MOSCOW -- For years now, Russia has been trying to leave the past alone, as if it were some ferocious creature best left undisturbed.

But that's changing. With the country battered by economic and political tribulations, some of the resulting fears and frustrations are being channeled into a struggle over Russian history and who will control it. It's a struggle over symbols, but not over nuances. The differences between the two sides couldn't be starker.

Wednesday, a parliament dominated by Communists overwhelmingly voted to restore the statue of the founder of the Soviet secret police to its pedestal in the heart of Moscow. Last night, a presidential aide vowed to continue his effort to investigate the Communist Party -- over its seizure of power in 1917.

What's it to be, a monument or a trial?

"It's a matter of historical justice."

Either side could have said that, though in this case it was Sergei Modestov, an assistant to Yevgeny Savostyanov, who as deputy head of the presidential administration is pushing for legal action against the Communists. He wants to put before the country the question of the Communists' methods as established in the earliest days and what he sees as their disregard for law.

The Communists are closer to power than at any time since the downfall of the Soviet Union. What they hope to accomplish by restoring the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky to its place in front of the Lubyanka, headquarters of the old KGB, is to blot out the memory of their lowest hour. That was in August of 1991, when a vengefully joyous crowd gathered at the Lubyanka to watch a crane take the statue away. Since then, it has been lying on its back in a park with other Soviet monuments.

Dzerzhinsky, with his leather coat and Mauser on his hip, was the Polish founder of the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police. The Cheka believed in terror. The Cheka became the NKVD, and that became the KGB, but the aura of the Lubyanka stayed pretty much the same. People here despised the place or revered it, and that also has stayed much the same. Today the security police are called the FSB.

The restoration of Dzerzhinsky's statue was presented to the Duma as a symbol of the need to battle Russia's outbreak of crime.

"The people in the Lubyanka feel unprotected without the Dzerzhinsky monument," said Nikolai Kharitonov, leader of the Communist-allied Agrarian Party, who sponsored the resolution.

Restored to its place near the crest of a small hill at the center of one of Moscow's busiest intersections, just up the street from the Bolshoi Theater and overlooking the city's center, the statue of Dzerzhinsky with the Lubyanka behind it would send an unmistakable signal to the country.

During the Duma debate over the monument, Yuli Ryabov sat next to the seat left empty by his fellow deputy from St. Petersburg, Galina Starovoitova, a liberal who was murdered last month. A picture of her stood on her desk, next to a growing pile of red carnations.

"Dzerzhinsky was one of the most horrible butchers in history, with a multitude of innocent victims on his conscience," Ryabov said. "How can we possibly reinstate his statue in the center of the Russian capital?"

The Duma resolution does not have the force of law, but it is emblematic of attempts on various fronts to push and probe for advantage.

A television network faces harassment in the courts, and fire inspectors recently descended on an outspoken radio station. Brazenly dirty tricks have marked the campaign for city council elections Sunday in St. Petersburg.

A Communist, Albert Makashov, said Jews should be rounded (( up and thrown in prison. Boris Berezovsky, a tycoon who is close to President Boris N. Yeltsin and is executive secretary to the largely irrelevant Commonwealth of Independent States, responded by saying the Communist Party should be banned. (( This week, the Duma called on the member nations of the CIS to remove Berezovsky.

The charges go back and forth every day. Newspapers, including Komsomolskaya Pravda, accuse Communist members of the Duma of taking payoffs for their votes. Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the Communist faction, called yesterday for a law forbidding "russophobia."

The Communists have stumbled in their attempts to exploit discontent over Russia's troubles, but their fortunes are improving nevertheless. Last week, they won overwhelmingly in local elections in Krasnodar, whose Communist governor is even more outspokenly anti-Semitic than Makashov. They have influence with Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov and several seats in his Cabinet. Their opposition is divided and on the defensive, in a way that brings to mind the last days of the Provisional Government eight decades ago.

Through the spring and summer of 1917, a quarreling government set up after the abdication of the czar tried to establish its authority in Russia, which was at war with Germany. That government failed to address the problems facing the country, and in November the Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace in what was then called Petrograd. The rest of the country, with the help of Dzerzhinsky's Cheka, eventually followed. Vladimir I. Lenin, the Bolsheviks' leader, remarked that power was lying on the streets, just waiting for someone to pick it up.

In January 1918, the Bolsheviks dismissed the Constituent Assembly, and it is that act that Savostyanov would like to see investigated as an illegal seizure of power.

A criminal investigation is unlikely, but even a political campaign could be helped by the discussion. Savostyanov's aim would be to hammer home what he sees as the illegitimacy of 70 years of Communist rule.

When he made the proposal Tuesday, it was dismissed by his opponents as a fairly ridiculous attack on the Communists, but Modestov, his deputy, said last night that he was determined to carry on with the idea.

He could, if successful, force Russia to deal with its painful history. The problem is in deciding whether the 20th century was a glorious era or a nightmarish one. There's not much in the way of middle ground. For a decade at least, neither side has wanted to open the question, beyond a few jabs here and there. That may no longer be possible.

Pub Date: 12/04/98