Communist Party

MOSCOW -- The political pulling and tugging that is shaping the future of the Soviet government took a dramatic turn yesterday when Eduard A. Shevardnadze, the respected former foreign minister, said that he has quit the Communist Party.In doing so, he makes it considerably less likely that President Mikhail S. Gorbachev can successfully refashion the party to keep the reform movement within its embrace -- and considerably more likely that an independent party will arise to challenge the Communists.

Huainan, China -- For days, the rain had come in warm, drenching sheets. It swelled the Huai River and turned the heavy, clay soil along its watershed into a sticky muck that sucked the shoes off people's feet. Zheng Zhaojun, who has lived here all of his 32 years, knew the danger the river posed. So when the Communist Party secretary for his village came calling, Zheng moved quickly. "They told us the water is rising fast, go," Zheng recalled as he stood in the doorway of the blue canvas tent that has been his family's temporary home for nearly two weeks.

MOSCOW -- The Communist Party is unlikely to regain its former position here, but a forthcoming court ruling on its banishment could cause President Boris N. Yeltsin a lot of trouble if it goes against him.At stake are billions of dollars worth of property, seized by the government, and even, some aides worry, the president's job itself.Thirty-seven legislators have sued Mr. Yeltsin, arguing that he had no legal standing when he banned the Communist Party after last August's failed coup by hard-liners in the party, military and KGB.The suit is scheduled to be argued Tuesday before Russia's Constitutional Court.

BEIJING -- A rare open letter signed by 17 former top officials and conservative Marxist scholars before a key Communist Party meeting accuses China's top leaders of steering the country in the wrong direction, pandering to foreigners, betraying the workers' revolution and jeopardizing social stability. "We're going down an evil road," said the letter posted on the Web site Mao Zedong's Flag. "The whole country is at a most precarious time." The challenge is unusual both for the importance of its signatories and for its timing during the time leading up to this fall's Party Congress -- an event held once every five years and a key date on the political calendar.

George Aloysius Meyers, a member for six decades of the Communist Party of the United States who spent 38 months during the 1950s in a federal reformatory for advocating the violent overthrow of the government under the anti-communist Smith Act, died in his sleep Monday at Sinai Hospital. He was 86.Mr. Meyers, a longtime Northeast Baltimore resident who was still a member of the national board of the party, spent a lifetime working for civil rights and job equality.He was chairman of the party in Maryland and the District of Columbia at the time of his celebrated 1951 trial as a "second-string communist official."

MOSCOW -- Communists rejoiced in their blandness yesterday.None of the recent uproar -- not the calls for President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's resignation, not the rumblings of martial-law enthusiasts, not the passion over the end of Marxist thought, not the feuding and sniping between left and right -- seeped to the surface of the plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union."

MOSCOW -- A courtroom showdown between the Communist Party and President Boris N. Yeltsin ended in a mixed decision yesterday, throwing the party that once ruled the Soviet empire a few scraps but leaving Mr. Yeltsin's authority essentially intact.It was an important event on the eve of a crucial legislative session in which Mr. Yeltsin will face many of the party's remnants. But it was an anticlimactic ending to what had been billed as the trial of the century.In the end, the 13-member Russian Constitutional Court delivered a muddle-along ruling, which now contributes to the country's muddled political landscape.

While the cataclysmic events that led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc nations are a "disaster," the head of the U.S. Communist Party said yesterday that socialism will return."

BERLIN -- The former East German Communist Party sank into its deepest crisis yesterday when two leading members were arrested for having illegally sent $72 million in party funds abroad.Party leader Gregor Gysi, who had managed to rejuvenate the party after the Communist state collapsed last year, said he accepted full responsibility for the scandal and will offer to resign today. Although the offer probably will not be accepted, the affair has again tarnished the party's image and left it with a bleak future.

MOSCOW -- In the cool spring sunshine of Gorky Park, thousands of Muscovites took a moment this weekend between listening to the rap singers and riding the Ferris wheel to exact quiet revenge against the Communist Party.They put their signatures on a petition aimed at forcing a referendum on the following question:"Do you consider it necessary to transfer the property controlled or owned by the Communist Party . . . to the state for the resolution of the most severe social problems?"Three months after they started, enthusiastic anti-Communist volunteers are approaching the 1 million signatures necessary by law to put the explosive question of nationalizing party property to a popular vote in the Russian Federation.

SHENZHEN, China -- The life of an official in China's closed political system can be anxious and uncertain. Anyone who doubts that should stride up the initial flight of nine steps leading into the courthouse in Shenzhen. The courthouse used to have 11 steps. Two were removed. Workers also broadened the stairway and placed two fierce ceremonial stone lions at another entrance. The reasons for the redesign haven't been made public. But news reports suggest that agitated officials wanted to halt a run of bad luck, including the jailing of three judges for corruption.

Theater `Dry Hours' at Center Stage Things of Dry Hours, a play based on the Communist Party in Depression-era Alabama, will be presented at Center Stage, 700 N. Calvert St., at 8 tonight. Tickets are $10-$60. Call 410-332-0033 or go to centerstage.org.

Just as Boris N. Yeltsin's career was taking off - his first career, that is, as a Communist Party functionary - he received an order from Moscow that would tie him, however indirectly, to the one great crime that overshadowed all of Soviet history. Czar Nicholas II and his family had been murdered by their Bolshevik captors in the Ural Mountain city of Yekaterinburg, back on the night of July 16, 1918, and 59 years later, Mr. Yeltsin was ordered to destroy the house where that had happened.

NEW YORK -- Crammed with Lenin buttons, dusty memos from the McCarthy period, and crumbling pages of internal briefings dating back a century, the 2,000 cardboard boxes handed over to New York University last month hold secrets about the Communist Party USA that make archivist Peter Filardo's heart flutter. Decades ago, they would have been gold mines for the FBI. "Oh yeah, this is it," Filardo said, sifting through one box. "National convention material from 1919 - this is the founding convention of the Communist Party.

NANJING, CHINA -- China went on a public relations offensive this week aimed at convincing the world it is serious about fighting corruption. During a carefully controlled trip marked by long, statistics-laden speeches and limited opportunities for questions, foreign and local journalists were led through a series of provincial and local offices in Jiangsu province on China's prosperous east coast. The central message: We're a clean, green, corruption-fighting (single-party) machine. "We have dynamic, open government," Zhou Kezhi, Jiangsu's vice governor, told the journalists from a stage bedecked with potted ferns and bougainvillea plants.

Robert C. Norton Jr., a retired FBI agent whose career in Baltimore spanned nearly two decades, died of heart failure Dec. 9 at Salisbury Center Nursing Home. He was 90 and had lived in Salisbury since 1976. Mr. Norton was born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., the son of a lawyer. He was a 1939 graduate of Columbia University and earned his law degree from the university's law school in 1942. That same year, he enlisted in the Army and served as a warehousing officer in Luzon, the Philippines, where supplies needed for the planned invasion of Japan were stored.

HANYUAN COUNTY, China - The rice farmers sitting in this living room have proved that they are not people who flee from confrontation. A few months ago, they were among 60,000 to 100,000 people facing down the Communist Party by physically blocking construction of a hydroelectric dam that one day will submerge the land their families have lived on for centuries. These farmers stood their ground in the face of thousands of armed soldiers and police. The farmers went so far as to encircle the party secretary of Sichuan province, preventing the highest-ranking provincial official from leaving the county seat for hours.

MOSCOW -- Celebrating the 78th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution and an expected powerful Communist Party comeback in December parliamentary elections, 10,000 Russian Communists marched through central Moscow yesterday.While just a shadow of the huge Revolution Day rallies of the Soviet era, the showing -- full of hammer and sickle flags and anti-American rhetoric -- was considered not just a nostalgic throwback to the days of superpower status, but a real hint of the future.Polls show that the Communists are likely to achieve strong gains, if not an absolute majority, in the State Duma, or lower house of Parliament, in the Dec. 17 elections.

BEIJING -- The Chinese government said yesterday it had disciplined two officials for illegally seizing farmland, two days after it removed the party chief of Shanghai on corruption charges. The moves, coming a little more than a week ahead of the Chinese Communist Party's leadership meeting, have raised speculation that President Hu Jintao is acting on a dual agenda: purging potential rivals while he attempts to quell public unrest over government corruption and impunity. The dismissal Monday of Chen Liangyu, a protege of former President Jiang Zemin and a member of Beijing's ruling politburo, was seen as part of a continuing nationwide crackdown on corruption.

The Cuban newspaper Granma printed this quote last week as speculation swirled about the country's future as Fidel Castro recuperated from major surgery. Raul has been given temporary leadership responsibility. "Only the Communist Party ... can be the worthy heir of the trust Cubans have placed in their leader." - Raul Castro