Once a Loyal Party Soldier, Zyuganov Vies to Lead Russia
By David Hoffman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 2, 1996; Page A01
When Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia in August
1968 to crush the then-Communist government's reform
movement, Gennady Zyuganov was fascinated. The future
leader of the Russian Communist Party was a promising
young party functionary and mathematics tutor in this
Russian province, far from the action, and Zyuganov
sought out first-hand stories from returning soldiers.
"He would try to catch every word," recalled his friend,
Vladimir Selyutin, who, along with Zyuganov, was in the
Komsomol, or Young Communist League. "As soon as he
heard someone was drafted and had gone there, as soon
as someone came back from there, he would invite them
for tea."
The crushing of the "Prague Spring" was a landmark event
in the history of communism; it prompted a crisis of
conscience for party members around the Soviet Bloc,
including the young Mikhail Gorbachev. But Zyuganov
expressed no misgivings or curiosity about whether the
invasion was right, Selyutin recalled. "I have no doubt he
didn't have any open criticism," he said. "He believed it
was the right thing to do. We didn't have radios to listen to
Western broadcasts. We didn't even think it was right to
listen to other voices."
Zyuganov's reaction to the invasion is typical of the early
life and times of the man who now is challenging President
Boris Yeltsin to lead post-Soviet Russia. An examination
of Zyuganov's books and other writings has shown that in
recent years he was a die-hard opponent of free-market
and democratic reforms who blended communism and
nationalism into a strident political creed. A look at his
formative years, the subject of this article, shows that
Zyuganov was a loyal and unquestioning foot soldier in the
Soviet Communist Party, despite events that caused
others to have doubts.
Zyuganov strove to succeed in the one-party state, and he
did so by utter devotion to the system. Growing up in the
post-World War II Soviet Union, the son of village
schoolteachers, Zyuganov became a typical Communist
Party man, part of a vast network of party officials known
as the apparat. He was not known for deep thinking, but
was a likable athlete with a talent for volleyball. For a
quarter-century, the party was the only employer he had:
from the time he left his teaching job at the Orel
Pedagogical Institute in the 1960s until the party went out
of business in 1991.
The Communist Party rewarded its own workers with
special food rations, better medical care, cars and dachas,
and Zyuganov shared in these perks of the elite.
The party also suppressed those who disagreed with it,
and Zyuganov did his part: He once harassed a colleague
for being too critical of Joseph Stalin and later for
possessing a Bible.
"He was a mediocre functionary who wasn't different from
others, following exactly the orders from others," recalled
Boris Popov, a democratic activist who has known
Zyuganov since they were classmates at the Orel teachers'
college. "As he was so diligent, he was rewarded for this
by career advancement."
Zyuganov has said the party had the "world's best ideas of
humanism, fraternity and justice." And yet his career
encompassed the "years of stagnation" under Leonid
Brezhnev, when the Soviet system was becoming
increasingly sclerotic, the leadership isolated and aging.
Since party officials remained in their posts longer and
longer, there was little impulse for change. Later, the most
creative and energetic party officials in the Gorbachev
years went on to work in the new Russian capitalism, but
not Zyuganov.
"Here we have the remains of the apparat," said Otto
Latsis, an analyst for the pro-reform newspaper Izvestia,
who recalled that the propagandists in the local party
organizations usually had no administrative experience or
duties. "That's where Zyuganov was for 20 years in the
apparat," he said. "He doesn't know any practical thing.
Judging by what they write and say, if they win, they won't
know what to do with power."
A Village Youth
The Great Patriotic War, as World War II is still known
here, cast a long shadow over the fertile, black-earth
region where Zyuganov was born in June 1944. His tiny
village, Mymrino, was occupied by the Nazis. The war's
aftermath left many sons without fathers, and the fields
chock-full of unexploded mines, which often went off
during plowing season. Zyuganov's father, a teacher, lost
part of a leg in the fighting, and wore a high black leather
boot.
Mymrino today is not much changed from the days of
Zyuganov's youth. The red-brown wooden house where
he grew up, No. 18, still stands by a rutted dirt road
where villagers fetch water from a well. Zyuganov's father
was a beekeeper. They had a pig, chickens, rabbits, an
orchard and a small potato field. Most people worked at
"Red October," the local collective farm.
His mother was also his grade school teacher, "very
strict," he recalled in an interview with the newspaper Top
Secret this year. "I had to learn pages of textbooks by
heart," he said. "She got furious when I once called her
`Mom' in class."
The village was poor. Alexander Prokhanov, editor of the
ultranationalist newspaper Zavtra, said Zyuganov was
shaped by these rural roots. "There are no space plants,
no airports, nothing that we associate with the
technological era in the Orel region," he said. "But there
are many wheat fields, Russian folklore songs and great
Russian culture. This is the background of the Russian
province -- poor in material things, rich in spiritual things
-- and this is the basis of Zyuganov's personality."
Today, the village of Mymrino is also a metaphor for the
ruined lives and humiliation that are at the core of support
for Zyuganov and the resurgent Communists. The village
store is well-stocked with seven varieties of vodka and
not much else. Nicholai Solodukhin, 39, a driver for the
collective farm, said he has no work because the farm has
no money for gasoline. Solodukhin, who lives in the house
where Zyuganov grew up, said: "I was born under
communism. I woke up and went to work. Now I wake
up and don't know what to do."
The impact of the war lingers in Zyuganov's campaign
rhetoric. He remembers the village as a "women's
kingdom" because so many men were killed in the war.
He recalls the devastation of Orel, the provincial capital,
and that students built a monument to those from the
region who died fighting the Nazis.
But Zyuganov never mentions Stalin's Great Terror, the
mass arrests, executions and the vast chain of prison
camps in which millions died. In the Orel region, the toll
was high, claiming more than 20,000 lives. At one site in
Orel are buried 423 victims who were executed, mostly
farmers and 33 priests.
In the years after Stalin's death, the terror was denounced
by Nikita Khrushchev, and the camps became a topic of
discussion. But Zyuganov's friend Selyutin recalls they did
not dwell on it. "I never met a single person who returned
from the camps," Selyutin said. "There was no discussion.
We weren't interested in that."
After only a year at the college, Zyuganov was drafted
into a special army unit for nuclear and chemical weapons
reconnaissance. He participated in the cleanup of a
nuclear accident in Chelyabinsk that was covered up by
Soviet authorities.
"Out of three years, I spent one wearing a gas mask and a
rubber suit," Zyuganov recalled, saying his hair was
"ruined by the army service." He said, "We were carrying
out radioactive dust on our hands."
While in the army, Zyuganov joined the Communist Party.
When he came back to the teachers' college in 1966, he
was three years older than others in the sophomore class
and already a party member, a position of prestige. He
married his wife, Nadezhda, on his return.
"Zyuganov was simple with people, and people liked him,"
recalled Selyutin. "He made people comfortable with him.
He was older than the other students, he had great
muscles, and we knew in sports he was a great volleyball
player. We noticed in sophomore year that he was a party
member, and we were just dreaming about it," Selyutin
said.
A Party Functionary
Zyuganov taught mathematics but soon turned to party
work, becoming the local head of Komsomol. Selyutin
recalled that Zyuganov would not hesitate to speak out
against teachers he thought were laggards. He organized
parties and dances. "He had a good sense of how to
decorate the room," Selyutin recalled.
Selyutin said they knew little about dissent in those years,
but it would be Zyuganov's duty to keep an eye out for
those who did not conform to the party line. Once, he
recalled, a student was found with American magazines
such as Playboy, and Komsomol investigated the student.
"This was the system," Selyutin said. "The KGB delegated
it to the Komsomol. The Komsomol was the way of
straightening people out."
Zyuganov rose to be second secretary, or second in
command, of the Orel city party, then went to study at an
exclusive party school in Moscow and returned to Orel
between 1980 and 1983 to be regional party chief for
ideology and propaganda. He recently described the
Soviet Union in the Brezhnev years as "a liberal state
without repression." He also said, "In my hometown, only
two people were arrested at that time, and they were both
criminals. One must examine very carefully who was sent
to the gulag and why."
In fact, those who disagreed with the party ran into
trouble in Orel. Emmanuel Mendelevich, now 44, a
history teacher, attended the Orel teachers' college in
1968, when Zyuganov was head of the Komsomol.
Mendelevich publicly complained that a book published
about the Stalin era was not critical enough of Stalin.
According to Mendelevich, Zyuganov then began a
yearlong campaign to expel him from the Komsomol,
including numerous meetings to call attention to
Mendelevich's supposed heresy. Eventually, the Moscow
Komsomol headquarters said there was not enough
evidence to oust him. Mendelevich ran afoul of Zyuganov
again in 1974 when Zyuganov accused him of harboring
samizdat, or illicit literature. At issue was a typescript of
the Bible that Zyuganov accused him of possessing.
Mendelevich, suddenly realizing that Zyuganov was talking
about a friend's copy, denied possession. Later, he said,
when he had difficulty finding a teaching job and appealed
to Zyuganov for help, Zyuganov put out an order that
Mendelevich should not be hired.
Mendelevich said Zyuganov, as regional ideology chief of
the officially atheist Communist Party, also led an effort to
intimidate evangelical Baptists, a Protestant denomination
with a history of persecution in Russia.
Contrary to Zyuganov's claim that there was no
repression, his hometown was also the location of one of
the notorious tools of the Communist Party and the KGB
-- the "special psychiatric hospitals." The Orel institution
was run by the Internal Security Ministry. Among the
patients were dissidents and political prisoners who were
often subject to "punitive medicine" such as injections of
drugs, according to Western studies of the hospitals and
testimonials from prisoners.
"In the Soviet times, it was a villainous place," said Yuri
Savenko, head of the Independent Association of
Psychiatrists. A famous dissident, Vladimir Gershuni, was
held in Orel in the early 1970s, the same years in which
Zyuganov was working his way up in the party
organization.
Alexander Shpak, its deputy director, said the Orel facility
held people deemed "dangerous to society" who were
regularly checked by a commission from the Serbsky
Institute of Psychiatry in Moscow. (According to a book
by Sidney Bloch and Peter Reddaway, the institute, the
foremost Soviet center of forensic psychiatry, doubled as
the "apex of psychiatric abuse" in the Soviet era.)
"Of course, certain state bodies always had a particular
interest in our work," Shpak said. "It could not be
possible that a dictatorship wouldn't be interested in this
type of institution. However, party officials never put extra
pressure on us, making us detain someone we wouldn't
find insane."
Some years later, Zyuganov displayed a flash of anger
about the Soviet-era dissidents.
At the 1992 trial of the Communist Party, Zyuganov
confronted Gleb Yakunin, a dissident priest who was
defrocked and later jailed for his views. "You said several
times, `I'm a dissident. I'm a dissident.' I have a question
to you personally," Zyuganov said. "How do you suppose
exchanging the collective, social consciousness for that of
a dissident will bring more happiness and prosperity to our
long-suffering people?"
The Party's Demise
When Zyuganov went to Moscow in 1983 to be an
instructor in the Central Committee ideology department,
Brezhnev had died and Zyuganov was heartened by the
ascension of Yuri Andropov, a former KGB chief. "There
are people whom you trust somewhere in your heart,"
Zyuganov recalled of Andropov. "I believed in him."
Andropov's appeal was the idea that the system could be
fixed, if only there were more discipline. When Andropov
died soon after taking power, Zyuganov was deeply
upset, Selyutin recalled.
But Zyuganov fit nicely into the party apparatus. He
moved up in the ranks to become deputy director for the
ideology department. He was responsible especially for
propaganda in the provinces. He became part of the party
elite.
"Zyuganov was part of it, we were all part of the [elite],"
recalled Leon Onikov, a political analyst at Tass, the
Russian news agency, and a veteran of the Central
Committee who recently wrote a book about the party's
collapse. He said Zyuganov was entitled to such things as
paid holidays at party resorts, better medical care, the
special "Kremlin ration" of food and a personal car.
Zyuganov's duties remained mundane -- propagandist for
a party that was near extinction. Nail Bikkenin, who was
then editor of the journal Kommunist, recalled a typical
example: a "campaign" for Brezhnev's books. "All over
Russia, conferences were held on Brezhnev's books," he
said. It would be up to Zyuganov to encourage the regions
to hold meetings and discuss the books.
In the late 1980s, however, the party began to splinter,
and Zyuganov took the side of hard-liners against Mikhail
Gorbachev. Zyuganov lamented the crackup of the party
to which he had devoted his life. He said the Communist
Party "was not simply a party, it was a system of
management of the country. . . . To break it the way it
was broken was the biggest crime before the people.
Once it was ruined, the country collapsed."
