U.S. Communist Party leader Gus Hall said Friday the Soviet Parliament's suspension of the Communist Party was "legislative insanity" and insisted that socialism is not dead.
"This is not a memorial," Hall told a news conference called "to respond to events in the Soviet Union.""These are rough times," said the 80-year-old Hall, who ran for president of the United States four times on the Communist ticket. "We are having to deal with questions we never had to consider before."
Referring to Thursday's vote by the Soviet Parliament to suspend all activities of the Communist Party, Hall said, "It was legislative insanity and if I had been there, I would have suggested checking the air conditioning ducts" in the assembly hall.
"They learned the lessons of McCarthyism well," he said speaking of Soviet leaders. "The wrong lessons."
Hall spoke in a packed Communist Party USA headquarters in Manhattan. The Communist Party USA is estimated to have from 2,000 to 5,000 members, down from nearly 100,000 in its heyday shortly after World War II.
Hall said the mass media currently was "going through another `Communism is dead' episode. "But socialism is a perennial," Hall said. "You can cut it but it comes up again. Its roots are deep in society."
Hall said the savior of the Soviet Union would be the people. "They will wake up and respond; they will ultimately straighten things out," Hall said. "They will find a way to resurrect socialism."
Hall said Mikhail Gorbachev would "go down in history for pulling the world back from the brink of nuclear disaster through disarmament negotiations."
"It is in domestic areas that he has made mistakes."
As for Boris Yeltsin, Hall said, "I think he is one of the architects of the witch hunt now going on. He is, in that respect, a detriment."