More than 1,000 Communists greeted the leaders of the failed 1991 hard-line coup with a standing ovation Saturday at a meeting aimed at reviving the discredited Communist Party.
"We have survived! Our president goes abroad and says that communism is dead in Russia - but the communist movement is becoming stronger," proclaimed Ivan Yakushin, a communal farm chairman. The stage was decorated with a white bust of Lenin.Despite the fanfare, the Communist Party is no longer regarded as a major political movement in Russia. The party's membership dwindled in the last years of Soviet power, and most Communist rallies in Moscow now draw fewer than 5,000 people.
The Communists, mostly men in their 40s and 50s, gathered at the Klyazma Reservoir Resort, nine miles north of Moscow.
Anatoly Lukyanov, the former Soviet parliament leader who has been accused of taking part in the coup, told the crowd that communism has a future in Russia.
President Boris Yeltsin banned the Communist Party shortly after the failed coup attempt that set the stage for the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Although a high court upheld his ban on the party's leadership structures, it ruled that Yeltsin was wrong to outlaw the party's grass-roots organizations. This means the party legally has the right to revive itself from the ground up.
The coup leaders at Saturday's meeting included Vladimir Kryuchkov, former head of the KGB; Gennady Yanayev, former Soviet vice president; Oleg Shenin, former Politburo member; Yuri Plekhanov, former KGB secret service chief; and Vasily Starodubtsev, a peasant leader.
They and others implicated in the coup are to stand trial in April.