ABSTRACT
On 11, 14, and 18 April Gorbachev met in three sessions with the regional CPSU secretaries in Moscow to discuss, among other things, "the progress of preparations for the 19th All-Union CPSU Conference." 1 These were highly unusual meetings. No reports on the proceedings, or even on the topics discussed, were published except for a brief report in PRAVDA of 21 April 1988 that such a meeting had taken place. However, because the meeting coincided with the peak of the "newspaper war," as Gorbachev's campaign against the conservative opposition following the publication of PRAVDA's 5 April editorial was universally called, it could be assumed that, borne by his enhanced popularity and apparent Politburo support, Gorbachev intended to use the meeting to brief the secretaries before the election of conference delegates. It seems plausible that Gorbachev presented to the secretaries at least some of the political reforms that he intended to propose at the conference in order to recruit their support. This assumption was indeed confirmed in Gorbachev's second speech at the conference, on 30 June, in which he spoke of his April meeting with the secretaries and admitted to having offered to make the secretaries heads of their respective soviets, an idea that the secretaries received at best with mixed feelings. 2 Incidentally, the need to convince the secretaries and give them time to digest the idea might explain the unusual 2- and 3-day intervals between the sessions. In any event, the official statement on the meeting merely revealed that "the participants stressed the urgent need to deepen the process of restructuring and persistently conduct the struggle for full and consistent realization of a radical economic reform" and that they
were united in their understanding of the basic mutual link between the success of restructuring and determined implementation of the party policy of comprehensive democratization of social life, expansion of glasnost' and development of interparty democracy, enhancement of the role of the soviets of people's deputies and drawing in the broad masses of the working people into these processes. 3
