ABSTRACT
Andrei Sakharov made significant pronouncements on the Soviet political system in his campaign program. He demanded direct election of the chairman and deputies to the Supreme Soviet. At the Party Conference Leonid Abalkin, director of the Economic Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, criticized Mikhail Gorbachev's proposal to have one person hold the two offices of first party secretary and chairman of a soviet. At the Party Conference, for example, the editor-in-chief of the magazine Znamia Grigorii Baklanov had criticized the fact that Politburo candidates had had to learn of the entry of Soviet troops into Afghanistan from the newspapers. The idea behind the reform of the Soviet political system is an attempt at a partial resuscitation of the system of soviets in Lenin's constitution of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1918.
