Comrades ask court to lift party ban

THE SOVIET Communist Party went to court yesterday to try to revive its political fortunes by seeking a ruling that the ban imposed on it by the Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, was unconstitutional.

The day did not go well for the old comrades. One of them, Dmitry Stepanov, started shouting from the back of the court about President Yeltsin being like Stalin and modern-day Russia being like Stalin's purges in the 1930s, and that civil war was on its way. The judge suspended the hearings until today and forbade Mr Stepanov to give any more testimony until the end of the hearings, which may be several weeks off.

The Communists want the Constitutional Court, a creation of Russia's post-communist reforms, to say that President Yeltsin acted illegally when he banned the party and seized its assets after many of its leaders supported the failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev last August. Supporters of President Yeltsin in the Russian parliament have entered a counter plea arguing that the party was a rogue organisation whose activities violated Russian and Soviet law.

The case is being viewed as the last gasp of the party members, who once numbered 19 million, but who these days can barely muster 10,000 at a Moscow demonstration. Conservative critics of President Yeltsin say that, if the court does not find he acted unconstitutionally, there will be violence and even civil war in the country.

The leading Communist at the time of the coup, Mr Gorbachev, was invited to give evidence, but declined, saying the procedure could only cause futher divisions in Russian society and he did not want to be a part of that. In any case, he said, he resigned from the leadership before President Yeltsin's decree banning the party on 6 November last year.

The court rejected the Communists' demand that President Yeltsin appear as a witness. The Communists also tried to pack their side of the court with witnesses, but the Yeltsin camp objected. 'How many (party) representatives do we need?' asked one of Mr Yeltsin's lawyers. 'Do we need a plenum of the Central Committee? And why are their titles, as mentioned, not preceded by the word 'former'?'

The court has been overwhelmed by a deluge of documents from the KGB and party archives - including six volumes, running to 2,000 pages, about the events of last August.