THE RED flag of the Soviet Union is officially banned in Smolensk, but it flies alongside the prohibited banner of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic on one of the most prominent buildings on Lenin Square.
Lenin's statue fronts the mayoralty building, and the city's streets still bear names from the communist era, which has passed in places such as Moscow and St Petersburg but remains ingrained and almost indelible in most of provincial Russia.
In the elections to the State Duma (lower house of the Russian parliament) in December 1995 Smolensk and its surrounding districts elected three deputies. All of them were members of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. One of them was the party's eminence grise, Mr Anatoly Lukyanov, who was a moving force behind the Moscow coup d'etat in 1991.
But what sort of communism does Smolensk support, now that the Soviet Union has been dissolved? The thoughts of the local party secretary, Mr Vladimir Kupnikov, do not in the least conform with the Marxist Leninist orthodoxy of the past. Here are some of them:
Privatisation is not all bad because it was invented by Stalin social support for the unemployed and the sick as well as free education services were invented by the Romanov tsars Stalin's repressions were bad but exaggerated and the real repressions took place in the 1920s at the hands of one Lev Davidovich Bronstein (alias Trotsky) who got what he deserved in the form of an ice pick through the skull in Mexico.
Russian communists and the "national patriotic forces", therefore, have the answers to the country's problems with, it would appear, the communists providing their tradition of privatisation and the monarchists their long established experience in social services.
It may be easy to ridicule such views but, bizarre as they are to western ears, they are strongly held and the population of this city of 350,000 fears western encroachment in both the economic and military spheres.
Now Smolensk is at the front line of competition with highly organised western business. Employment at the Yakovlev Aerospace works, which produced the Soviet space shuttle as well as military and civilian aircraft has, since the USSR's dissolution, fallen from 10,000 to 2,000.
The Smolensk linen mill, according to its director, Ms Ninya Belyakova, has lost 6,000 jobs in the same period. Those still employed work one daily shift instead of the previous three.
There are bright economic spots. Mr Vadim Skorbyashev has kept the local meat plant alive through a Russian style privatisation. The workers have been given 60 per cent of the shares and the collective farmers who supply the raw material own the other 40 per cent.
Mr Skorbyashev's enterprise has managed to keep employment at the old levels through a significant increase in productivity. Not only that, but also through profits of 27 billion roubles (£3.5 million) last year he has managed to invest in new machinery.
But the meat plant is an exception in a city rocked by the market economy. The people on the street were curiously reticent about giving their full names. They were reticent, too, in telling me who they would vote for in June, but none of them was hesitant about saying who they would vote against. Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin does not head the popularity ratings here.
A young women selling linen in a kiosk in the town centre put it this way. "I don't know who I will vote for, but I will vote against. Yeltsin. Our diet has deteriorated, my children are poorly fed. Why should I vote for him?" she asked. A woman called Tamara simply said Russia "needed a tsar".
In the middle of all this dissatisfaction is the city's mayor, Mikhail Zysmanov, who was appointed by Mr Yeltsin rather than elected by the population. The situation in Smolensk, he said, was a perfect example of what Russia's national poet, Alexander Pushkin, wrote in Boris Godunov. "The mob hates the living authorities more than those who have already died."
Nihilism had become, he said, the main political force not only in Smolensk, but also in many other areas of provincial Russia. But this nihilism was not the fault of the president, who was a much maligned man. "Once you meet him face to face you will experience his dynamism," he said.
This correspondent explained that people in Ireland had, unfortunately, not had the opportunity for eyeball to eyeball contact with Mr Yeltsin the last time he visited Shannon. The response was swift and somewhat condescending. I did not know, I was told, how tiring an east west flight could be, and if the Irish people really wanted to meet Mr Yeltsin they could invite him again and he would surely come.
If the entire Russian populations votes the way Smolensk appears likely to vote, Mr Yeltsin will not be making state visits to anywhere, let alone Ireland.
