ABSTRACT
Mikhail Gorbachev first suggested convening a party conference in January 1987. His object was to consolidate his hold on power mid obtain a mandate for his reform program. At the time of the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in 1986, he had lacked the authority to sweep out many of the holdovers from the Brezhnev era in the Central Committee; he had also been unable to introduce the kind of party reforms he thought desirable. V. Selivanov almost certainly spoke for the most radical reformers in Gorbachev's entourage. Since Gorbachev's election as party leader in 1985, his candid admission that the Soviet Union was heading for a crisis and his policies of glasnost and perestroika spurred members of the Soviet public to express an amazing range of opinions on how the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics should resolve its problems. Under the party rules, the powers of a party conference were extremely vaguely formulated.
