The comrade's room reeks of the past. Above the desk hangs a portrait of Lenin, a treasured gift from Leonid Brezhnev. On another wall is a tapestry of Karl Marx, a present from fallen East German leader Erich Honecker. Elsewhere sit a replica of Lenin's telephone; a wood sculpture from Fidel Castro; and busts of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Gus Hall, aging chairman of the Communist Party U.S.A., calls his New York City office a "museum of history." But among all these historic mementos, Hall is, unwittingly, the prime exhibit.
The 80-year-old party patriarch is one of the world's last communist stalwarts, an ideological dinosaur rapidly headed for extinction. But you'd never know it to talk to him. Let Mikhail Gorbachev resign as party boss, and let the roll of party defectors grow faster than a meat line in Moscow. Gus Hall still insists that communism is not dead, that socialism is as inevitable as ever, that capitalism will be destroyed. "The problem is not with socialism. The problem is with human error, mistakes of leadership," argues Hall, groping to explain the earthquake in the Soviet Union. "The system of socialism is still the only real, basic solution to the problems of capitalism."
The past two years -- and not just the past two weeks -- have put Hall's beliefs to the test. The Iron Curtain opened, and the Berlin Wall toppled. Eastern Europe gained its freedom, and the Germanys united. Capitalists started selling Big Macs in Pushkin Square. Now come the failed coup, the dismantling of the Soviet Communist Party and the race toward independence and a market economy. While conceding that these events mark a "serious detour," Hall finds solace in this quote: "If current events are negative, then look long range."
Make that long, long, long range. Hall may be the only person who is sanguine about Marxism's future. But that's no mystery to anyone who knows the jovial, square-jawed Minnesotan, whose deliberate step and stolid bearing (6 ft., 210 lbs.) evoke his earlier days as a lumberjack and steelworker. He's a rough-hewn American version of the Soviet bear, who would look equally at home in overcoat and shapka on the Kremlin reviewing stand with Brezhnev (his favorite Soviet) or in a gimmie-cap at a Fourth of July picnic in Des Moines. He mixes an earthy Midwest charm with a trace of Finnish ancestry ("yahs" sprinkle his speech), which makes it difficult to fathom his lingering bad-guy notoriety. But behind the affable grin lie eyes cold and calculating. Perhaps it is this paradox -- the genial great-grandfather and steely communist chieftain rolled into one -- that has made him one of the longest-sitting leaders of a national Communist Party.
Hall learned about the coup while at a family reunion in Minnesota, and then hurried back to New York. Though he calls the action unconstitutional, Hall evinces some sympathy for its plotters. "It was an attempt to deal with real problems, but in a wrong way," he explains. He dislikes Boris Yeltsin ("Now I think he becomes the biggest danger") as well as Mikhail Gorbachev (an "opportunist" who "tends to sit on both sides of the fence"). A hard- liner at heart, Hall blasts both men for leading the Soviet Union down the capitalist road. Once capitalism's failures emerge, he predicts, the Soviets will scurry back to socialism. No wonder critics have dubbed him the "Norman Vincent Peale of the left."