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By Renfrey Clarke MOSCOW — When voters in the city of Volgograd went to the polls on October 1 to elect a new local legislature, supporters of the Russian government were not expecting much comfort. Nevertheless, the results shocked them. Of 24 seats, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) won 22. Official spokespeople made haste to reassure Russia's "democrats". Volgograd was said to be unrepresentative of Russia as a whole. "One could only have expected such an outcome in a city ... where there is almost no intelligentsia, but many underpaid plant workers", the deputy head of President Boris Yeltsin's analytical centre was quoted as saying. But the truth is that scores of millions of Russians live in provincial centres much like Volgograd, where intellectual distractions are few and the local economy is near collapse. The Communists did not, in fact, win over the bulk of the Volgograd electorate. Participation in the local poll was only 39%, and although the KPRF far outstripped its rivals, only about 15% of the votes went to Communist candidates. Nevertheless, the outcome reinforced the lesson that of the organised forces in Russian politics, the KPRF is now the strongest. The Communists' win in Volgograd added to a train of doleful election reports carried during the past year by right-wing Russian newspapers. Late in 1994 local and regional elections there were victories for Communists and their allies in Voronezh city and province, Ivanovo Province, and the Chuvash Republic. In the city of Orel in central European Russia early this year, the KPRF won 10 of 11 seats up for election. In polls in Vladimir Province north-east of Moscow in March, the communists shocked government supporters by winning 12 of 20 seats. Unlike such "red belt" leftist strongholds as Voronezh and Orel, Vladimir had been counted as sympathetic to "reform". The KPRF and left-wing allies also won majorities in regional legislatures in the republic of Bashkortostan in the Urals, and in Kamchatka Province in the Far East. Partly in order to block further victories by the provincial left, Yeltsin on September 17 issued a decree "recommending" that local legislatures put off new elections until 1996, and regional legislatures until 1997. With little chance of being re-elected, many deputies to these bodies have leapt at the invitation to perpetuate themselves in office. Some regional parliaments are now reported to have postponed elections by close to two years. The relatively strong showing by the KPRF in Volgograd has focused additional attention on the Communists' prospects in the December 17 elections for the State Duma, the lower house of the federal parliament. In almost all recent surveys, the KPRF with 9 or 10% of voter preferences has risen above the ruck of lesser parties and blocs, including those aligned with the government. Opinion polls usually under-report the communists' strong support in small towns and villages; accordingly, the KPRF has been considered certain to outstrip the 12.3% it recorded in the December 1993 elections, and to emerge with the largest single bloc of deputies elected on the basis of all-Russian party lists. Now, the result in Volgograd suggests that the KPRF's gains in December may be even greater than anticipated. When Yeltsin had his legal experts draft a new constitution late in 1993, he insisted that the voting for the 50% of Duma deputies to be elected from territorial constituencies should be on a first-past-the-post basis. The president's gamble was that his supporters, even if not especially numerous, would form the largest bloc of voters in most districts. But the Volgograd experience indicates that if the vote-counting in December is even reasonably honest, large numbers of the deputies sent to Moscow from the silent factories and ruined farms of provincial Russia will be Communists or their allies. To maximise the chances of the left in provincial areas, the KPRF, early in September, concluded a deal with the Agrarian Party, which has its base among rural workers and the managers of former state and collective farms. Under this agreement, the two parties will refrain from running against one another in 80 of the 225 territorial electorates. Informed guesses put the combined KPRF and Agrarian Party vote in December at between 30-35% of the total. To form a consistent majority in the Duma, KPRF leaders are hoping to strike deals with a series of opposition centrist and nationalist-populist groups. The most important of the latter is the Congress of Russian Communities (KRO). With his outrageously "presidential" constitution, Yeltsin, in strict legal terms, would have little to fear even if opposition forces were to hold two-thirds of the votes in the Duma. But in political terms the picture for him is more sombre. A coherent opposition majority in the Duma, led by a well-organised KPRF caucus and with the legitimacy of having been recently elected, could present the president with challenges more serious than he has had to confront in years. In particular, a confident and vocal parliamentary opposition could end any chance Yeltsin might retain of winning the presidential election due for June 1996. This may well have helped convince the president to urge the postponement of elections for local and regional legislatures. With numerous polls already called off, postponing the presidential elections — no doubt after the tactics of 1993 had been repeated, and a string of constitutional crises had been provoked — would be a less repellent toad for public opinion to swallow. While pro-government ideologues in Russia are dismayed by the thought of a Communist-dominated parliament, they are not panicking. There is even an inclination among right-wing analysts to view KPRF hegemony over an expanded opposition as the least unsatisfactory of the outcomes likely to emerge from the political struggles of the next few months. This view becomes less puzzling when the nature of the KPRF leaders is taken into account. With a claimed membership of 600,000 and cells in almost every town and village of Russia, the KPRF includes large numbers of people involved directly in production and anxious to defend workers' rights and interests. The party leadership responds to pressures from these layers with pronouncements reflecting various long-time positions of Russian Marxism. For example, KPRF leader Gennady Zyuganov declared in September at a meeting in the city of Irkutsk: "I am absolutely convinced that the public, collective form of property is the most effective in Russia." The party's electoral program includes calls for the privatisation of industry to be halted; for state price controls on basic goods to be reimposed; for guaranteed jobs and housing; and for restoring the constitutional right to free health care and education. It is curious, however, to observe how little faith Zyuganov and other KPRF leaders have that championing demands like these is the way to win votes. Strangely for communists, the KPRF leaders assume that the key to increasing their electoral impact lies not in educating, mobilising and inspiring workers — who make up the great majority of Russia's voting population — but in trying to annex political territory far to the right of the labour movement. During July, the Moscow daily Izvestiya remarked that Zyuganov in his speeches was making "endless references to pravoslavie [Russian religious orthodoxy] and national might". Political scientist Sergei Markov of the US-funded Carnegie Centre noted during August: "The KPRF, and especially ... Zyuganov can only be considered left-wing in a very conditional sense, because most of the party's postulates and programmatic priorities are traditionally right-wing rather than leftist." When Zyuganov has not been championing the values of patriarchalist absolutism, he has devoted himself to seeking political alliances of a type that would inevitably require the sacrifice of the pro-worker elements of the KPRF's program. The party's projections include a call for the formation of a "government of national salvation" in which the Congress of Russian Communities would clearly be a major participant. The KRO's central organisational figure, Yuri Skokov, headed Yeltsin's powerful Security Council during much of the initial phase of "reform", and the group's most saleable leader, the charismatic General Alexander Lebed, at one point mortified his sympathisers by expressing admiration for former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. While it may make sense at times for leftists in the Russian parliament to form temporary blocs with right-wing opponents of the government, pretending that people like Skokov and Lebed are in themselves anything but repugnant can only aid the decay and demobilisation of the working-class political forces that are central to the left's survival. With a stake in the political self-destruction of the working class, Yeltsin is now said to be considering seriously whether his best chance of holding on to the presidency lies in letting the KPRF leadership and its strange allies do their worst. According to the Moscow daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta on October 11, the following scenario is now popular in the Kremlin: "After the opposition victory in the elections, the 'left Duma', with the consent of the president, forms a 'government of the left'. Naturally, the Central Bank, the Prosecutor's Office, and the 'power ministries' [that is, defence, interior and security] remain under the president's watchful control. "The results of the actions by the government of 'national accord' ... are entirely predictable. The shift to the left therefore comes to an end, and on the principle of the 'lesser evil', the majority of Russians again give their votes to the president."