This month Moscow blocked off two streets to make way for a small Communist demonstration. It was a march in memory of about 150 people who were killed in October 1993, when hard-line deputies in the Parliament tried to wrest power from Boris Yeltsin and halt the lurching course he was steering toward constitutional democracy and capitalism.

The whole, vast mass of Russia seemed to teeter for a few days. Sympathizers flocked to Moscow's White House, where the deputies were barricaded, and sat watch around bonfires, full of passion for the Soviet Union and the Communist Party. It didn't seem impossible that the gains of five years would vanish overnight.