THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, June 15, 1996 TAG: 9606150016
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: By DAVE ADDIS
LENGTH: 77 lines
Two years ago, I met Gennadiy Zyuganov, chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Russia, in a cramped room in The Jefferson Hotel in Richmond.
His rumpled laundry from the day before was lying in a heap on the floor, and the remnants of his breakfast were congealing in dishes on a side table. He was on the phone, working a call-in interview with Radio Liberty, whose audience can be measured by the teaspoon.
I recall thinking, ``So this is how far the mighty Reds have fallen. The heir to Marx and Lenin is doing phoners from a hotel room in Richmond, Va.''
There's something about interviewing a man with his day-old underwear lying between you that makes him seem anything but threatening. And Zyuganov, who had emerged from obscurity and seemed destined to return there, was anything but threatening.
He seemed absurdly far from where he stands today, within a few points in the polls of kicking Boris Yeltsin out of the Kremlin. Back then, when experts tried to guess who might succeed Yeltsin, the name Zyuganov never surfaced. Half a dozen others were far better placed, everyone believed, than this Communist Party drudge.
I'd just returned to the States from six months in Moscow, where I'd worked as a writer and editor for a Russian newspaper. I had attended Red Square rallies hosted by the remnants of the Communist Party. Their bullhorn rhetoric and menacing hammer-and-sickle flags were an inviting backdrop for the Western television networks, but the faithful, when you saw them up close, had a shabby and tired air about them. They seemed old, and lost.
So did Zyuganov, as he wrapped up his radio interview and began chatting with me through an interpreter. The night before, he was dropped from the ``Larry King Live'' show because the host spent too much time prattling on about startling new details in the sinking of the Lusitania.
If that snub bothered Zyuganov, he didn't let it show. He was beefy and garrulous and almost kindly as he did with me what he has done with journalists ever since: insist that his is a reformed Communist Party that will work hand-in-glove with the West, that the days of terror are over, that his people simply believe stronger government controls and slower reforms will ease Russia's entry into a free-market democracy.
It's embarrassing now to reread the report from that interview: the breezy manner with which I described him as a dinosaur; my tweaking him about how all his followers are aged and infirm. (The average age of a Communist Party member in Russia today is 57; that is just about exactly the life expectancy of the average Russian male.)
He admitted that was true, but he offered a polite lecture on how those who count him out too readily might learn a thing or two in the months to come.
As I rose to leave he insisted that a photographer shoot a picture of us together. ``If I become president,'' he said, ``it will be a valuable remembrance.'' Later, the photographer and I laughed about that. He never bothered to print the picture. Zyuganov. What a loser.
I should have known better. Six months in Moscow isn't enough time to learn all there is to know about the Russian psyche, but it is enough to learn that Russians have a peculiar view of when they're beaten and when they aren't. They proved that at Leningrad and Stalingrad. They proved it twice at Sevastopol.
And Zyuganov proved it again when he brought the most discredited political movement in history to the brink of victory in less than two years.
A lot of dynamics are pushing the Communists back toward power: The horrific street-level reality of the Russian economy. The erratic blundering of Boris Yeltsin. A long history of clinging, psychologically, to strong and powerful leaders. And nostalgia for the days of 50-kopeck bread and 3-ruble vodka.
Gennadiy Zyuganov may win the presidency, and he may not. We probably won't know until a second round of voting in July. But I looked up Bill Kelley, the photographer, the other day and asked him to dig through his negatives and make a print of that picture.
Zyuganov might be right: It could be a valuable remembrance - not of a politician, but of the need to exercise caution when trying to read the collective mind of the Russian nation. MEMO: Dave Addis is a Virginian-Pilot staff writer. ILLUSTRATION: GENNADIY ZYUGANOV by CNB