares their anti-Western, often anti-Semitic beliefs. In St. Petersburg, a man introduced himself as a member of Monarchists for Zyuganov, a contradiction so absurd even the usually dour candidate had to laugh.
Prokhanov says his friend is “like velvet, with no sharp edges,” which is why he appeals to so many different constituencies. Because he is so flexible and cautious, as Prokhanov explains it, ”Zyuganov is the buffer, the go-between for all sides. All these political trends seem as if they’re struggling with each other, but the idea of compromise is ripening within them. They need Zyuganov, and Zyuganov needs them. Having received Russia falling apart in his hands, he wants to be the one who puts it back together. Russia and Zyuganov have found each other.”
In Mymrino, the tiny village in Russia’s Black Earth region where Zyuganov was born, memories burn brightly of the young, towheaded ”Genna” leading student brigades to pick potatoes at the nearby Red October collective farm.
“He had the aura of authority around him,” says Valentina Antipova, 57, a neighbor who recalls Gennadi playing the conciliator even as a boy. “Whenever there was a quarrel, he would come out and break it up.”
Zyuganov’s parents, neither of whom ever joined the party, were schoolteachers. His father Andrei, a peaceful man whose hobby was beekeeping, nearly lost his right leg to a German bullet in the fighting near Sevastopol and walked with a severe limp for the rest of his life. Like much of rural Russia, Mymrino still lacks plumbing and paved roads. The region suffered from the mass arrests and forced collectivization of Stalin’s time, although you won’t hear Zyuganov talk about that when he rhapsodizes about Russia’s rural past in his speeches.
Zyuganov left Mymrino for the army and then went to Oryol, the regional capital, to study mathematics at the Oryol Pedagogical Institute, where he set himself on a fast track to a party career by leading both the student union and the local branch of the Komsomol Communist youth organization. Svetlana Voronina, a former classmate, remembers him as a voracious reader. ”Every book I bought on trips to Moscow, he wanted to read,” she says. One Zyuganov favorite was a book titled Raising Children in the Atheist Manner. Mindful of his nationalist supporters, for whom the Orthodox Church is inextricably linked to Russia’s identity, Zyuganov now brags about having read the Bible (twice) and has eliminated the party’s ban on religion.
Like any good politician, Zyuganov knew how to take care of his constituents. Valeri Yermikov, a lanky sports trainer who played volleyball with Zyuganov at the institute, recalls how he later endured nine years on a waiting list for a telephone line at his new apartment. Finally he petitioned the state-run phone company but was rudely rebuffed. On that very day, Yermikov ran into Zyuganov, who at the time was Oryol’s top party functionary. “Why do you look so sad?” Zyuganov inquired. Yermikov recounted his troubles. A few days later, without any explanation, his phone was installed.
Zyuganov steadily climbed the rungs of the regional party apparatus in Oryol, becoming chief of ideology. He was also tapped by the party’s Central Committee to go to Moscow. Instead of settling behind a desk, Zyuganov was sent around the Soviet Union to check on party work, an experience that he says put him in touch with the country’s problems. In 1990 he broke with then party leader Mikhail Gorbachev and helped found a hard-line Communist Party based in Russia.
Zyuganov’s career as an opposition leader has been characterized by caution and measured ambition. In July 1991 he and 11 others signed an open letter titled “A Word to the People,” a blistering plea to save the Soviet Union from Gorbachev’s reforms. The letter, which Prokhanov wrote, marked the birth of the union between Communists and nationalists that some fear will transform Zyuganov’s coalition into a Russian version of Hitler’s National Socialist party. It also foreshadowed the failed coup by party hard-liners the following month. Although he proudly calls himself a “leading ideologist” of the attempt, Zyuganov was on vacation when it happened and he did not return to Moscow until it was over.
The same prudence guided his handling of the bloody rebellion against Yeltsin by opposition members of the Russian parliament in October 1993. Rather than endorse the hard-liners, Zyuganov publicly called for all sides to avoid violence, a move that angered leaders of the rebellion, several of whom landed in jail. But Zyuganov’s judgment paid off. While other opposition parties boycotted parliamentary elections in December 1993, Zyuganov’s participated and did well, giving it a legitimacy the sidelined parties lacked. In balloting two years later, the C.P.R.F. won the largest block of seats in parliament, putting Zyuganov in a powerful position to challenge Yeltsin.
Zyuganov’s ample writings are full of the turgid prose of a Soviet bureaucrat, but they reveal a mind keenly affected by the centuries-old Russian struggle between pro-Western reformers and xenophobic Slavic purists. Zyuganov is one of the latter. “He has a deep historical view of Russia’s mission as the opposition to the dissolute West,” observes Freedom House president Adrian Karatnycky, who has pored over Zyuganov’s books. ”He’s a big believer in the decline of the West and the emergence of a new civilization.” The emergence, in other words, of a reborn Russia, prosperous, powerful and pure.
Attempting to calm Washington and other Western capitals about his possible victory, Zyuganov has launched a charm offensive. In April, Sergei Ayvazyan, an English-speaking foreign-policy adviser, visited Washington with a message for U.S. officials: “Don’t demonize Zyuganov.” Dismissing the distinction between communism and social democracy as mere “semantics,” Ayvazyan insisted that Zyuganov was “a progressive, democratic, pragmatic politician.” He even regaled Clinton Administration officials with a story of how he and Zyuganov once sat in a cafe and contemplated removing “Communist” from the party’s name. They decided against it, he said, for fear of alienating nostalgic older voters.
Artful politicians often defy ideological stereotypes. That may be the case with Zyuganov. In Russia the current debate is over what kind of leader Zyuganov would be. Even in Mymrino, opinion is divided. On a sunny spring day, a handful of the village’s elderly gathered for a picnic on a patch of grass just 50 yards from Zyuganov’s old house.
“We like him not just because he’s from here, but because he’s from a poor background,” explained Anton Markin, 81. But Boris Levkovich, 68, remained worried. He recounted the horrors of the Soviet past to his comrades, including the “20 million of his own people Stalin killed.” Said Levkovich, his face flushed with anger: “Stalin was a Communist. How do we know Zyuganov will be any different?” It’s a question 100 million Russians are asking.
