In March 1989, the first public test of the new “radical political reform” occurred, the election for the Congress of People’s Deputies. According to Ligachev, the elections brought a self-inflicted debacle on the CPSU.484 Virtually no public discussion of the law on elections occurred. Moreover, the CC directed local and regional Party officials neither to interfere in the elections nor to mobilize their forces for candidates, calling such non-interference and non-mobilization “respect for democracy.” Central Party offices let local branches fend for themselves. Some CPSU candidates soon quarreled publicly among themselves. Though his assignment was international work, Yakovlev played a big role in the elections. The same was true of his ally, Vadim Medvedev. Vitali Vorotnikov, a Politburo member, observed the election rules were one-sidedly skewed against anti-revisionist Communists.485 Because the press had successfully attacked the principle of workplace elections, the March 1989 balloting led to results that over-represented intellectuals and under-represented workers and peasants.486 Forced to compete with one arm tied behind its back, the Party suffered severely.
Although 87 percent of the delegates to the Congress of People’s Deputies belonged to the Party, and many top officials won in their own right, many other Party leaders lost. Forty-four percent of the Party candidates who stood unopposed failed to gain the 50 percent of the vote required for election.487 The defeated included the mayors of Moscow and Kiev, Party chiefs in Kiev, Minsk, Kishinev, Alma Ata, Frunze, the Latvian prime minister, the president and prime minister of Lithuania, thirty-eight regional and district Party first secretaries, and almost the whole Leningrad Party leadership. In the Baltics, only Party candidates backed by national fronts won. Boris Yeltsin, still a Party member though not Party-backed, won a resounding 89 percent of the vote.488
Princeton historian John Dunlop has called the convening of the newly elected First Congress of People’s Deputies in May-June 1989 the event that “changed everything.”489 In a move without precedent, Gorbachev decided to televise the Congress. For thirteen days and nights, the proceedings transfixed two hundred million Soviet viewers. Obsessive TV viewing reduced economic output at the time by 20 percent.490
In the First Congress of People’s Deputies, the intelligentsia loudly pushed an agenda markedly different from Gorbachev’s. Andrei Sakharov demanded the abolition of the USSR Constitution’s Article Six, the constitutional entrenchment of the CPSU’s leading role. Yeltsin solemnly warned that a Gorbachev “dictatorship” loomed ahead. A Soviet athlete named Vlasov attacked the KGB’s “history of crimes.” A speaker named Karyakin demanded Lenin’s removal from his mausoleum on Red Square. Delegates denounced the one-party system. Some speakers disputed the ideas of Karl Marx and Das Kapital. Congress set up commissions to review the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact, and a massacre in Tbilisi. Political change accelerated from a “canter to a gallop.”491 After June 1989, more change occurred each month than had occurred from April 1985 to June 1989.
The proceedings of the Congress shook the self-confidence of the CPSU to its foundations. For millions, the Congress undermined the legitimacy of the Party, Soviet history, and the whole social order. It also emboldened socialism’s opponents. It pushed back the boundaries of the politically thinkable. Managed reform was over. Gorbachev became “a surfboarder of events.”492
In July 1989, the Soviet working class passed judgment on Gorbachev’s perestroika and the First Congress of People’s Deputies. In Kuzbas and Vorkuta in Russia, in Donbas in the Ukraine, and in Karaganda in Kazakhstan, a devastating mine strike erupted. Independent workers’ organizations launched the stoppage. From 1986 onward, they had grown up in industrial areas, outside the official trade union structure, just as the “informals” grew up in Moscow.493 The first mass labor unrest since the 1920s,494 the strike caused the Gorbachev leadership to tremble. Yeltsin, sensing populist opportunity, promptly began to work to win over the miners to the “democrat” cause. The iconoclastic atmosphere at the June Congress had helped to goad the miners into action, but, mainly, severe economic hardships drove them to the picket line. The ill-considered cutback in the state orders hit coal mining particularly hard because mines had to buy supplies at market prices, but they could sell coal only at fixed government prices.495 In 1989 miners chiefly demanded higher pay, although they also raised some political demands, for example, the ending of the central ministries’ control, freedom to set coal prices, and the repeal of Article Six of the USSR Constitution. In a few places, miners directly challenged the CP. Moscow felt so threatened by a strike in such a vast and pivotal industry, employing 1 million workers of a total workforce of 160 million, that for ten days three major institutions—the Party high command, the Supreme Soviet, and the Council of Ministers—did little else than try to work out how to grant the miners’ expensive demands.496 Soon, Moscow shipped vast quantities of soap, fresh meat, canned milk, sugar and animal fat to mining areas.
Meanwhile, Yeltsin, on the eve of his election as president of the Russian Federation, gained considerable support among miners. In April 1991 a new strike, more like a general strike than a mine strike, broke out. It was a crippling two-month stoppage affecting many sectors of basic industry in an already weakened Soviet economy. This time the miners’ demands reflected Yeltsin’s program, including demand for the resignation of the Soviet government. In a sign of Yeltsin’s rising authority, the strike ended only after Yeltsin transferred the mines from Soviet jurisdiction to Russian Federation jurisdiction. The new strike made Gorbachev even more accommodating than he had been to the surging strength of the Yeltsin camp.497
In 1989, diversity of opinion expressed in the Congress intensified the pressure on the Party to allow organized factions. The “democrat” argument was that multi-candidate elections within the Party were pointless unless candidates could differ on the issues. Already some Communist deputies to new legislative bodies publicly defied Party views. The Lithuanian CP, for example, differed with Gorbachev on Soviet unity. These developments raced ahead of CPSU internal discussions. The accomplished facts set the terms of debate over the handling of intra-Party differences.498 After the Party decided to permit organized factions, it was but a short step to permitting other political parties. Not far behind that, lurked the far bolder notion of permitting parties that opposed socialism and the Union state. As late as November 1989, Gorbachev rejected the possibility of a multi-party system. As the Central Committee reconsidered Article Six of the Constitution, a half-million strong “democrat” rally in Moscow, addressed by Boris Yeltsin, demanded an end to Article Six. At the CC Plenum in March 1990, Gorbachev reversed himself and did away with Article Six, and opened the way to new, legal parties.499
A crisis of confidence struck the CPSU. In 1989, its 19 million membership stopped rising, and in 1990 the number of members fell by more than 250,000. Passivity and paralysis seized the ranks. Opinion polls revealed a decline of the Party’s prestige, authority, and public support. By 1989 the CPSU was paying the price for its identification in the public eye with Gorbachev’s policies that were sowing hardship and uncertainty in the general population. Neither Gorbachev nor any top leader had any clear plan for dealing with these problems or reversing the Party’s fortunes.500
The CPSU had always had a diversity of ideas and ideological struggle, but following Lenin, it had avoided organized tendencies that would cripple the implementation of policy. Within the context of Leninism, contested elections inside and outside the CPSU were possible.501 There was no problem with a multi-party socialist state, provided that the working class party had the leading role, and the other parties accepted working class state power and socialism, that is, they were not counterrevolutionary. Multiparty systems existed in the GDR, Poland, Vietnam, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and North Korea.502 No socialist state could brook the legalization of anti-Communist parties whose aim was to reverse the results of the revolution.