Reds Routed or Red Revanche?

The power of the once-mighty Communists is slowly fading away. The Communists' support in the polls is still at 30 percent, but thanks to clever maneuvering by the Kremlin, they have lost all chairmanships in the State Duma. Even more important, Communist Gennady Seleznyov, speaker of the Duma and one of the most prominent politicians in Russia, refused to comply with party discipline, and the Communist leadership was forced to expel him. Sensing an impending decline in the Communists' fortunes, a couple of local governors who had won on the party ticket announced they were deserting the party, and more are likely to follow.

This sounds like wonderful news to those, including myself, who hated the oppressive Soviet Communist regime and thought of Boris Yeltsin's victory over the party in 1991 as the most blissful moment in 20th century Russian history. But today I'm not rejoicing.

Yeltsin regarded ridding Russia of the Communist danger as his historic mission. He dropped the Communist state symbols: the anthem, the flag, the emblem. He yearned to rebury Lenin and, up until his last day in office, maintained a passionate desire to ban the Communist Party. There was not a single day in his years as president when he didn't have to repel vehement Communist opposition.

Vladimir Putin, anointed president by Yeltsin, did not inherit this sense of mission from his predecessor. The Kremlin's recent effort to reduce the political weight of the Communists is purely situational tactics. The Kremlin regards political parties as mere voting numbers, and reshapes them as it sees fit.

Two and a half years ago, as the hastily mustered pro-Putin Unity party entered the Duma with limited voting strength, the Kremlin ordered it to side with the Communists, thus alienating the pro-reform liberals and discarding Yeltsin's anti-Communist legacy. Over the past year the Kremlin has reshuffled the political parties and ensured a new, favorable majority in the Duma.

So for a few months now, the Kremlin has pursued an anti-Communist campaign. But in doing so it has sent hardly any message to the public as to what is so bad about the Communists -- except that their Duma faction would not support the Kremlin's legislative initiatives. The Communists' responsibility for the tragic history of 20th century Russia is not an issue. Nor are they held accountable for the Soviet Union's economic collapse or for the terrible damage the years of terror inflicted upon the national identity.

Putin himself appears to be uncertain about his attitude toward the Soviet past. He has vaguely blamed the country's current economic disaster on "the previous decades," which may be interpreted as a hint at the damaging effects of the Communist economy. But he has barely said it point-blank. On the other hand, he thinks nothing of visiting the get-togethers of KGB veterans, the very tool of the Communist Party dictatorship. He brought back Stalin's national anthem and is proud of it. In his public news conference June 24 he emphasized this is where he breaks with Yeltsin's legacy.

During his latest visit to Poland, Putin paid homage to Polish workers shot by the pro-Soviet Polish government, but he did it only as a matter of diplomatic courtesy. He did not make a public statement, let alone an appearance, on the 40th anniversary of the killing of Soviet workers in Novocherkassk this spring. Nor has he ever visited any of the sites of Stalin's mass executions, at least two of which lie abandoned within a half-hour's drive from Moscow.

Putin's defenders say pragmatism is what counts: Once he has a solid pro-Kremlin majority in the Duma, Putin can get his reform legislation approved, and as the country reforms economically, everything else will fall into place. This is not completely convincing, as Putin's loyal elite includes both reform-minded liberals and KGB-mold hard-liners. Putin's mixed signals encourage both factions to act on what they regard as Putin's backing, thus pulling Russia in different directions.

Moreover, because of Putin's uncertain attitude toward the Soviet past, the ugliest practices of the old system have once again reared their head. In a recent example, a Rostov-on-Don court used the expertise of one of the most notorious institutions of the Soviet police regime, forensic psychiatry, in the trial of Colonel Yury Budanov, who kidnapped and killed a Chechen girl.

Because the evidence was overwhelming and the military establishment sought to protect one of its own, the colonel claimed temporary insanity. To certify his mental incapacity, Budanov's military defenders resorted to the services of the same psychiatric "experts" who in the 1970s declared Soviet dissidents mentally ill and helped the Communist regime lock them up in asylums indefinitely. Still, there are grounds to believe that somebody important in the Kremlin is displeased about the resuscitation of relics of the totalitarian past. At the end of Budanov's trial, which has lasted for a year and a half, the judge postponed the sentencing and ordered a new, and third, psychiatric evaluation.

Masha Lipman, deputy editor of Yezhenedelny Zhurnal, contributed this comment to The Washington Post.