police attempts to remove the most militant
demonstrators were caught by the television cam-
eras, as was the crowd’s courageous insistence on
what were supposed to be guaranteed legal rights.
Gorbachev presided over the Conference,
doing his best to appear even-handed between
the large majority of communist conservatives and
passive middle-of-the-roaders, on the one hand,
and the small group of radicals, whose undoubted
star was Yeltsin, on the other. Gorbachev now
unfolded his radical reform plans for the party.
The party Secretariat would no longer supervise
government ministries; in this way party and state
would be separated. The Supreme Soviet would
be abolished, to be replaced by a Congress of
People’s Deputies. Two-thirds of its members
would be elected from a list of candidates ap-
proved by electoral committees; one-third were
to be nominated – 100 by the Communist Party,
the remainder by a variety of social organisations
ranging from the Academy of Sciences, which was
allocated twenty seats, to the Society of Stamp
Collectors and the Red Cross. It was a huge body
of 2,250 members. Its main function besides lis-
tening to speeches during its meetings (over just
two or three days a year) was to elect a (new)
Supreme Soviet of 400 to 450 members, chosen
from the deputies – a working parliament in
session for some eight months a year. The head
of state, responsible for the government, foreign
policy and defence, as well as for the party,
would be the chairman of the Supreme Soviet.
Gorbachev persuaded the party conference to
approve his plans, which enabled these constitu-
tional reforms to be implemented in time for the
Congress of People’s Deputies to be elected in
the spring of 1989.
The proceedings of the Conference were tele-
vised, providing a dramatic illustration of the
debate that Gorbachev’s democratisation was
encouraging in the Soviet Union. It was a specta-
cle unprecedented in Soviet history. Most notable
was the last day of the conference, when the bulky
figure of Boris Yeltsin insisted on being heard from
the rostrum. Gorbachev, presiding, could have
prevented him from speaking, but he chose not to.
Yeltsin argued for faster democratic progress, gen-
uine elections and the prosecution of corrupt
Communist Party bosses, the ‘millionaire bribe-
takers’. Perestroika, he advocated, should first
achieve success in one or two essential areas before
it was extended to others; the people, he said, were
losing faith, dismayed by the lack of progress.
Ligachev, the arch-conservative, rebutted Yeltsin’s
arguments and tried to ridicule him. He also
denied, unconvincingly, that the party bosses
enjoyed unwarranted luxuries. But the Soviet
peoples listening to the debate throughout the
USSR knew who was telling the truth. Through
the power of the media and by his courageous
confrontation Boris Yeltsin had again catapulted
himself to national attention as the ‘alternative’
reformer to Gorbachev, and his following grew. At
its close the Conference tamely approved Gorba-
chev’s constitutional proposals as the lesser of the
evils presented to them. Obedience to the general
secretary’s will was still the norm. The habits of
dictatorship served Gorbachev the reformer.
‘Democratisation’ was, for Gorbachev, creat-
ing not just a conflict between the communist
conservatives like Ligachev, who feared that the
party would lose control of the country, and the
radicals, who accused Gorbachev of wishing to
stop at a halfway stage between the old party
system and genuine democracy.
Gorbachev’s reforms were also creating a clash
with independent republics opposed to the
Kremlin’s central domination of the Union. In
the Baltic republics this independence movement
had rapidly gathered strength. The anniversary of
the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, which
had delivered the three Baltic republics, Latvia,
Estonia and Lithuania, into the Soviet sphere,
prior to their absorption in 1940 and 1941 into
the Soviet Union, became the occasion for
denunciation. A human chain linked the three
republics in a spectacular demonstration of soli-
darity. Popular fronts were formed between
independent-minded communists and nationalists
in the three states, the most forceful being the
Lithuanian Sajudis. Tentative declarations of sov-
ereignty in all three countries were condemned by
Gorbachev as ‘nationalist excesses’. Relations
between the Baltic representatives and Moscow
continued to deteriorate throughout the year.
Gorbachev believed that he could not give way