Communist Party

MOSCOW -- A published report said yesterday that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev appears ready to dump the Marxist-Leninist ideology that has reigned here as Communism for 73 years.The liberal Nezavisimaya Gazeta (Independent Newspaper) reported that Mr. Gorbachev will advocate replacing Communist doctrine with a hazily defined form of "social democracy" when he meets the policy-making Central Committee of the Communist Party Thursday.Such a proposal probably would spark a stormy debate with hard-liners that could jeopardize the future of the party.

MOSCOW -- People who wonder why Soviet reform seems stalled and why conservatives again seem on the offensive might well consider the experience at a classic Soviet industrial fortress such as Moscow's giant ZIL truck plant -- the letters stand for Factory Named for Likhachyov, one of its first directors.If Soviet politics were a prizefight, this would be the matchup:In one corner, the reigning champion: the Communist Party. Has virtually run the plant for 73 of its 75 years. Has 10,000 members among the 60,000 ZIL workers, its own three-story headquarters and a paid staff of 38 people.

Changing the name of Italy's Communist Party to "Democratic Party of the Left" won't fool Italian voters who are against the Communists. It might fool voters who are for them, but won't find them on the ballot.What a sad state of affairs for the giant political machine that for decades threatened to come to power by democratic means and that pioneered something called "Eurocommunism," supposedly tolerant and pluralistic and democratic, before the Communist empire of Eastern Europe even thought of self-destructing.

THE LONG-AWAITED leadership change for Vietnam went through without a hitch. But can that country sustain a Communist political system and a capitalist economy, especially when its capitalist neighbors are going through banking and currency crises?The new political elite who now run the place want Vietnam to remain wedded to both isms in their separate spheres.President Le Duc Anh, who retained military and political control in Communist Party hands while opening relations with the United States and welcoming old enemies to Hanoi, is stepping down.

MOSCOW -- Today used to be their day. This country used to be their country. But as the nation's Communists celebrate the 88th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution that brought Lenin to power and laid the foundation of the Soviet state, their party finds itself without reason to celebrate much else. Once a well-organized and dominant force in the first decade after the Soviet Union's collapse, the Communist Party now stands on the outskirts of power. The party lost more than half its seats in the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, in 2003.

MOSCOW -- Prodded by President Boris N. Yeltsin, the Russian Constitutional Court agreed yesterday to hand back Mikhail S. Gorbachev's confiscated passport so that the former Soviet leader may attend a state funeral in Germany.It was the most encouraging sign yet that the two men have reached an understanding breaking the internationally embarrassing deadlock caused by Mr. Gorbachev's refusal to appear in a case involving the Communist Party's past.Court Chairman Valery Zokerin announced that the court's summons to Mr. Gorbachev, Soviet Communist Party general secretary from 1985 to 1991, was still in force.

John E. Moran, 67, a child film actor in the 1930s, died Thursday of cancer in Greenfield, Mass. He was discovered by the late Mary Pickford and appeared in several Hollywood films, including the 1938 version of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and "Destination Moon," a 1939 Buck Rogers serial.Stephen F. Kolzak, 37, who supervised casting for the Emmy-winning television comedy "Cheers," died Wednesday of AIDS in Los Angeles. He was senior vice president of casting and talent at Columbia Pictures Television until illness forced him to resign in 1987.

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.

Paris. Was the December 1989 Romanian upheaval in that ended the dictatorship of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu a revolution, or a coup d'etat?It was both , says a principal figure in those events, Silviu Brucan.I met Silviu Brucan in Bucharest in the late winter of 1988-1989, when he was organizing a secret movement inside the Communist Party to overturn the Ceausescus and install a liberalized Communist regime. When the revolution took place at the end of 1989, he emerged as one of the new National Liberation Front's leaders.

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.