About 100 young Communists aboard a boat built to look like the legendary cruiser Aurora set sail at night for the Kremlin with a message for Russia 's leaders.

As the gray boat, which usually takes tourists around Moscow, approached the Kremlin walls, the Communists fired off two shots from a fake cannon placed on the deck.

'With this action, we want to demonstrate the attitude of the young Communist electorate toward those in power,' said Ilya Ponomaryov, the party's chief information officer.

The cruise on Sunday night, acting out the historic shot in October 1917 signaling the storming of the Winter Palace, was part of a broader Communist campaign orchestrated by Ponomaryov to attract and motivate younger voters.

'Many young people live without any money and lack hope for the future. This event is intended to demonstrate to them that it is still possible to fight to change things,' said Ponomaryov, 28, who worked for the Yukos oil major from 1998 to 2002 before going to work for the Communist Party, or KPRF, in January of this year.

The three-hour cruise on the Moscow River followed a meeting of regional Komsomol leaders held earlier Sunday.

'We discussed how to organize KPRF campaigning in the regions so as to attract as many young people as we can,' said Yury Afonin, first secretary of the KPRF council in Tula, who was appointed first secretary of the central committee of the Komsomol Union on Sunday.

Afonin said it was his success in bringing in 1,500 new Komsomol members in Tula that persuaded party leader Gennady Zyuganov and his deputy Ivan Melnikov to give him the post.

The first thing he did in Tula was to establish good relations with the local media, he said. 'We often organize meetings with local journalists, and our local television channel covers us more than it does United Russia.' On the national channels, the pro-Kremlin party gets the widest coverage.

It no doubt has helped the Communists' cause that Tula is part of the red belt and its governor, Vasily Starodubtsev, is a member of the party's central committee.

Vasily Koltashov, 24, first secretary of the Novosibirsk Komsomol organization, said the best way to attract the attention of the young is to organize 'theatrical performances' like the symbolic shots from the Aurora.

Last January, for example, Koltashov said he organized a performance aimed at showing the evils of capitalism.

'To explain to people of my age that capitalism is bad, we put a tangerine-filled corpse of a bourgeois in a coffin. We pretended to be sorry for the death of a 'homo economicus,' but then we opened his body and distributed the tangerines among the people,' he said.

The tangerines represented the property the dead man had accumulated.

On board the imitation Aurora, the atmosphere was nostalgic, with renditions of old Soviet songs playing over the sound system.

The lower deck of the boat was illuminated by red lights, and on tables covered with red tablecloths were plates of the most traditional foods: pickled cucumbers, pickled garlic, Olivier salad and the inevitable selyodka pod shuboi, or herring under a fur coat.

Accompanied by the proletarian rock music of Eshelon and the rap of the left-wing Sixty-Nine, Ponomaryov announced the winners of an Internet competition for the best new campaign slogans.

The winners - 'Putin Forward to the Past, KPRF Backward to the Future'; 'We Changed Ourselves Without Changing the Motherland'; and 'KPRF Internet-tional Party' - were awarded in a ceremony interrupted by applause and the playing of the Internationale.

When the boat drew close to the Kremlin walls, some 30 Komsomol members shouted slogans calling for a new revolution or for the bourgeoisie to be arrested: Burzhuyev na nary, rabochikh na Kanary, or Bourgeoisie to prison, workers to the Canary Islands.

Dmitry Borovikov, 23, who is working on a Ph.D. in economics, was one of those shouting the anti-capitalist and anti-Kremlin slogans. He said he joined the party in 2001. 'I can't say that I back KPRF ideology in full, but at least it is the only party that sticks to some principles,' he said.

Close to the end of the evening, 23-year-old Katya Mukhina, who joined in the singing of 'The U.S.S.R. Is My Fatherland,' said she will vote Communist because she does not see any other alternatives.

Mukhina, who teaches Russian language in a Moscow school, said she likes being a Komsomol activist because 'I like the Komsomol crowd. We don't compete against each other like other young groups do and we don't know what careerism is.'

Among the young Komsomol members on Sunday was one of the Communists' long-time backers, Alexei Kondaurov, 54, who is running on the 13th spot on the party's federal list. 'Young people represent the future of the Communist Party, and the party's future plans are to work with them,' he said.

A former KGB general, Kondaurov is an official aide to the president of Yukos-Moskva, a major division within the oil company. The president, Vasily Shakhnovsky, was charged last week with tax evasion, as part of the widening case against Yukos shareholders.

Asked whether the nostalgic atmosphere on board the Aurora represented a return to the Soviet past, Kondaurov said that 'if the KPRF wins the election there won't be any step backward, but on the contrary there will be more democracy in the country and businesses will feel much more protected than they are now.'

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2003/10/21/002.html».