COMMUNISTS BACKTRACK.

Publication: Monitor Volume: 2 Issue: 55

A Duma press spokesman grudgingly acknowledged that the Duma was likely to comply with the request. Communist party leader Gennady Zyuganov tried to play down the event, telling a press conference March 19 that Yeltsin’s reaction was "hysterical" and that the Communist party was wedded to the principle of the peaceful and voluntary reconstruction of the Soviet Union. (Interfax, Russian Television, March 19) Zyuganov sounded bemused and aggrieved: the platform on which the Communist party fought the December 1995 parliamentary elections promised unambiguously to "denounce the Belovezhye accords [disbanding the USSR and creating the CIS] and create the conditions necessary for the stage-by-stage restoration of a single Union state on a voluntary basis." (Sovetskaya Rossiya, August 31, 1995)

Communists Have Shot Themselves in the Foot.