powers of appointment in favour of elections. If he had left the local party committees to themselves, he would never have achieved the political and economic goals he had set for the communist party.
Nor could Gorbachev lightly overlook the danger posed by Ligachev and other leaders who opposed further radicalization of reforms. The January 1987 Central Committee plenum had taken the decision to convoke a Party Conference. Gorbachev hoped that such a Conference, scheduled to meet in mid-1988, would change the composition of the Central Committee. For the Central Committee elected in 1986 still consisted mainly of functionaries appointed in the Brezhnev years. The ‘nests’ had selected anti-perestroika delegates to the Conference; and indeed, while Gorbachev was meeting President Reagan in Vladivostok, the communist party rank-and-file in the same city rebelled against their corrupt provincial party secretary. Gorbachev spoke up for the rebels. He also signed letters of reference for prominent Moscow-based supporters of his policies such as the historian Yuri Afanasev.
He also made a further advance with economic reform. The Law on the State Enterprise had come into effect in January 1988; and in May the Law on Co-operatives had been passed whereby co-op members could set their own prices and make their own deals both in the USSR and abroad. Certainly the fiscal disincentives were strong, and the local soviets were entitled to deny official registration to the co-ops. Yet the Law’s significance was undeniable. For the first time in six decades it was permitted to set up urban manufacturing and service-sector enterprises that were not owned by the state.
Gorbachev confidently opened the Nineteenth Party Conference on 28 June 1988 even though he had only half-succeeded in getting his supporters elected as delegates. His theses called for a strict functional separation between the party and the soviets. At the Conference he defined this more closely. He wanted to disband the economic departments in the Central Committee Secretariat and to reduce the size of the party apparatus in Moscow. At the same time the Supreme Soviet, which had had only an honorific role, was to become a kind of parliament with over 400 members who would be in session most of the year and be chosen from a Congress of People’s Deputies consisting of 2,250 persons. As a sop to the Party Conference, Gorbachev proposed that while two thirds of the deputies should be elected through universal suffrage, one third should be provided by ‘public organizations’ including the communist party.20
His assault on the party’s prerogatives was relentless. Among his most startling suggestions was that local party first secretaries should automatically submit themselves for election to the parallel soviet chairmanship. He gave the impression that he expected such secretaries to retain their personal power. Yet privately he hoped that the electorate would use their votes to get rid of his opponents in the party.
Gorbachev’s audience consisted of delegations led by precisely the sort of communist party officials he wished to eliminate. The implications of his proposal were understood and resented by them; and whereas Ligachev received a rapturous reception from the Conference, Gorbachev was applauded only at the few points where he made comments of a conservative content. And then something unexpected occurred which enraged his critics still further: back from political oblivion came Boris Yeltsin. Uncertain that he would be allowed to address the Conference, he came down to the foot of the platform waving his party card. Gorbachev made a gesture to him to take a seat in the front row of the hall until there was an opportunity for him to speak; and on this occasion Yeltsin chose his words with care, endorsing practically all Gorbachev’s proposals and humbly asking to be rehabilitated as a leader.
Critics were angry that Yeltsin should be picking up the pieces of his political career. After a pause in the Conference proceedings, Ligachev led the counter-attack.21 Yeltsin’s record was torn to shreds. Even his career as a provincial party secretary in Sverdlovsk was mocked. Summing up the case for the prosecution, Ligachev asserted: ‘You, Boris, are not right!’ The Conference took Ligachev’s side and Yeltsin was refused his request to be re-admitted to the supreme party leadership.
Gorbachev had already dropped his plan to change the Central Committee’s composition at the Conference; but he would make no further concessions to Ligachev and insisted that the Conference should ratify his draft theses. And he had a final trick up his sleeve. Or rather he had it in his pocket. At the end of the Conference he pulled out a scrap of paper on which was scribbled his schedule for implementing the constitutional amendments. Without this, the central and local party apparatuses would have engaged in endless procrastination. Gorbachev wanted the amendments to be in place by autumn 1988 and a general election to be held in spring 1989, followed by republican and local elections in the autumn. The internal reorganization of the party was set to occur by the end of 1988. Gorbachev resumed his masterful tone: ‘That’s how the draft resolution comes out. It seems to me simply vitally necessary to accept this resolution, comrades.’22 The delegates gave their approval before being given a chance to think about the consequences. Change was coming, and coming fast.
The Conference decisions embodied an important reorientation of Gorbachev’s strategy. The party was being dropped as the vanguard of perestroika. Instead Gorbachev wished to rule through a Congress of People’s Deputies elected by the people. The size and functions of the central party apparatus were sharply diminished at a Central Committee plenum held in September 1988. The same plenum left Vadim Medvedev instead of Ligachev in charge of ideology and gave Yakovlev a supervisory role on the party’s behalf in international affairs. Gromyko was pushed into retirement in October and replaced as Chairman of the USSR Supreme Soviet by Gorbachev himself (who refrained from redesignating the office as President until March 1990). The Soviet Union remained a one-party state; but the party as such had abruptly lost much of its power.
The Politburo was preoccupied by this domestic transformation. Not even Ligachev — nor even, come to mention it, Yeltsin — badgered Gorbachev about developments in Eastern Europe. The common feeling of Soviet political leaders was that the USSR’s affairs should have priority of attention. Gorbachev had set down the general line. On coming to power, he had advised the various leaderships of Warsaw Pact countries that the USSR would no longer interfere in their affairs.23 But beyond this his comments on Eastern Europe were of a general nature. In 1985 he was still not averse to praising the anti-reform economic policies of the German Democratic Republic. Thereafter he spoke more fervently in favour of reforms in Eastern Europe. But his working assumption was that the communist leaderships of each country in the region had to find their own most suitable mode of political and economic transformation. He studiously avoided instructing the Warsaw Pact countries to follow the specific model of the USSR.
Gorbachev held to his belief that the Soviet-style compound, once reconstituted, would flourish in Eastern Europe. He showed his priorities by his choice of places to visit and politicians to meet. In November 1985 he travelled to meet President Reagan in Geneva and in October 1986 they met again in Reykjavik. Not until April 1987 did Gorbachev visit East Berlin and Prague. And in March 1988 he took a trip to Belgrade. In each of these East European capitals he was feted by crowds. It was obvious to him and his entourage that people were using his public appearances as an opportunity to manifest their resentment of their own communist regimes.
Nevertheless Gorbachev, Shevardnadze and Yakovlev continued to shape policy towards Eastern Europe without offering direct criticism of their counterparts in these countries. They even avoided leaning very hard on the parties and governments to replace their leaders. When the Bulgarian communist reformer Petar Mladenov approached Gorbachev for advice as to how to replace the ageing hierarch Todor Zhivkov, Gorbachev cut short the conversation.24 Gorbachev would have preferred Mladenov to Zhivkov as Bulgaria’s leader; but the Soviet General Secretary wanted to avoid being seen to intervene. Thus he confirmed that what he had said confidentially to Warsaw Pact leaders in March 1985 had been intended seriously: non-interference was a reality. Even as late as his Prague trip, in April 1987, Gorbachev fastidiously stated: ‘We are far from intending to call on anyone to imitate us.’25 So glasnost and perestroika were not commodities for obligatory export. But what, then, was meant to happen in Eastern Europe?
Zhivkov and his fellow veterans in the region asked the same question. They hated Gorbachev’s perestroika. Erich Honecker in the German Democratic Republic and Gustav Husak in Czechoslovakia, who was nationally hated for doing the USSR’s dirty business for years, felt betrayed. Even Janos Kadar in Hungary was troubled by the prospect of the introduction of political and cultural freedoms on the current Soviet paradigm. Yet Gorbachev still desisted from openly attacking them. He contented himself with destabilizing the political compounds and standing back to observe the consequences. This was like a trainee chemist running amok in a laboratory. He was dealing with ingredients which, once tampered with, became volatile and unpredictable. If there remained doubts that Gorbachev would go further than Khrushchev in reforming foreign policy, a glance at the disintegrating communist order in Eastern Europe dispelled them.
It is mysterious how Gorbachev persuaded himself that his version of ‘communism’ would emerge in a strengthened condition. The main explanation seems to be that he and Foreign Minister Shevardnadze simply
