370 THE END OF THE COLD WAR
suggested that their best option would be to invite leading members of
the Congress to Moscow. He pointed to the important changes that
were quietly occurring. Among other things, the Strategic Defense
Initiative, which Brown had always opposed, was being scaled back.
He urged the Soviet leadership to widen its spectrum of contacts and
reach out to sympathetic politicians in Washington.^41
While Bush probed the old question about Moscow’s reliability,
Soviet leaders were asking a new one about themselves: could the
USSR resolve its gathering economic emergency and put an end to its
political volatility?
The long-awaited elections to the Congress of People’s Deputies
took place in March 1989 after some hustings that were frequently
uproarious. Although no opposition parties were allowed to stand,
plenty of dissenters found their way on to the ballot sheets and won
seats. Thirty-eight province-level party secretaries were defeated. The
party bosses in Kiev, Minsk and Alma-Ata suffered the same fate.
Gorbachëv refused to overturn the results. The communist political
establishment experienced a momentous humiliation. Nevertheless, the
Congress was going to contain many deputies who resented the course
of the reforms. Eighty-eight per cent of them were communist party
members and a sizeable section of them wanted a complete change
of official policy.^42 A faction calling itself Soyuz (or Union) was to
gather around military commanders such as Nikolai Petrushenko and
demanded a more assertive approach in international relations than
Gorbachëv and Shevardnadze had adopted. At the same time, on the
other side of the political spectrum, were deputies who demanded a
faster pace of reform. These were about to establish the so-called
Inter-Regional Group in the Congress – and Yeltsin, who gained a
crushing victory in his Moscow constituency, associated himself with
them. Gorbachëv had brought a noisy, divided parliament into exis-
tence. Politics would never be the same again as he made himself
Chairman of the Congress’s Supreme Soviet.
Political volatility spread throughout the USSR as Moscow’s
authority shrank. National assertiveness was on the rise, and demon-
strations laid down a challenge to the Georgian communist leadership
under Dzhumber Patiashvili. Reverting to old Soviet ways, Patiashvili
called in the troops. The army commander ordered them to use force
in breaking up a protest in Tbilisi on 9 April 1989. Twenty demonstra-
tors were killed, hundreds were wounded. This cleared the streets
but led to commotion throughout Georgia. The Soviet republic was