ABSTRACT
In January 1989 the Central Committee of the Communist Party published a directive, which it proudly described as its election platform. Mikhail Gorbachev himself approved all the names on the party list. To give it a faint whiff of choice, 641 “electors,” composed of Central Committee members and specially invited guests, were eventually allowed to vote for or against each candidate. The elections were a quest for legitimacy, a bid to renovate a tottering system and the party which was its main pillar, but the first one hundred deputies were tainted even before the Congress assembled. The new electoral law, passed on 1 December 1988, contained several protective “filters,” agreed to by Gorbachev to placate anxious members of the Politburo. Boris Yeltsin had taken 89 per cent of the vote in Moscow, aided by huge demonstrations of supporters in the streets and the clumsy intimidation campaign of the party hierarchy.
