ABSTRACT
The Communist Party was mentioned as an important institution, and opponents were accused of being "bourgeois" and seeking to "restore capitalism." Mikhail Gorbachev found himself occupying a narrowing middle in the evolving political spectrum. He found himself faced with an increasingly coherent conservative movement beginning with the Russian Republic Communist Party's founding Congress in mid-1990, dissatisfied groups from the Party, the military, the KGB, the defense industry, state farms, and the cultural world began to join in an informal but quite powerful conservative coalition. The right has complained bitterly that Gorbachev betrayed them by flinching when the Vilnius coup resulted in violence. Gorbachev seems to understand that the forces of the old order have demonstrated their weakness as well as their power. Gorbachev has already been in power longer than the four American presidents who served between Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan.
