“He has more powers than a Russian tsar, an Egyptian Pharaoh and the general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party put together.”But, as they quaffed their wine, the Americans must have wondered if the communist was speaking with a forked tongue, saying one thing to the West and another to the party faithful. Some of his supporters are believed to be far less moderate, and far more traditional. The party has distributed a leaflet which talks about eliminating opportunities to acquire “unearned wealth” – a word often seen by Russians as synonymous with profit. Asked to explain this recently, Mr Zyuganov launched into a speech about cracking down on Mafia racketeering in Russia.

But he did not answer the question.While such suspicions live on, the pressure on the centre parties to find someone who has a chance of being elected president is growing. Mikhail Gorbachev has entered the fray, warning of “a radical left wing” which “calls us backwards to yesterday” and will amend the Russian constitution to give themselves more power, given half the chance.The liberals and reformers have been squabbling for months but fate has finally smiled on them. Russia’s electoral commission barred the country’s most popular liberal party, Yabloko, over minor errors in their registration documents, a decision reversed yesterday. In the ensuing scandal, the party’s leader, Grigory Yavlinsky, was able to present himself as the victim of sinister Kremlin machinations – giving him the best chance of becoming the standard bearer in a counter attack against the rise of the nationalist left.. AS BALKAN leaders gathered in Dayton, Ohio, this week to seek peace, a small delegation of Bosnian Serbs arrived at the war-crimes tribunal in The Hague to seek justice.

Zoran Perkovec, an Orthodox priest, and Slavko Sebarleya, an engineer, presented evidence to Justice Richard Goldstone, the chief prosecutor, accusing their Muslim jailers in Sarajevo of war crimes. With them was a Bosnian Serb woman, who does not wish to be identified, who had come to give evidence of killings and torture carried out by Croatians at the Tretla camp near Mostar. And a Bosnian Serb lawyer gave evidence of crimes by Croats in a camp in Split.
The hearing, at the anonymous tribunal building in The Hague, received little publicity, compared with the fanfare which accompanied the stage- managed events in Ohio. Yet the willingness of this group of Bosnian Serbs to come to the tribunal is the latest sign that the legal process under way at The Hague could prove as significant for reconciliation as the diplomatic process in Dayton.