The next significant moment in the downward arc of the CPSU occurred at its Twenty-eighth Congress in mid-1990. In the lead-up to the Congress, the Party continued to unravel rapidly. The Party began losing the working class. Workers began “voting with their feet” and leaving. According to Graeme Gill, at the CPSU Moscow city conference only 7.2 percent of delegates were workers. “From the industrial oblast of Yaroslavl not one industrial worker was sent as a delegate to the national congress.”503 Angry at worsening conditions, workers wondered, “Why …was economic reform begun with changes that hurt workers?”504 In early 1990, the hemorrhage of Party membership accelerated. The Party grassroots loudly criticized the abandonment of Marxism-Leninism, something overlooked by those who attach great importance to the claim that few Soviet workers defended the system (a matter discussed more fully in Chapter 7 and the Epilogue). Graeme Gill wrote that in the lead-up to the Twenty-eighth Congress, “The reaffirmation of faith in Marxism-Leninism accompanied by the charge that the ideals of the party had been turned upside down was a common line of complaint against the party leadership at this time.”505
In the first half of 1990, organized CPSU factions crystallized. The Democratic Platform dominated by white-collar workers and professionals favored turning the CPSU into a parliamentary social democratic party. The misnamed Marxist Platform favored a market economy. Internal surveys carried out by the Party in May 1990 suggested that a growing segment of the Party base believed that its leaders were corrupt and did not believe that the Soviet government could stop the economic decline. More than half of those polled no longer saw the Party as the country’s leading political force.506
Convening in July 1990, the Twenty-eighth Congress of the CPSU represented the last pitched battle at a Party Congress over Gorbachev’s policies. The Congress, however, did nothing to slow the General Secretary’s revisionist march. The Congress marked another step for a Party rapidly losing both its mission and its working class base. The non-Communist media set the Party agenda. Debate occurred not over “whether the market economy?” but “what sort of market economy?” The Congress rendered the Politburo mostly ineffective. By acknowledging a new freedom of Party organizations in the union republics to review CPSU decisions and to work out their own Party programs, the Congress aided separatism. The Congress downgraded Marxism-Leninism as a source of ideological guidance and turned the Central Committee into a quasi-representative parliament, instead of the authoritative leadership body it had always been. The convention reduced the CC’s powers in relation to the General Secretary. The whole CPSU Congress rather than the CC now elected Gorbachev, making an ouster between elections more difficult, if not impossible. The right to form “platforms,” “seminars,” “clubs” in CPSU was acknowledged, though not “factions.” For opponents of Gorbachev, this was merely a semantic victory. Factions were already forming. The anti-revisionists also won a battle to keep the Party organization in the military and a meaningless verbal commitment to democratic centralism.
At the Twenty-eighth Congress Ligachev failed to get elected as Deputy General Secretary and withdrew from active, public CPSU work. Yeltsin ostentatiously left the CPSU, as did such noted “democrats” as Leningrad mayor Anatoly Sobchak, Moscow mayor Gavril Popov, and ex-Marxist historian Yuri Afanasyev. The Democratic Platform withdrew from the CPSU but not before staking a claim to CPSU assets. On balance, the political complexion of the CPSU shifted farther in an anti-socialist direction after the Twenty-eighth Congress not only because of Gorbachev’s victories, but also because of the exodus of honest Communists. Anti-revisionists were giving up on the CPSU and devoting efforts to winning influence in the new Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF). In 1989, Ligachev helped found the Soviet Peasant Union, and in 1990 the CPRF.507 One reason Ligachev had stayed in the CPSU as long as he did was that he wanted to try one last attempt at reversing the direction of Party politics at the Twenty-eighth Congress. Ligachev played by the rules long after Gorbachev and Yakovlev had stopped. As late as May 1990, Ligachev wrote a letter to Gorbachev in which he declared his loyalty to perestroika, while appealing to Gorbachev to circulate the letter through the Politburo and CC leadership and heed his call to convene a CC Plenum on the crisis in the Party and the country.508 Gorbachev never circulated the letter.
After the Twenty-eighth Congress, from mid-1990 through August 1991, the Party “imploded.”509 The splintering into factions accelerated. Membership losses especially among workers mounted. Dues moneys, publication sales and other sources of Party income plummeted. Party finances worsened to near bankruptcy. Financial losses forced staff reductions that further weakened the organization’s influence. In the new state bodies Communist deputies manifested open disunity. Meanwhile, “democrats” pressed for the elimination of CPSU members from all state and social institutions. After August 1991 and the failure of the “August coup,” (discussed later) and the declaration of martial law by the Soviet government, the Party situation reached the nadir. Anti-CPSU hysteria in Soviet and world media exploded. A drive to outlaw the CPSU and confiscate its assets emerged and proved unstoppable. The CPSU’s fate was sealed.
Paralleling the Party’s dismemberment was the ruin of the military, as well as the Party’s influence in the military. In 1989-91, Gorbachev went after the CPSU’s influence in the Soviet military, which received intensive Marxist-Leninist ideological training compared to other sectors. Gorbachev and his associates viewed breaking the Party’s grip on the military as part of breaking its grip on the whole political system. The first step in “de-partification” was to change Soviet military doctrine, dumping the idea that deterrence depended on U.S.-Soviet weapons parity and that the USSR should aid Warsaw Pact allies and other fraternal socialist states. Soviet unilateral disarmament eroded military morale and conditions. Military disintegration came from three other circumstances: force reductions ordered by Gorbachev, hostile media coverage of military conditions, and resistance to conscription. In 1989 and 1990, officers started to quit in large numbers. In 1989-91 the Soviet armed forces shrank from 5.3 million to just under 4 million men. The demobilized men often returned to homelands with no jobs and no housing awaiting them. Meanwhile, Gorbachev moved ahead with plans to abolish the the Military Political Administration, the organ through which the CPSU organized itself in the armed forces. Though Ligachev and his allies managed to prevent the Twenty-eighth Congress from doing that, the disintegration of Party influence inexorably moved ahead.
What explained the faint-heartedness of CPSU leaders who resisted Gorbachev, their underdeveloped political skill, their transparent illusions,510 and the frequency with which they caved in and voted for policies they did not believe in? For a long time Gorbachev’s opponents had the votes to remove him, but did not act. The Politburo even rejected Gorbachev’s resignation.511 Reflecting later on a stormy meeting, Gorbachev loyalist Chernyaev wrote furiously, ”Did you think it [Gorbachev’s resignation offer] was blackmail? A game?” Noting that Gorbachev’s opponents were a big majority in the Politburo and Central Committee, Chernyaev taunted them after the fact: “The ‘collapse’ was only starting then; you could have “restored order”! But no! You had neither the guts nor any alternative concept.”512