Back in the early 1990s, when Russia's Communists seemed to be fading into irrelevance, Gennadi Zyuganov used to visit an apartment overlooking Pushkin Square in Moscow, his arms laden with pastries and other delicacies baked by his wife. The apartment belonged to Alexander Prokhanov, a virulently nationalistic newspaper editor, and the occasion was an unlikely gathering of politicians, generals and intellectuals from the far right and far left of Russia's ideological spectrum. With little in common save a shared conviction that Boris Yeltsin was destroying the motherland, the members of Prokhanov's salon would practice running the country together. They would form a mock Cabinet, dividing up the various portfolios among themselves. Deciding who got which job was never easy, but the consensus pick for the top post was always the same.''We chose Zyuganov," says Prokhanov. "Every time."
What was fantasy just a few years ago is now tantalizingly close to reality. Zyuganov, 51, the head of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, has again emerged as a consensus choice, this time as the presidential candidate representing a broad coalition of opposition parties and movements as well as the C.P.R.F. Leftists of all degrees have joined right-wing nationalists who once viewed communism as anathema.
As his success in those mock Cabinets shows, Zyuganov's politics are malleable. He is, at once, red enough for old-style Communists and white enough for hard-line nationalists. At a late-April meeting with the candidate in the town of Sosnovy Bor, due west of St. Petersburg, an old man with damp eyes and a Soviet-flag pin stuck in his lapel reverently described Zyuganov as ''one of the best leaders our party has ever had." At a May Day rally in Moscow, the heads of various nationalist movements praised Zyuganov as someone who shares their anti-Western, often anti-Semitic beliefs. In St. Petersburg, a man introduced himself as a member of Monarchists for Zyuganov, a contradiction so absurd even the usually dour candidate had to laugh.
Prokhanov says his friend is "like velvet, with no sharp edges," which is why he appeals to so many different constituencies. Because he is so flexible and cautious, as Prokhanov explains it, ''Zyuganov is the buffer, the go-between for all sides. All these political trends seem as if they're struggling with each other, but the idea of compromise is ripening within them. They need Zyuganov, and Zyuganov needs them. Having received Russia falling apart in his hands, he wants to be the one who puts it back together. Russia and Zyuganov have found each other."
In Mymrino, the tiny village in Russia's Black Earth region where Zyuganov was born, memories burn brightly of the young, towheaded ''Genna" leading student brigades to pick potatoes at the nearby Red October collective farm.
"He had the aura of authority around him," says Valentina Antipova, 57, a neighbor who recalls Gennadi playing the conciliator even as a boy. "Whenever there was a quarrel, he would come out and break it up."