be chosen by the people in a secret ballot. It was
not democracy yet, for the candidates would all
be vetted and had to be approved by an official
selection committee, but for the Soviet Union it
was a vital break with the past. Similar elections
were to be held in factories to select managers.
Gorbachev also proposed the holding of another,
the nineteenth, national party conference.
The year 1987 also witnessed cautious initia-
tives in the field of economic reform. Gorbachev
contemplated some form of leasehold of agricul-
tural land. Small private businesses were allowed
to start; a few individuals became wealthy. The
free-enterprise cooperative movement grew from
small beginnings to 133,000 concerns in 1989,
employing 3 million people, but they were con-
strained from developing fully. The state, directly
or indirectly, was still the employer of the over-
whelming mass of the Soviet peoples, and it was
still the most important customer. Attempts to
make the state sector of the economy more effi-
cient by such measures as the Law of State
Enterprises in June 1987, which removed the
detailed control of central planners, ended in dis-
aster. Reform was slow and half-hearted. Prices
were not set by the market and the consumer but
by the state planners. Genuine cost accounting
was lacking. This, coupled with less draconian
party control, threatened the economy with the
worst of both worlds: it was no longer compre-
hensively planned nor was it a market economy.
The government continued to print money to
ease workers’ discontent and so, with too many
roubles chasing too few goods, produced sky-
high prices on the black and free markets; mean-
while, deliveries at state prices were diminishing,
as the goods were illegally diverted to the more
profitable free market. Resistance to more funda-
mental and rapid reform was strong. The radical
reformers and economists such as Yeltsin were
locked in battle with the conservatives and reac-
tionaries. Gorbachev now inclined to caution.
Another serious problem was surfacing in 1987
- nationalist and ethnic unrest in the republics.
In August that year there were large-scale demon-
strations in the Baltic republics, Lithuania, Latvia
and Estonia, which had been annexed by the
Soviet Union in 1940 after a pact concluded with
Hitler. In the following year the demand for
autonomy grew stronger. The Estonian parlia-
ment claimed the right to veto laws passed by
the Supreme Soviet on national issues. In the
Caucasus the Christian Armenians of Nagorno-
Karabakh became embroiled in internecine con-
flict with Muslim Azerbaijan, in whose republic
they formed an enclave; demonstrations followed
and blood was shed. The troubles spread to the
republic of Armenia, and Moscow ceased to be
fully in control. The ethnic conflicts presented a
serious threat to Gorbachev’s reforms because
they were likely to provoke a conservative back-
lash against the greater freedom from central party
control which lay at the heart of his perestroika;
he told the Armenians they were stabbing him in
the back. He also recognised that to reopen now
the question of frontiers between the republics
threatened unstoppable conflict. He was there-
fore unsympathetic to the nationalist agitation,
whether it arose in the Caucasus or in the Baltic.
Gorbachev achieved a major international
success in 1987. After the Reykjavik failure, nego-
tiations between Washington and Moscow con-
tinued. By the close of the year agreement was
reached on getting rid of two whole classes of
nuclear missiles, those of intermediate and short
range. A treaty recording their agreement in prin-
ciple was signed in Washington by Reagan and
Gorbachev. It was an important moment: confi-
dence was being built up.
The Nineteenth Party Conference, summoned
by Gorbachev, brought on 28 June 1988 to
Moscow from all over the country 5,000 party
members, most of them conservatives. Despite all
the efforts of the Communist Party organisation, a
minority of radicals had made it too. Among them
was Boris Yeltsin, who secured his election in
Karelia. Nor had the elections of delegates every-
where been the tame pre-ordained affairs of the
past. There were public demonstrations in a num-
ber of cities against the party’s tactics – that in
Moscow’s Pushkin Square attracted worldwide
attention. Radicals within the party had formed the
Democratic Union, whose objective was to create
a multi-party democratic parliamentary system.
Many of these were among the 2,000 people who
had gathered in Pushkin Square. Heavy-handed
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