The Party Is Over

By JAMES O. JACKSON

At No. 4 Staraya Ploshchad, strollers stare in wonder at the blank windows and locked doors of the vast gray building that is the headquarters of the vanishing Soviet Communist Party. Laughter and cheers erupt as a 5-year-old boy, encouraged by his father, urinates on the wall. A graffitist has scrawled DOSHLI (We've come this far) -- the slogan of Soviet soldiers fighting to victory over Germany in World War II.

That building until last week was the mighty, monolithic power center of a party that had run the country for more than 70 years using a combination of ruthless terror and plodding bureaucracy. Like party offices all across the country, it was shut down after the failure of the attempted coup, its assets frozen and its employees out on the street. Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as its leader and the national parliament suspended its activities.

"Within an hour of the presidential order there was no one to talk to anymore," said Vladimir Gubarev, an editor at Pravda, which, like all other party newspapers, was suspended on Aug. 23 and failed to appear for the first time since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. "There is no one in the Central Committee Secretariat. No one in the Politburo. They all fled like mice."

The disappearance of the party and its minions was all the more stunning because it had been so ubiquitous in Soviet life. Its 300,000 apparatchiks, backed by a party-cell structure embracing 15 million rank-and-file members, supervised everything from kindergartens to strategic nuclear rocket forces. Advancement to the upper levels of politics, industry, army and intellectual life was virtually impossible without party membership. The party owned 5,254 administrative buildings, 3,583 newspapers and 23 resorts and sanatoriums. Its cash assets last week were put at about 4.5 billion rubles. But as last week demonstrated, there was a hollowness behind the bland facade of power. Eaten away by corruption, nepotism, privilege and old age, the party could not stand up to the storm of glasnost and the hammering of perestroika.

% The coup's failure may have been due mainly to the leaders' lack of belief in the future of a party they, probably better than anybody else, knew was an empty fraud. In the months preceding the coup and collapse there were signs that top party bosses, sensing the end was near, had begun looting the treasury. The newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported a series of shady real estate deals involving top party officials and attempts to convert soft ruble accounts into hard currency. Just before the party lost control of the Moscow City Council, for example, the Communist chairman, Valeri Saikin, transferred 33 city buildings to the party free of charge. Top party leaders bought their palatial government-owned country houses for ludicrously low prices. Former Politburo member Alexandra Biryukova reportedly paid only 19,000 rubles for her dacha west of Moscow, although its real value was assessed at 754,000 rubles. Communists even turned to capitalists in an effort to conceal or divert their cash. "The Central Committee and other party organizations have been investing finances in shareholding companies, joint ventures, commercial banks and other commercial structures of various kinds," according to an announcement by the Soviet State bank, which last week froze all party funds. The bank itself may have been involved. The Russian Information Agency reported that chairman Victor Gerashchenko, who originally was fired last week for supporting the coup but then was reinstated, asked a U.S.-based firm to convert 500 million party rubles into dollars. The company refused.

There were other signs of runaway corruption. The party had a colossal 1991 deficit of 1 billion rubles on a budget of 2.5 billion rubles. One party source charged that a 500 million-ruble fund for the children of Chernobyl was diverted by local party committees to their own use.

The extent of the corruption may have been what drove the party's top financial officer, Nikolai Kruchina, to leap to his death on Aug. 26 from a balcony on the seventh floor of -- appropriately -- a luxury Moscow apartment building set aside for top party officials. As the Central Committee's general affairs officer, Kruchina had been in charge of the party's billions and would have known of irregularities, if not actually been involved in them. Valentin Stepankov, chief prosecutor of the Russian Federation, said officials interviewed Kruchina about party financial affairs shortly before his death. "He seemed to have reason to be nervous," said Stepankov.

But the prosecutor and others were concerned that some of the last-minute money dealings might be an attempt to bankroll an illegal underground party of anti-reform, communist hard-liners, something like the small but disciplined Bolshevik party that Lenin led to power in the October Revolution of 1917. "We do not have any valid information to that effect yet," Stepankov said. "But I have instructed my investigators to be on special alert for any documents on financial dealings and put them aside for special investigation."

Even if it does not go underground, eliminating communist influence from the country may not be as simple as confiscating buildings and freezing bank accounts. Pravda's Gubarev estimates that two-thirds of the country's industrial and administrative infrastructure is run by party members accustomed to its vertical command structure. "It will take decades to create a new management system," he said. On the other hand, most of them are well- educated professional executives who joined the party more out of expediency than conviction. Freed from the constraints of a hidebound communist system, the most competent among them could be expected to quit the party and become effective administrators in a new market-oriented economic order.

While it is unlikely that the party will ever regain its old dominance, it is not yet clear what will replace it. A spectrum of new groups appeared in recent weeks within the party, ranging from neo-Stalinist Nina Andreyeva's Bolshevik Platform in Leningrad to the Democratic Reform Movement created by former Gorbachev allies Eduard Shevardnadze and Alexander Yakovlev. There is also Russian Vice President Alexander Rutskoi's Democratic Party of Russian Communists, and a group of liberal academics from within the old party leadership announced plans to form a "new party of leftist forces." There is even a fledgling core of conservative, market-oriented parties in the West European tradition whose handful of members tend to group around the Democratic Russian Movement and the Democratic Reform Movement. But most of the emerging "noncommunist" politicians -- Yeltsin, Yakovlev, Shevardnadze -- are less than a year away from being dues-paying Communists themselves. After seven decades of one-party rule, the Soviet Union seems to be heading into an era not of multiparty politics but of nonparty politics, where political personalities rather than ideological positions will matter most to voters struggling to learn basic democracy.

With reporting by John Kohan and Yuri Zarakhovich/Moscow