Communist Party Ussr

"You need to hang (hang without fail, so that the public sees) at least 100 notorious kulaks, the rich, and the bloodsuckers. "Publish their names. Take away all of their grain. Execute the hostages. "This needs to be accomplished in such a way, that people for hundreds of miles around will see, tremble, know and scream out: let's choke and strangle those blood-sucking kulaks." --Vladimir I. Lenin, 1918 The order by Russian Communist leader Vladimir I.

The reputation of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, former Soviet president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, may be changed forever Friday when formerly top-secret internal Communist Party documents--some bearing Gorbachev's signature--are open for public perusal in archives that once belonged to the Communist Party. Officials in Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin's administration say the party that Gorbachev once led stopped supporting international terrorism only last year.

New statements by top Russian officials Friday appear to show that the Soviet Communist Party continued to supply funds and arms to terrorists until as recently as last year, even though then-President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the party's leader, had long espoused a policy of cooperation with the West. "These groups, for example, were ready to demolish pipelines or kill American businessmen or British or others . . .

Yegor K. Ligachev, once the second-most-powerful man in the Kremlin, on Wednesday called his former boss and comrade, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, a coward and a traitor. "I met many Communists who spent decades in labor camps in the permafrost zone but retained their faith in the party," the erstwhile Politburo hard-liner said. "I fail to understand its general secretary who spent three days in the best health resort the country has by the warm sea, then called for its dissolution."

Turning the tables on President Boris N. Yeltsin's foes, Russia's Constitutional Court on Tuesday scheduled the "trial of the century"--open hearings on the Soviet Communist Party's bloody, checkered past--and asked the last general secretary, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, to attend to defend its actions.

Five years ago, when the Soviet Union was still the Evil Empire to many Americans, the Rev. Alan Thomson was videotaped in a hotel room allegedly handing a female FBI informant $17,000 he had received from Communist officials in Moscow. Government officials say the cash was intended to help finance the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, an alleged "Communist front" organization chaired by Hollywood actor John Randolph.

Russian hard-liners failed notably on Tuesday in their most concerted attack yet on President Boris N. Yeltsin's government, a double-barreled attempt to revive the defunct Soviet Parliament and pack a central square with protesters. Only an estimated 15,000 demonstrators gathered on the Kremlin-adjacent square, which has held hundreds of thousands of Yeltsin supporters at past rallies.

This is where the road to nowhere ended Tuesday, an industrial pothole of a town that hosted one of the strangest wild-goose chases that Russian politics has ever seen.

To the diehard Communists of the Soviet Union, its dissolution late last year after the collapse of socialism not only was a mistake of historic proportions but an unconstitutional seizure of power by radicals. Today, they will attempt to reverse it. Communist hard-liners plan to convene an emergency session of the old Soviet Congress of People's Deputies to challenge the legitimacy of Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin's regime.

In an effort to make a comeback, Russia's conservatives--thrust into the political wilderness when the Soviet Union collapsed--plan to mount a double challenge next week to the radical democrats who now hold power here.