Communist Party

Hoang Van Hoang, 86, a founding member of the Vietnamese Communist Party who defected to China in 1979, died in exile Saturday of a lung infection. Along with Ho Chi Minh and others, Mr. Hoang helped found the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930 and set up the Vietminh United Front to fight against French colonial rule in 1941.Edwina Booth, 86, star of the 1931 film classic "Trader Horn," died of heart failure Saturday in Los Angeles. Miss Booth was rumored to have died a half-century ago from the jungle fever she caught while filming "Trader Horn" in Africa.

MOSCOW -- President Mikhail S. Gorbachev approved yesterday the use of troops to prevent confiscation of property, a move apparently aimed at protecting the Communist Party's enormous holdings from seizure by newly elected officials.The decree came four days after the city of Ternopol in the Ukraine ordered an inventory of Communist Party property as a first step toward a city takeover of party buildings. Earlier this week, authorities in Czechoslovakia ordered Communist Party property nationalized, and a radical parliamentary faction has proposed the same move for the Soviet Union.

William J. Dodd, Louisiana's lieutenant governor under Earl Long in the 1940s and '50s, died of cancer Saturday in Baton Rouge. He was 81. Mr. Dodd, who began his political career as a state legislator from 1940 to 1948, employed a folksy style on the stump.Camilla Davis Trammell, Houston philanthropist, died Friday at age 72. She was married to Houston oilman John Blaffer, who died in 1973. Mr. Blaffer was the son of a founder of Humble Oil Co., which later became Exxon. In 1953, the couple donated the Blaffer Wing to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts.

Beijing -- Five years ago, Xu Xiaoxue decided to leave her husband and make a life of her own. So she left the southern town of Wuxi and headed north to Beijing to seek her fame and fortune as a superhuman.Now, armed with a client list of top Chinese leaders, plus a finely honed business sense, Ms. Xu has entered the burgeoning ranks of Chinese who make their living by claiming supernatural abilities. Her advertised skills: X-ray vision, faith healing, fortune telling.On good days she can even change the weather.

MOSCOW -- When a Saudi Arabian prince stopped here in September for talks with President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, he and his entourage stayed in a quiet, elegant hotel not yet listed in any guidebooks.The 63-room hotel, the Visit, has been taking well-heeled foreign guests since last summer, when its proprietor, the Moscow Communist Party, decided it could use the cash.To Western capitalists who are here for longer stints, the Moscow Communists are renting country homes from their impressive collection.

YANGZHOU, China -- It's hard to escape Jiang Zemin: China's most powerful man dominates the television news; his most trivial meetings are reported on the front pages of every newspaper. His speeches are required reading for the 53 million members of China's Communist Party.But look for traces of Mr. Jiang's past in his hometown, and he vanishes.The schools that he attended here have no special plaques. A book published in 1993 profiling Yangzhou's famous native sons omits any mention of him -- although Mr. Jiang was already China's president, commander in chief and general secretary of the Communist Party.

MOSCOW -- Democrats from 10 of the Soviet Union's fledgling parties and two dozen other political organizations formed a united front yesterday against the shaken but not yet beaten Communist Party.Democratic Russia, which claims support from 30 percent of the parliament of the Russian Federation and 60 percent of both the Moscow and Leningrad city councils, hopes to achieve a step-by-step takeover of power from the Communist Party, which has governed the Soviet Union for 73 years.To end this long monopoly on power, the new democratic movement, in a series of resolutions adopted at a weekend congress in Moscow, called for creating a multiparty democracy with a market economy based on private ownership of property.

MOSCOW -- Boris N. Yeltsin triumphed over his Communist opponents to become the first democratically elected national leader in Russian history, leading a sweep by reformist anti-Communists in Wednesday's voting, according to unofficial returns announced yesterday.Mr. Yeltsin, 60, a one-time Communist Party Politburo member whose rebellion against the system captured the popular mood, won about 60 percent of the vote against five opponents to become president of the Russian Federation. About 70 percent of the 104 million voters in the biggest Soviet republic went to the polls.

MOSCOW -- Nine top political figures, most of whom have close ties to President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, warned yesterday that "ultraconservative forces are strengthening" and appealed to Soviet citizens to unite behind a single reform movement.Their statement, distributed to reporters last night, was far from the first attempt to hammer into a disciplined opposition the diverse and quarrelsome critics of the Soviet Communist Party establishment.But the nine political leaders, some of the biggest in the politics of the Gorbachev era, lent the appeal enough clout to make the Communist Party look nervously over its shoulder.

MOSCOW -- Lithuanian authorities have filed criminal charges against a leader of the republican Communist Party in connection with his role in the Soviet army seizure of broadcasting facilities Jan. 13 in which 14 people died, the Tass news agency reported yesterday.The charges against Juozas Jarmalavicius, the Lithuanian Communist Party's ideology secretary, set the stage for further confrontation with President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and the rest of the Communist Party leadership in Moscow.