Russian Communists at familiar crossroads Though they have offices in small towns and cities around Russia, with portraits of Stalin on the wall and hammer and sickle flags ready to unfurl in the corner, their message has remained unchanged as their members have grown older over the past 20 years: The glorious achievements of the Soviet Union are being systematically destroyed and only they can save Russia from moral degradation. They earned 11.57 percent of the vote in 2007, when they came in second, as now, to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's dominant United Russia Party. The election resul ts humbled United Russia, which got 64.3 percent in 2007 and officially only 49.3 percent in December, and left the Communists with a tantalizing prospect of ascendance. They have been at this fork before, when the weakened and ailing President Boris Yeltsin presented a slow-moving and vulnerable target in the 1996 presidential race. They failed to seize the advantage then, and political handicappers here predict that this time will be no different. Communist theory has always argued that history is on their side, however, and so there was Gennady Zyuganov, the party's leader and perennial presidential candidate, striding into a press room packed with reporters last week with the easy smile of a hot new vote-getter. "Merry Christmas," he exclaimed, as if to remind Russians, who celebrated Christmas Jan. 7 and are still playing Western carols in malls and coffee shops, that at least some Communists have gotten religion despite the official atheism of the Soviet years. The December election set off a paroxysm of anger among Russians who called it rigged, refusing to believe Putin's party had gotten even close to half the votes. Tired of years of what they have come to see as imperious and manipulative rule since Putin took over in 2000, protesters took to the streets in demonstrations across the country, throwing into confusion what had been seen as an easy Putin return to the presidency in March. Now Zyuganov, who lost to Yeltsin in 1996, Putin in 2000 and Medvedev in 2008 (he didn't run in 2004), is seeking the presidency once more, buoyed by the election that gave his party 92 of the 450 seats in the state Duma. It had 57 before. But he has a problem. Much of the higher vote has been attributed to a protest against United Russia, coming from people who went to the polls determined to back any party but that one. Yuri Burminov cast his ballot for the Communists at a northwest Moscow polling station last month with great reluctance. The 70-year-old pensioner said he remembered communism all too well and was unenthusiastic about voting for the party. But he was disgusted with the way the country was being run.