Moscow, December 25, 1991

Yeltsin had to admit that he had Gorbachev to thank for his political resurrection. Stalin shot awkward comrades; Khrushchev pensioned them off; Brezhnev sent them as ambassadors to distant countries. “Gorbachev’s perestroika set a new precedent,” he conceded later. “A dismissed politician was given the chance to return to political life. New times were on the way, unpredictable and unfamiliar, in which I had to find a place for myself.”⁸

In four years Gorbachev had presided over an extraordinary liberalization of Soviet society. People could march, demonstrate, vote in elections, criticize the party, and enjoy a much freer press. By doing so he had, however, unleashed forces that threatened to destroy the party he led. Elected deputies would inevitably respond to the people who voted for them rather than members of an increasingly unpopular Communist Party apparatus. The conservatives trying to hold him back had no alternative policy, other than a return to the old ways, which meant repression and stagnation.

The People’s Congress opened on May 25, 1989, in the Palace of Congresses in the Kremlin. The ten days of debates were televised live on Gorbachev’s orders. He was stunned by the anger and vitriol that poured forth. On the first day viewers heard attacks on the KGB, criticism of Raisa, and calls for the removal of Lenin’s body from the Red Square Mausoleum. Siberian writer Valentin Rasputin electrified everyone by suggesting that Russia should one day leave the Union.

Deprived for so long of the right to even listen to such criticisms without risking arrest, people across the eleven time zones of the Soviet Union could not tear themselves away from their radios and televisions. Three years after emerging from exile as a dissident, Andrey Sakharov, selected as a deputy for the Academy of Sciences, was able to broadcast to the nation his call for a federal structure to replace the Soviet Union, in order to end the oppression suffered under the Stalinist model. There was outrage across the country when Gorbachev cut off the microphone as Sakharov was calling for a repeal of Article 6 of the Soviet constitution, which guaranteed the leading role of the Communist Party. Though Sakharov had run well over his time, many never forgave Gorbachev this one act of censorship, stilling the voice of conscience that had been silenced for years.

Gorbachev had nevertheless achieved a truly amazing feat in liberalizing debate about the future in a country where people had been gagged for most of the century. For the first time all the opposing and disparate elements of Soviet political life gathered in one place, free to say what they liked: hard-line communists, former dissidents, military officers, workers, scientists, academics, and intellectuals, not to mention a few Orthodox bishops and Muslim muftis.

Deputies and journalists mixed freely in the huge airy foyer draped with hanging ferns and at a gigantic buffet with one hundred and forty tables laden with savories and attended by two hundred and eighty waiters in identical white suits and bow ties. Dazed Politburo members found themselves besieged when they appeared among the crowd. The secretive Soviet leadership was suddenly accessible and diminished by being seen in the flesh.

The Congress was still subservient to the party and its leader, however. Hundreds of old-style communists had got themselves elected by posing as democrats. Historian Yury Afanasyev termed the body “Stalinist-Brezhnevite” in its overall makeup. Yeltsin preferred to term it “Gorbachevian, faithfully reflecting our chairman’s inconsistency, timidity, love of half measures and semi-decisions.”⁹

When it came to the election by the Congress members of a supreme soviet, a smaller body that would meet regularly to consider legislation, Yeltsin was consequently overlooked. Crowds came out on the streets of Moscow in a spontaneous protest. A deputy from Siberia, Alexey Kazannik, offered to give up his Supreme Soviet place to make way for Yeltsin. In the end, Gorbachev realized that denying the politician with the biggest single electoral mandate would make the Congress look ridiculous and ultimately bent the rules to allow what Yeltsin called a “castling” measure to take his seat in the upper body.

Nothing was the same for Soviet citizens after the sturm und drang of the Kremlin sessions. “On the day the Congress opened they were one sort of people,” observed Yeltsin. “On the day it closed, they were a different people. However negatively we assess the final result… the most important thing was achieved. Almost the entire population was awakened from its lethargy.”¹⁰