ABSTRACT
For twenty months and ten days Mikhail Gorbachev was the first and only president of the Soviet Union. His period in office appears, at first glance, as a mad roller-coaster ride of policy, a wild lurching from reform to repression and back. The method he would resort to most frequently was once analysed by Karl Marx. He called it the “miniature everyday coup,” designed to give the illusion of leadership and to distract the public from the underlying political or economic crisis. The scene chosen for many of Gorbachev’s so-called coups was the parliament he created. Indeed, under his presidency the Soviet legislature became, almost exclusively, the stage for political theatrics, directed first by Gorbachev and then against him. Gorbachev had abandoned the party hierarchy because he saw the real centres of power to be in the republics, and notably in the Russian Congress.
