OVERTIME….

The Communist Party decided to keep thirty members of its Duma faction inside the Duma building around the clock throughout the recess. The 24/7 club is to guard against rumored moves by the Kremlin to ban the party and/or remove Lenin’s body from its Red Square mausoleum for cremation and reburial. Yeltsin gave the rumors credence with a televised scolding of the minister of justice, for failing to produce information on Communist Party “constitutional violations.” In a similar vein, Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin told his former colleagues in the security service that their task in December’s parliamentary elections is “to bar extremists, criminals and swindlers from power.”