From political reform to systemic transformation
New concepts and a greatly enhanced freedom were accompanied by institutional change. The point at which the policy pursued by Gorbachev and his supporters moved beyond an attempt to reform the existing system was in the run-up to the Nineteenth Party Conference in the summer of 1988. Encouraged by the removal of Boris Yeltsin in November 1987 from his post as Moscow party chief after he had criticised the party leadership and, in particular, Ligachev at a Central Committee meeting the previous month, conservatives within the CPSU Central Committee began to fight back against the developing radicalism of Gorbachev's reforms.[18] (Yeltsin saw himself as being in the vanguard of perestroika, although his emphasis at that time was more on a greater social egalitarianism than on democracy. Gorbachev was the first to call for competitive elections.)
In early 1988 the apparatus backlash against radical reform became more apparent. A letter appeared under the name of Nina Andreeva, a hitherto unknown Leningrad lecturer, in Sovetskaia Rossiia on 13 March 1988, which attacked the processes under way in Russia from a neo-Stalinist standpoint. It received immediate support from within the Central Committee apparatus. Its publication date was deliberately chosen for a Sunday just before Gorbachev left for Yugoslavia and Yakovlev for Mongolia. In their absence Ligachev commended the article to journalists as 'a benchmark for what we need in our ideology today'.[19] There was a gap between publication of this document, which appeared to many to portend a dramatic change of official course, and its rebuttal. Most Russian intellectuals, including some who were later to criticise Gorbachev for 'half-measures' and 'indecisiveness', waited to see which way the wind was blowing. On Gorbachev's insistence, the Politburo discussed the Andreeva letter at a session that lasted for two days and it turned out that at least half the membership were basically sympathetic to the anti-reformist line it had expressed.[20] It was not until 5 April that an article appeared in Pravda rebutting 'Andreeva' point by point. It was given additional party authority by being unsigned, though it was drafted by Yakovlev, with the participation of Gorbachev, and represented a clear victory for the reformist wing of the leadership.
This, in turn, enabled Gorbachev, with particularly important help both from Yakovlev and from his recently appointed adviser on reform of the political system, Shakhnazarov, to radicalise the political agenda and to oversee the production of documents presaging far-reaching reform that were presented to the Nineteenth Party Conference in June 1988. The conference itself produced more open debate than had occurred at a party forum since the 1920s. Politburo members Mikhail Solomentsev, Gromyko and Ligachev were criticised by name and Gorbachev, though not yet explicitly named as someone guilty of social democratic deviation from Communist orthodoxy, was the clear implicit target of several critical speeches from conservative Communists. Nevertheless, at that time the party remained notably hierarchical and Gorbachev still benefited from the authority traditionally enjoyed by the General Secretary. As a result, he was able to get the conference delegates to approve reforms that were both against the inner judgement of many of them and which constituted a fundamental departure from Soviet practice. The most important decision was to move to contested elections for a new legislature, the Congress of People's Deputies, which would in turn elect an inner body, the Supreme Soviet. The latter was to be in session for some eight months of the year - unlike the existing rubber-stamp Supreme Soviet which met for only a few days each year.
Until these elections were held in March 1989 the political institutional changes constituted what Yakovlev and many others have called a 'revolution from above'.[21] The elections, however, galvanised Soviet society - some republics and nations more than others - and brought entirely new actors on to the political stage. They also provided the opportunity for one demoted politician, Boris Yeltsin, who had remained a nominal member of the Central Committee, to make a spectacular comeback and begin his ascent to power. Yeltsin stood for election in a constituency that comprised the whole of Moscow and he overwhelmingly defeated the favoured candidate of the party apparatus. A third of the seats were reserved for candidates from 'public organisations' (which ranged from the Communist Party itself to the Academy of Sciences and the Writers' Union and Film-Makers' Union). This was both a concession to institutional interests within the Soviet system and also, in the minds of some reformers, a way of getting talented people from outside the political class into the new legislature. Among the deputies chosen from the Academy of Sciences was Andrei Sakharov. In the ballot by the electorate as a whole for the remaining two-thirds of the deputies, there was real contestation between two or more candidates in a majority of seats. About a quarter of the constituencies had only one name on the ballot paper. This, however, did not guarantee election, for the support of more than half of those voting was required. A number of officials, who had contrived to have no competitor, found themselves spurned. Among those thus defeated was a candidate member of the Politburo, Iurii Solov'ev, in Leningrad.[22] These first contested national elections marked a breakthrough to real political pluralism in the Soviet Union and kindled great public enthusiasm. The voter turn-out was higher than for any subsequent Russia-wide election up to and including the presidential election of 2004. Only a minority of those elected to the new Soviet legislature were committed to further transformative change, but some of those who were formed the Inter-Regional Group of Deputies which numbered Sakharov, Yeltsin, and the historian Iurii Afanas'ev among its leaders.
Other elections followed - in 1990 for the legislatures of all fifteen republics of the Soviet Union (which saw Yeltsin emerge as chairman ofthe Supreme Soviet of the Russian Republic) and in 1991 for newly created republican presidencies. The most important of those elections was in June 1991 when Yeltsin got more votes than all his opponents put together to become president of the Russian Republic and the first popularly elected leader in Russian history. In March I990 the institution of the presidency had been created at the level of the Soviet Union. There was debate among reformers whether this should be a nationwide election or an indirect election by the legislature, the Congress of People's Deputies. Even a number of reformers (including the distinguished scholar, Academician Dmitrii Likhachev) urged Gorbachevto opt forthe latter. Some were for prompt indirect election on the grounds that, with tension rising as a result ofnationalist discontent and economic problems, the sooner a new executive was formed the better. Other supporters of Gorbachev were worried that he could lose the election, although it was in May 1990 that Yeltsin for the first time moved ahead of Gorbachev in the surveys conducted by the All-Soviet (later All-Russian) Institute for Public Opinon (VTsIOM), the most reliable of the opinion pollsters at the time. Gorbachev's election by the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR to become the Soviet Union's first executive president in March 1990 was a tactical victory, but probably a strategic error. If he had competed in a general election and won, he would have greatly strengthened his legitimacy in an era - which he himself had inaugurated - when this could no longer be conferred by the practice of seven decades whereby a group of senior Communist Party officials got together behind closed doors and chose the party leader who then automatically became the country's leader.
18
For the transcript of the Central Committee meeting which led to Yeltsin's removal from his Moscow party post and from candidate membership of the Politburo (although he remained a member of the Central Committee), see
19
For a more detailed account of the 'Nina Andreeva affair', see Brown,
20
For the main points of that discussion, see 'O stat'e N. Andreevoi i ne tol'ko o nei', in M. S. Gorbachev,
21
See e.g. Aleksandr Iakovlev,
22
Stephen White, Richard Rose and Ian McAllister,