March 31, 1996

THE Communist leader Gennadi A. Zyuganov has made some far-fetched claims on the stump. Last week, he suggested that Stalin respected the Russian Orthodox Church in his heart. He also said that 20 years ago the C.I.A. launched a plot to destroy the Soviet Union, and that the Russian mass media are conspiring against him. On at least the third claim, Mr. Zyuganov has a point.

A 5.4-acre parcel in the heart of Queens that has never had a brick laid upon it -- despite its neighboring concentration of garden apartments and private homes -- has been bought by a developer with visions of building a combined medical and apartment complex. The developer, Jack P. Schleifer, recently purchased the property at Parsons Boulevard and 71st Avenue in the Hillcrest section of Flushing from Republic National Bank, which acquired title when it took over control of Crossland Federal Savings Bank. Mr. Schleifer said he paid approximately $5 million in a deal that was brokered by Grubb & Ellis New York.

In the strike-shortened season of 1994, when the San Francisco Giants played 115 games instead of the usual 162, Matt Williams hit 43 home runs. "The way he hit that spring," Bobby Bonds, the Giants' hitting coach, said recently, "I made the comment before the season started that he would hit 50 or more home runs, and people thought I was crazy. In a short season he wound up with 43. At the rate he was going, I feel that he would have broken the record. We'll never know the answer to that. He may not have done it, but in my personal gut I really believe he would have if we had played a full season."

The National Association of Securities Dealers proudly announced last week that it had ordered Franklin N. Wolf, the erstwhile proprietor of F. N. Wolf & Company, a defunct penny stock firm, to repay $7.8 million the N.A.S.D. found had been wrongly taken from customers. And it fined him $250,000. Unfortunately, the odds are that the fine won't be paid. And the customers may not get any money either.

THE town of Heath, Mass., is the kind of place where a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story might be filmed. In early spring, its village green appears bleak and pure, an assemblage of white clapboard mid-19th century buildings: a community hall that offers square dancing every other Saturday and a former church without a steeple that now houses the three selectmen, the town clerk, the library and the post office. Down the street, the old Center School House, its stern white sides also covered with clapboard, is a town museum.