Last of The Red-Hot Believers

By Michael Riley

The comrade's room reeks of the past. Above the desk hangs a portrait of Lenin, a treasured gift from Leonid Brezhnev. On another wall is a tapestry of Karl Marx, a present from fallen East German leader Erich Honecker. Elsewhere sit a replica of Lenin's telephone; a wood sculpture from Fidel Castro; and busts of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Gus Hall, aging chairman of the Communist Party U.S.A., calls his New York City office a "museum of history." But among all these historic mementos, Hall is, unwittingly, the prime exhibit.

The 80-year-old party patriarch is one of the world's last communist stalwarts, an ideological dinosaur rapidly headed for extinction. But you'd never know it to talk to him. Let Mikhail Gorbachev resign as party boss, and let the roll of party defectors grow faster than a meat line in Moscow. Gus Hall still insists that communism is not dead, that socialism is as inevitable as ever, that capitalism will be destroyed. "The problem is not with socialism. The problem is with human error, mistakes of leadership," argues Hall, groping to explain the earthquake in the Soviet Union. "The system of socialism is still the only real, basic solution to the problems of capitalism."

The past two years -- and not just the past two weeks -- have put Hall's beliefs to the test. The Iron Curtain opened, and the Berlin Wall toppled. Eastern Europe gained its freedom, and the Germanys united. Capitalists started selling Big Macs in Pushkin Square. Now come the failed coup, the dismantling of the Soviet Communist Party and the race toward independence and a market economy. While conceding that these events mark a "serious detour," Hall finds solace in this quote: "If current events are negative, then look long range."

Make that long, long, long range. Hall may be the only person who is sanguine about Marxism's future. But that's no mystery to anyone who knows the jovial, square-jawed Minnesotan, whose deliberate step and stolid bearing (6 ft., 210 lbs.) evoke his earlier days as a lumberjack and steelworker. He's a rough-hewn American version of the Soviet bear, who would look equally at home in overcoat and shapka on the Kremlin reviewing stand with Brezhnev (his favorite Soviet) or in a gimmie-cap at a Fourth of July picnic in Des Moines. He mixes an earthy Midwest charm with a trace of Finnish ancestry ("yahs" sprinkle his speech), which makes it difficult to fathom his lingering bad-guy notoriety. But behind the affable grin lie eyes cold and calculating. Perhaps it is this paradox -- the genial great-grandfather and steely communist chieftain rolled into one -- that has made him one of the longest-sitting leaders of a national Communist Party.

Hall learned about the coup while at a family reunion in Minnesota, and then hurried back to New York. Though he calls the action unconstitutional, Hall evinces some sympathy for its plotters. "It was an attempt to deal with real problems, but in a wrong way," he explains. He dislikes Boris Yeltsin ("Now I think he becomes the biggest danger") as well as Mikhail Gorbachev (an "opportunist" who "tends to sit on both sides of the fence"). A hard- liner at heart, Hall blasts both men for leading the Soviet Union down the capitalist road. Once capitalism's failures emerge, he predicts, the Soviets will scurry back to socialism. No wonder critics have dubbed him the "Norman Vincent Peale of the left."

The coup attempt sparked a flash of excitement at party headquarters, which is located across the street from the Chelsea Hotel in downtown Manhattan. About 8:30 a.m. every workday, Hall's chauffeur-driven Oldsmobile (he buys American and uses a cellular phone) pulls up to the curb in front of the eight-story brownstone, where staff members, still harboring paranoia left over from the days when the FBI tapped their lines and read their mail, answer the phone "4994" and dispatch envelopes without the party's name. Once in the building, Hall, a four-time presidential candidate, climbs into a creaky elevator for the slow ride to the top floor and its glass cases of dusty party memorabilia. In his office, he settles into a black recliner behind his desk, on which rests a copy of the People's Weekly World and an American Express appointment calendar.

Since before he started shaving, Hall, whose parents were charter members of the Communist Party U.S.A., has been steeped in the revolution. Born Arvo Kusta Halberg, son of a carpenter in Minnesota's iron range, he went to work after the eighth grade as a lumberjack to help support his family. Long hours in the deep woods at a dollar a day educated him. "Working in lumber camps in those days," he recalls, "would make a communist out of anybody." He joined the party in 1927 and spent several years in the early 1930s at Moscow's Marx- Engels-Lenin Institute. When he returned, the brash youngster started organizing workers and getting in trouble. In the Little Steel Strike in Warren, Ohio, authorities charged him with using explosives, and in Minneapolis they arrested him for inciting a riot. In 1940 he was convicted of fraud and forgery in an election scandal and spent 90 days in jail.

In 1948 Hall and 11 other communists were indicted under the Smith Act on charges of advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. He jumped bail and fled to Mexico, was captured in a border motel, and spent several years in a maximum security cell at Leavenworth, right beside Machine Gun Kelly. Such exploits built a mythic aura around Hall, who, two years after his release in 1957, became general secretary of a party in turmoil. Gone were the halcyon days of 1932 when a communist candidate for President garnered 102,000 votes. Between McCarthy's witch-hunts and Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 denunciation of Stalin, the party was hemorrhaging.

Fewer than 10,000 party members remain (though Hall claims 15,000), and some are fomenting revolt from within. They blast Hall's Stalinesque grip on the party and push for more openness and democratization. Party members' letters, filled with criticism about Hall and his hierarchy, crisscross the country. % "There's a revolt brewing, and there are going to be some walls falling down," predicts party member Conn Hallinan. "Gus has to go. I don't care if the man shows up in love beads and says, 'Everybody do your own thing'; he'd still have to go." Dorothy Healey, a longtime foe who left the party in 1973 but still has pipelines into it, agrees. "It's like that old Lord Acton saying: 'Power corrupts,' " says Healey. "It's very sad because it's not just the Communist Party but the left that has to come to terms with a new reality." Says Hall defensively: "I've always said we'd be a dead party if we didn't have differences."

While Hall's resolute belief in Marxism restricts his vision, it helps explain his ability to retain power. So, too, does his aw-shucks Americanism. He is a smart, if not brilliant, fellow who connects with the common man. Even though he named his golden retriever Yuri (after Andropov), Hall has cultural tastes that are all-American. He guffaws at the hit TV show America's Funniest Home Videos. He reads the Wall Street Journal and Business Week, along with the African Communist. And he raises few complaints from his Yonkers neighbors. (In the 1960s, when he started a huge excavation, neighbors wondered whether Hall knew about an impending Soviet nuclear attack. But it turned out he was digging a garage, not a bomb shelter.)

His wild past is hard to reconcile with a man who paints primitive pictures of woodpeckers for kids, collects art and grows organic vegetables at his son's house on Long Island. During the summer, Hall frequently arrives at the office, his car trunk laden with squash, lettuce, eggplant and potatoes. Last weekend he fought the stress of world events by clearing from the yard trees downed by Hurricane Bob. Elizabeth, his wife of 56 years, applauds him as a good family man. Indeed, how can anyone think ill of Hall when he beams so about cooking pancakes for his four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, or shares his secret for making tasty beef stew. (It's the apples.)

Is anybody still afraid of Gus Hall? Well, the FBI keeps tabs on him. "This is sort of the last chapter of a long scenario," says Pat Watson, FBI deputy assistant director. But even the feds know the party is over. There's plenty of evidence. The party daily newspaper has become a weekly. Its cable TV show, People Before Profits, has been suspended. Membership has dropped about 25% in the past year.

This last communist, forlorn and nearly forgotten, is more lonely than loathsome. His glory days, when he battled the "old, big lie" that communists were hiding everywhere, hatching plots to overthrow the government, are gone. Today what Hall calls the "new, big lie" -- that the red menace is ready for burial -- is true. Hall, years ago, thought socialism was just around the corner. "But when you get older," he says with customary dexterity, "you have to say there is more than one corner." The only thing lurking around the next corner, however, is the dustheap of history.