ABSTRACT
The USSR Supreme Soviet rejected the oft-praised advantages of 'soviet-style government' and officially ended the country's failed political experiment. Despite the catalytic jolt of the coup, causes for the changes in Soviet politics clearly go deeper than the tanks that rumbled through Moscow or even what some have called Yeltsin's counter-coup. 'Democratic' or 'progressive' candidates, for the most part, tried to stay out of each other's way and concentrated their fire on the party. The new USSR Supreme Soviet was constitutionally required to implement the strategic course set by the Congress of People's Deputies. Demokratizatsiia was neither a 'Leninist' solution to the problems of the 'period of stagnation' nor a conscious process of democratic crafting. The Russian republic's presidential system was one product of republican battles with 'the center' and the inadequacies of'soviet power.' Mikhail S. Gorbachev's experiment with soviet government awakened civil society while giving republican political elites a legitimate institutional forum to press for sovereignty.
