ZYUGANOV STARTS IN MOLDOVA TO REASSEMBLE USSR.

Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov said in a December 20 newspaper interview that his party, now the Duma’s strongest by far, has "a strategy for a stage-by-stage (poetapnoe) restoration of the USSR by using the mechanisms of the referendum and political consultations…Real steps are needed, not [just] talk about the Union. I am certain that this process will conclude with the restoration of a single state." (13) Zyuganov has lost no time using "the referendum mechanism" the way he just said he would. "Dniester republic" television broadcast December 20 and 21 an appeal signed by Zyuganov on behalf of its party and its Duma faction, urging residents of that part of Moldova to vote in a referendum in favor of secession from Moldova. "The disintegration of the USSR was our common misfortune. Russia’s elections have demonstrated the surging popular support for communists and the patriotic organizations. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation consistently promotes the acceleration of integration processes on the former USSR’s territory and supports the Dniester republic’s aspiration to determine its future independently…Show the peoples of the CIS countries an example of the wish and will to live in a single family of peoples." (14) Yet Zyuganov’s electoral triumph has only marginally increased support for the Transdniester in the Duma. The chamber’s chairman Ivan Rybkin, head of a losing governmental bloc, had personally endorsed earlier this month the secession referendum in Transdniester; and the Duma as a whole passed a resolution to that effect last month on Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s proposal. Transdniester’s ruling Russian minority is staging December 24 a referendum on joining the CIS.

Kravchuk: Russia Cannot Renounce CIS Treaty.