ABSTRACT
Mikhail Gorbachev listened to the district leaders' complaints about the mayor's arbitrariness but avoided siding with them. Gavriil Popov, a member of the policy advisory council created to aid the President, was an important ally. In addition, since their college days he and Gorbachev had been bound together in a strange relationship of mutual attraction and repulsion that they could not quite bring themselves to terminate even at the most stressful points in their political lives. Gorbachev recalled that it was precisely those forces that had stopped Khrushchev when he had been on the verge of implementing real reforms. The critical nature of the situation prompted Gorbachev to invite an additional, last-minute participant he was counting on for support: public opinion. Gorbachev began by recapitulating the decisions he had made after the putsch, which had prevented "the worst from happening."
