Moldova's Red Revival.(Communist Party back in power)(Brief Article)(Statistical Data Included)

This is a revolution!" exclaims Ivan Ursu, a lifelong communist, surveying the banquet tables at the Inauguration of Moldova's new communist president. "And there wasn't even any shooting!"

In Moldova, the party is partying again. Back in 1991, the tiny former Soviet republic was among the first to declare independence and embrace capitalism. The country even outlawed the Communist Party. But after 10 years of poverty, corruption and misery, Moldovans have decided that maybe the old days weren't so bad after all. In February, the country became the first former Soviet republic to vote the Communist Party back into power. On April 7, it became the first to reinstall a communist president. To hear him tell it, it won't be alone for long. "The vanguard of the world communist movement has fallen [on Moldova]," Vladimir Voronin told comrades at the party's Fourth Congress recently. Now, he said, Moldova has the "honor" of leading the revival.

Most Moldovans would have been appalled by such talk a few years ago. In the early 1990s freedom brought a blossoming of ethnic pride--some people even advocated merging with Romania; at least 65 percent of Moldova's 4 million citizens are ethnic Romanians. But now Moldova has become the poster child for the frustrations of the former Soviet republics. And hunger and nostalgia are proving to be stronger political forces than self-determination. Increasingly, Moldovans view impoverished Russia as a beacon of prosperity. "Democracy" has become a dirty word, associated with a laissez-faire approach to corruption, the rise of the mafia and declining living standards. "Life was freer under communism," says villager Sveta Mraga, who equates "freedom" with clothes for her children and heat for her home that she can no longer afford. "We want some of that freedom back."

It's not hard to see why. In just 10 years Moldova has become the poorest country not only in Europe but in the entire former Soviet Union. Nowadays it's best known for a bustling trade in women, smuggled out of the country and forced into prostitution. More than 75 percent of the population lives in poverty. Industrial production is one third its 1991 levels. Things are so bad that "night thieves" steal power- line wires and telephone cables. In March two women were caught selling human meat, stolen from the garbage bin outside a cancer ward. "This country has an economy?" asks an adviser to the World Bank working in Moldova.

Still, Moldova's appetite for a wholesale return to Stalinism remains unclear. "The ...