HOW DARK A RED IS HE?

By Bruce W. Nelan

WHEN GENNADI ZYUGANOV, LEADER of Russia's Communist Party, steps onto the podium in a factory auditorium south of Moscow and poses under the red banners and hammer-and-sickle emblems, he transports his audience back to the time before Mikhail Gorbachev began his reforms, a sclerotic period of repression and decline now viewed by many as an era of stability. The crowd loves it. The hall rocks with applause as Zyuganov denounces the upheavals that have destroyed the old-style Soviet system, and he blasts the West for "forcing ideas, concepts and changes on our country that will never bear good fruit."

But on a day when Zyuganov addresses a meeting of the American Chamber of Commerce in a posh Moscow hotel, he faces the lights and cameras in the guise of an urbane social democrat who is at ease with concepts like a mixed economy and foreign investment. "If our people come to power," he assures the assembled capitalists, "you can look into the future with confidence."

So which is the real Zyuganov? It is a pressing question, since the Communist Party so thoroughly vanquished its rivals in parliamentary elections last month. Voters cast two ballots, one for a party and one for a candidate in their local districts. Appealing to impoverished pensioners and others for whom reform has failed, the Communists took 22% of the party-preference vote; Vladimir Zhirinovsky's ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party came in a surprising second, with only 11%, about half its 1993 level. Altogether, the Communists were allocated 157 of the Duma's 450 seats; Our Home Is Russia, the party supporting President Boris Yeltsin, forms the next largest bloc, with only 55 seats. His Duma success in hand, Zyuganov is bent on winning the presidency next June, either for himself or for a popular anti-reform Communist candidate. If he succeeds, the current effort to reform and modernize Russia could be choked off in the grip of reimposed central control. The fabric of Russian society and East-West relations would suffer devastating damage.

Zyuganov may campaign from both sides of his mouth, but his critics think they know exactly who he is. Yegor Gaidar, a reformist rival, argues that while the former communist parties of eastern Europe are moving toward social democracy, the Russian party "is evolving toward national socialism." Otto Latsis, a Moscow political commentator, says Zyuganov heads "the worst part of the old party apparat, the most reactionary fringe." In Washington, State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns, a Russian expert, says Zyuganov's Communists are "the inheritors of the most brutal system this century has known, except for the Nazis. We have nothing in common with these guys."

Zyuganov is a stolid apparatchik, and before last month's balloting, he said he was uncertain whether it would be better for him to run for President or to help elect an antireform leader who had better name recognition and more appeal across party lines. Last week one such candidate put his name forward: Alexander Lebed, a war hero and retired general. Lebed, who is immensely popular with the public and has a strong nationalist voice, said he would run in June and that he hoped to do so in cooperation with the Communists. Party leaders seemed irritated by the announcement but said they would talk it over with the general, who was elected to the Duma last month despite his party's dismal showing. If Lebed and the Communists combined forces, the presidency would be well within their grasp.

Only someone with particular tenacity would remain a communist in Russia throughout the 1990s and then manage to maneuver the party back to the brink of power. The son of village schoolteachers in southwestern Russia, Zyuganov began his career as a full-time party worker in 1967. He was serving as a deputy chief of the ideology department of the Soviet Central Committee in 1990 when he helped found a separate Russian Communist Party. It was created to oppose the reformist course of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, led by Mikhail Gorbachev. Zyuganov proudly says he served as "a leading ideologist" in the failed 1991 communist putsch against Gorbachev.

Communist parties were banned in 1991, so Zyuganov joined several nationalist organizations and participated in a drive against Yeltsin, the President of Russia. When the ban was lifted in 1992, Zyuganov re-created his party and became chairman of its Central Committee, the post he still holds. He was an early supporter of the 1993 coup against Yeltsin, although he eventually disavowed violence. Today he leads a party of more than 500,000 members and a political machine with branches in every region of Russia.

Zyuganov says the party "recognizes a mixed economy, has renounced atheism and is ready for serious political dialogue to persuade voters." That certainly does not sound like Marxist-Leninism. But there is more. The party's official program looks back longingly to Yuri Andropov, a former kgb chief and Soviet party head from 1982 to 1984, crediting him somehow with establishing "freedom of speech and freedom of political associations." As for Stalin's purges and Gulag and the corruption of the Brezhnev era, they were "mistakes" to be avoided in the future, Zyuganov says.

The party opposes privatization, but Zyuganov stops short of saying he would renationalize every industry; he does not want to scare away foreign investors. He would rebuild the shattered armed forces, and perhaps most ambitiously, he wants to re-create the Soviet Union or "a great Rus-sian state" of its former republics. Of course, he says, this must be done peacefully, in a "consistent, step-by-step voluntary way, on the basis of elections, referendums and international treaties." Meanwhile, he says, the West must not expand nato by taking in former Warsaw Pact members.

Last week Yeltsin returned to work at the Kremlin, strolling around its snowy courtyards in his first public appearance since a heart ailment felled him two months ago. In a staged event he chatted jovially with Russian tourists and journalists and told them he would not allow the Communists to end his reform program.

But maybe not. The results last month suggest that in the first round of voting for President in June, one of the two winners will be the Communist Party candidate, whether it is Zyuganov or someone else he decides to put forward. But who will be the other contender in the runoff? Unless the government and the splintered reform forces manage to unite in support of a single candidate, the other entry might not be Yeltsin or any other reformer. It could be the man whose party was the second favorite among Russian voters last month: Zhirinovsky.

--Reported by Tamala M. Edwards/Washington and John Kohan and Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow

With reporting by TAMALA M. EDWARDS/WASHINGTON AND JOHN KOHAN AND YURI ZARAKHOVICH/MOSCOW