would not build an equivalent. After
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Moscow refused, the United States deployed in Europe two kinds of INF: cruise missiles that could fly in under Soviet radar, and ballistic missiles with warheads able to reach Kremlin bomb shelters.
Seeking better relations with the West, Gorbachev put aside his objections to the U.S. quest for antimissile defenses. Gorbachev and Reagan in 1987 signed a treaty that obliged both countries to destroy all their ground- based missiles, both ballistic and cruise, with a range of 500 to 5,500 kilometers. To reach zero, the Kremlin had to remove more than three times as many warheads and destroy more than twice as many missiles as Washington, a process both sides completed in 1991. Skeptics noted that each side retained other missiles able to do the same work as those destroyed and that INF warheads and guidance systems could be recycled. See also: COLD WAR; STRATEGIC ARMS LIMITATION TREATIES; STRATEGIC DEFENSE INITIATIVE; ZERO-OPTION
Clemens, Walter C., Jr. (1990). Can Russia Change? The USSR Confronts Global Interdependence. New York: Routledge. FitzGerald, Frances. (2000). Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War. New York: Simon amp; Schuster. Herf, Jeffrey. (1991). War by Other Means: Soviet Power, West German Resistance, and the Battle of Euromissiles. New York: Free Press. Talbott, Strobe. (1985). Deadly Gambits. New York: Vintage/Random House. Wieczynski, Joseph L., ed. (1994). The Gorbachev Encyclopedia: Gorbachev, the Man and His Times. Los Angeles: Center for Multiethnic and Transnational Studies. Wieczynski, Joseph L., ed. (1994). The Gorbachev Reader. Los Angeles: Center for Multiethnic and Transnational Studies.
WALTER C. CLEMENS JR.
The United States in 1984 initiated a program to build a space station-a place to live and work in space-and invited its allies in Europe, Japan, and Canada to participate in the project, which came to be called “Freedom.” In 1993 the new presidential administration of Bill Clinton seriously considered canceling the station program, which had fallen behind schedule and was over budget. Space officials in Russia suggested as an alternative that the United States merge its space station program with the planned Russian Mir-2 program.
The United States accepted this suggestion and made it a key element of the redesign of what came to be called the International Space Station (ISS). The existing partners in the Freedom program issued a formal invitation to Russia to join the station partnership, which Russia accepted in December 1993.
There were both political and technical reasons for welcoming Russia into the station program. The Clinton administration saw station cooperation as a way of providing continuing employment for Russian space engineers who otherwise might have been willing to work on improving the military capabilities of countries hostile to the United States. Cooperation provided a means to transfer funds into the struggling Soviet economy. It was also intended as a signal of support by the White House for the administration of President Boris Yeltsin.
In addition, Russia brought extensive experience in long-duration space flight to the ISS program and agreed to contribute key hardware elements to the redesigned space station. The U.S. hope was that the Russian hardware contributions would accelerate the schedule for the ISS, while also lowering total program costs.
Planned Russian contributions to the ISS program include a U.S.-funded propulsion and storage module, known as the Functional Cargo Block, built by the Russian firm Energia under contract to the U.S. company Boeing. Russia agreed to pay for a core control and habitation unit, known as the service module; Soyuz crew transfer capsules to serve as emergency escape vehicles docked to the ISS; unmanned Progress vehicles to carry supplies to the ISS; two Russian research laboratories; and a power platform to supply power to these laboratories.
The Functional Cargo Block (called Zarya) was launched in November 1998, and Russia continued to provide a number of Soyuz and Progress vehicles to the ISS program. However, Russia’s economic problems delayed work on the service module (called Zvezda), and it was not launched until July 2000, two years behind schedule. As of
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January 2002, it was unclear whether Russia would actually be able to fund the construction of its two promised science laboratories and the associated power platform.
With the launch of Zvezda, the ISS was ready for permanent occupancy, and a three-person crew with a U.S. astronaut as commander and two Russian cosmonauts began a 4.5 month stay aboard in November 2000. Subsequent three-person crews are rotating between a Russian and a U.S. commander, with the other two crew members being from the other country. The crew size aboard ISS is planned to grow to six or seven after the European and Japanese laboratory contributions are attached to ISS sometime after 2005.
The sixteen-nation partnership in the ISS is the largest ever experiment in technological cooperation and provided a way for Russia to maintain its involvement in human space flight, which dates back to 1961, the year of the first person in space, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. See also: MIR SPACE STATION, SPACE PROGRAM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
National Aeronautics and Space Administration. (2002). “International Space Station.” http://spaceflight .nasa.gov/station. Progressive Management. (2001). “2001-The International Space Station Odyssey Begins: The Complete Guide to the ISS with NASA and Russian Space Agency Documents.” CD-ROM. Mount Laurel, New Jersey: Progressive Management.
INTOURIST See TOURIST.
The Inter-Regional Deputies’ Group (IRDG) took shape in June 1989 as a loose democratic grouping in the first USSR Congress of People’s Deputies. But its main historical achievements were the propagation of democratic ideas to the Soviet public, and its catalytic role as a focus and example for democratic groups. Its period of intense activity lasted less than a year. Its functions were soon superseded, primarily by the rise of the Democratic Russia movement. At the time of IRDG’s spontaneous emergence, its spokespersons took pains to deny that it was a faction that might divide the congress. However, by the time it held its founding conference on July 29-30, 1989, Soviet miners had launched a strike that put forward political as well as economic demands and radicalized political thinking among Soviet democrats. The IRDG realized that its original goal of merely pressuring the Communist Party into conducting reforms no longer fit the mood of those elements in a society that favored change. Now it needed to campaign for what the former dissident Andrei Sakharov had demanded at the congress: the repeal of Article Six of the Soviet Constitution, which legitimized the political monopoly of the Communists. Only such repeal would allow the emergence of a variety of constitutionally legitimate parties, and thus open the door to radical change.
This principle, coupled with the IRDG’s insistence on the right of the union republics to exercise the sovereignty to which they were already entitled on paper, became the two main planks of the IRDG’s initial program. Later, principles such as support for a market economy and private property were added.
The founding conference, attended by 316 of the congress’s 2,250 deputies, saw much debate on whether the IRDG should constitute itself as a faction, and whether it should define itself as an opposition. The majority, convinced by historian Yuri Afanasiev’s proposition that Marxism-Leninism was unreformable, was inclined to answer these questions in the affirmative. Organizationally, 269 of those present joined the new group and elected as their leaders five co-chairmen and a coordinating council of twenty. The co-chairmen comprised Afanasiev; Sakharov; the politically reascendant Boris Yeltsin; the economist and future mayor of Moscow, Gavriil Popov; and- to symbolize the IRDG’s commitment to the sovereignty of the union republics-the Estonian Viktor Palm.
Over the next months the IRDG held meetings at which numerous speeches were made and many draft laws proposed. However, partly because its most ambitious politician, Yeltsin, usually chose to act independently of the IRDG, the group proved unable to channel all this activity into practical action. Soon it realized that factional activity in the congress was not feasible for a small group that never numbered more than four hundred. Some of its members, notably Yeltsin, saw that the upcoming elections to the fifteen new republican conIRAN, RELATIONS WITH gresses, scheduled for early 1990, held out more promise of real political change than did the USSR congress. Others, such as Sakharov and Afanasiev, rejected this approach, which was inevitably tinged with ethnic nationalism, in favor of uniting democrats and promoting democratization throughout the whole of the USSR.
