Culture : A Land of Marxist Millionaires : What’s rich, fat and successful? Why, a Cypriot Communist, of course. But they retain the common touch.

NICOSIA, Cyprus —  “Certainly thousands of our members are very rich, some are millionaires,” said Agamemnon Stavrou, who had introduced himself as “deputy head of the ideological department” as he led a reporter past portraits of Marx and Engels at the headquarters of Akel, the Communist Party of Cyprus.

“We are the party of the working people,” he continued moments later as he settled behind a modest desk.

What goes on here is peculiarly Cypriot, a political contradiction puzzling only to outsiders. Here the Communists are the people next door--your plumber, your physician or the head of the state broadcasting corporation. Akel is the second-strongest political party in Cyprus--behind the center-right Democratic Rally--and per capita one of the largest of the remaining Communist parties in Europe. In last spring’s parliamentary elections, the Communists got 30.6% of the vote.

The president of Cyprus is George Vassiliou, a millionaire marketing executive, who ran as an independent in the 1988 election and won with decisive Akel support. Vassiliou is not a Communist, but his parents, both doctors, were founders of Akel. The 36 men and women present at the birth of the party in 1941 included mayors, barbers, a poet and a suitcase maker. One, a lawyer named Zenon Rossides, went on to become ambassador to the United States.

Akel, formally called the Progressive Party of the Working People, absorbed the original Communist Party here and emerged from World War II and the Cypriot struggle for independence from Britain as a rock-hard party that followed the Moscow line.

Its longtime leader, Ezekias Papaioannou, “was constantly on with the ‘Down with the imperialists’ stuff,” said a Cypriot political analyst.

Now, as in the rest of the shaken, shrinking Communist world, the times are confusing.

While statues of Lenin are being hauled down across the Soviet Union, here in Nicosia a bold new monument in the Socialist Realist style was unveiled two weeks ago at the headquarters of the powerful Communist labor federation known as PEO. A working man and woman--he stripped to the waist and wearing a plain cloth cap, she adorned in a simple, toga-like dress, both barefoot--stand holding aloft a sledgehammer.

The militant labor federation of a Marxist-Leninist political party is a natural combination but, again, appearances are confusing. On Friday nights, unionists march past the statue on their way to play bingo on an upper floor of the headquarters building. Bingo? “We are the common people,” said Akel spokesman Stavrou, who has the ability to stretch party support to cover all bases.

Akel officials blithely deny any direct link between the party and the union, despite an overlapping membership. “PEO is autonomous, they are free to form their own policies,” said the man from the ideological department.

The relationship is plainly deeper, Western diplomats and local analysts insist. “PEO is a branch of Akel,” one diplomat said flatly. “It has no officials that weren’t blessed by Akel.”

Another called PEO the heart and soul of Akel. “It’s not an intellectually based party, not strongly Marxist-Leninist,” he explained, convinced that Akel and PEO is a hand-in-glove alliance. “I’d say it’s more properly a labor movement.”

Nonetheless, Papaioannou and the current general secretary, Moscow-educated Demetris Christofias, the only two leaders Akel has had, embraced the Soviet line as good Marxist-Leninists. In return, Moscow over the years provided scholarships for members of the Akel youth organization and supported the party in other ways.

The newly unshackled Soviet press recently published an account of Moscow stipends sent to Communist parties abroad in 1985. The publication New Times said that about $300,000 went to Akel, purportedly to fund some of the commercial businesses owned by the party.

An Akel spokesman denied the charges when they first surfaced a few weeks ago, and then claimed, defensively, that had there been such financial transfers, it would not be unusual or improper between “brotherly parties.”

Difficult explanations like these have become almost routine from Akel headquarters since Mikhail S. Gorbachev came to power in Moscow and introduced glasnost and perestroika into the Cypriot vocabulary. Christofias put down a recent reform rebellion in the Akel ranks by insisting that his followers were more reformist than the rebels.

August’s failed rightist coup is Moscow also caught Cypriot party leaders by surprise, according to political analysts here. First they dithered, unwilling to oppose or applaud the coup. “Even today they still haven’t condemned it,” said a Western diplomat. “Right now they are probably a little flustered. They don’t know who to look to.”

Closer to home, Akel’s policies are more certain. The party supports U.N. efforts to resolve the longstanding Cyprus problem, the division of the island between its Greek and Turkish communities. It condemns the Turkish invasion of 1974 and subsequent Turkish settlement in the northern sector of Cyprus.

In the shifting alliances and conservative tendencies of Cypriot politics, Akel is never likely to gain parliamentary control but, with a third of the seats, it has a loud voice and is an electoral kingmaker.

“Vassiliou, a very savvy politician, knows he has to keep Akel happy,” a Western diplomat said.

Meanwhile, the party and its nominally Communist members continue to anchor the political left. They are no longer able to play a forceful Soviet card but still represent the bulk of the unionized work force. Their right-wing opponents support SEK, a rival, “free” labor front, but Akel has earned a grudging respect for its support of the blue-collar classes.

And we’re not talking exclusively dockhands and factory workers here. The actors union, for instance, is primarily Communist, and no one has suggested an un-Cypriot activities committee to investigate. PEO has a reputation for responsibility in recent years, which means no politically motivated general strikes. Walkouts are irksomely common here, but primarily in the civil service, which is not PEO’s bailiwick.

The sharpest street-level criticism aired about Akel concerns the silk-stocking aspects of its brand of communism. “Communists!” spluttered a cabbie on Archbishop Makarios Avenue, named after Cyprus’ independence leader, a founder of the Nonaligned Movement. “Those guys aren’t Communists. They’re big businessmen, a lot of them. What kind of communism is that?”