to ban communism from itself?

Prior to this class I had always though of Gorbachev as Russian who finally realized that communism doesn’t work. I don’t’ believe this to be the case any more, though considering his predecessors, his liberal demeanor still astonished me for the better. In the Transcript of Russian Federation Duma Session with USSR President Gorbachev, Gorbachev mentions that he was asked “whether socialism should be banned from the USSR and the Communist Party disbanded as a criminal organization.” I was rather shocked to read this. That socialism and the Communist party can be outlawed in Russia perplexes me since less than half a century before socialism and the Communist party were considered more important than the state itself. Gorbachev plainly states that he cannot dissolve the communist party, because he “will never agree to qualify millions of workers and peasants as criminals” and not for the glory and survival of communism. If such a thing had been even referenced to Stalin, it would have been a very different situation for the person who asked the question.