Their progenitors ruled this country for 70 years, a bloody epoch of famine, war, political executions and gross mismanagement. Now a lot of people want them back. Ukrainian Communists seem assured of emerging as the leading party from the March 29 parliamentary election, adding to the 86 seats that already make them the largest single faction in the Rada. Some analysts say the Communists stand to win a third of the places in the 450-seat Parliament.
No one is seriously suggesting that such an outcome would make the party anything more than a nuisance to the government from its benches in a fractious legislature overshadowed by a powerful presidency. Nor is a Communist victory likely to usher in midnight arrests and deportations to Siberia.
Besides, like their reformist foes, the Communists are also looking west for inspiration. Only in their case the model is Belarus, where their hero, Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko, has imposed authoritarian rule redolent of the Soviet era.
'We are not dragging anyone into the past, we are offering a program learning from the world experience,' said party leader Petro Symonenko during an appearance at Kyiv Mohyla Academy last week.
Just as long as the experience is not that on offer from Western advisers. Symonenko wants to end reforms pushed by multilateral lenders such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank before they lead to a 'national catastrophe.'
'So long as a representative of foreign countries sits inside every ministry, so long as the budget cannot be approved until it is confirmed by the IMF and [economist Jeffrey] Sachs kicks open the door to the president's office to insist that his economic program be implemented in Ukraine, the decline of economy will continue,' Symonenko thundered.
The party platform, crafted to appeal to middle-aged workers and retirees nostalgic for the generous pensions and secure jobs that marked Soviet rule, calls for reunification with Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union, immediate suspension of privatization, nationalization of previously privatized property and a return to central planning.
Yet the party, reborn after its mighty precursor was banned between 1991 and 1993, now promises to respect private businesses 'that do not exploit the labor of others,' freedom of worship and multi-party democracy, so long as the latter excludes 'neo-fascist' parties. 'They are all pragmatics nowadays, and couldn't help but change,' said Oleksandr Stehny, an analyst for the Socis-Gallup polling firm.
Serhy Odarych, director of the Ukrainska Perspektyva think tank, calls the tough talk in the Communists' platform 'a bluff to win votes.'
He notes that businessmen occupy prominent slots on the party's nationwide ticket and provide it with campaign cash. 'If they do win the elections, nobody is going to let them nationalize everything,' Odarych said. The Communists' election platform distances them from former comrades such as President Leonid Kuchma who defected once the party lost its monopoly on power and have since turned up in top government jobs.
'The modern Ukrainian Communists are [descended] from the party of Lenin, are heirs to his ideas and precepts. We are part and parcel of the working class, and our aims are the desires and hopes of workers,' the platform reads. Analysts describe them otherwise.
'The modern Communists are the third- and fourth-rate party secretaries who did not have enough party money to go into business [in the 80s],' said Odarych.
Thus Symonenko, 45, was a party official during the final 16 years of Soviet rule, rising to the level of second secretary in the party's Donetsk Region organization. The Communists' No. 2, Yemelyan Parubok, 58, served 12 years on the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Odarych said party leaders who failed to profit from the chaos of Perestroika founded the Ukrainian Communist Party in 1993 in order to lay claim to the Soviet Communist Party's assets. They have raised this issue in Parliament several times, thus far without success.
However, the communists themselves say their goal is to defend the interests of workers.
'The Communist Party is the only one that does not want to seize power – it wants to bring to power those who deserve it. There is only one power, the power of labor,' said Borys Novikov, a party member and the Dean of Social Sciences faculty at Kyiv's National Technical University (the former Polytechnic Institute.)
Like their Soviet precursors, who exhibit a fondness for milkmaids and machinists before each election, the new Communists are the only party whose slate of candidates includes rank-and-file laborers alongside party officials and intellectuals. The Communist Party's top 10 lists a miner and two machinists.
Their rhetoric and the plausible claim to be the only party representing the dispossessed with a chance to make a difference in politics, has given Communists a sizeable lead over the 29 other parties contesting parliamentary elections. Opinion polls give them anywhere from 11 to 20 percent of the popular vote, roughly double the figures for second-place Rukh.
According to Stehny, the Communists are particularly popular in the industrial regions of eastern Ukraine, which share a border with Russia and where the proportion of mixed Russian-Ukrainian marriages is high. They are also doing well in southern Ukraine and Crimea, where the majority of residents are ethnic Russians and want to reunite with Moscow.
'About a third of the Ukrainian population regrets the union's collapse, and Communist promises work with these people,' said Stehny.
In the past, analysts have discounted the Communists' staying power because they have fared poorly with the young, relying on pensioners who can't accept that they built the Soviet regime in vain and middle-aged voters disillusioned by the hardships that have followed independence and half-hearted reform efforts. Retirees account for 44 percent of the party's 140,000-strong nationwide membership.
It is, however, precisely those older voters who are expected to turn out at the polls in the greatest numbers on March 29.
And the Communists claim they have plenty of younger followers as well. 'Recently, I have been handing out a lot of party membership cards to people born in the 60s and 70s,' Symonenko said last week.
He said the party's own surveys show that it will garner 18 percent of the vote among Kyiv students.
'Life itself speaks in favor of the Communists: the country's mortality figure is 300,000 higher than the number of births – this is politically induced extinction, and people are tired of it,' said Novikov.
