The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

For a few days after Vilnius, some Soviet citizens assumed and others feared that the conservatives had taken over, perestroika had ended, and the only remaining question was how fast, and how far, reforms would be rolled back. But Gorbachev continued his balancing act, over a precipice that seemed to grow only deeper: both sides were now sure at all times that he was unduly favoring the other. Gorbachev scheduled a referendum on the future of the country. The single question citizens of the USSR were asked to consider: "Do you believe it is necessary to preserve the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of sovereign republics with equal rights, where the rights and freedoms of people of all nationalities will be fully guaranteed?" It was not clear what the legal and practical consequences would be, or even what the question meant, since, with the exception of the words "renewed federation," it said the same thing as the existing Soviet constitution. Really, it was not so much a referendum as an opinion poll, with one poorly designed, overburdened question.

The Central Referendum Commission of the USSR reported that nearly 150 million people, or 80 percent of all eligible voters, took part in the referendum and that they overwhelmingly voted to preserve the Soviet Union: 76.4 percent said yes. Trouble was, all of these voters lived in nine of the fifteen republics. The Baltics and Armenia did not vote at all. In Georgia and Moldavia, the vote took place only in a couple of outlier regions. Kazakhstan offered an edited version of the referendum question, without the word "federation" or any reference to human rights.²⁸ The center no longer wielded sufficient power to compel different republics to coordinate efforts and questions on a referendum. There was little basis for concluding that a majority of citizens of the Soviet Union wanted the same thing, but Gorbachev interpreted the results as a mandate to draft a renewed union treaty. Yeltsin pressed on with the business of state- building in Russia. In late March—just ten days after the referendum —Gorbachev banned demonstrations in Moscow, to prevent a Yeltsin rally. Tanks blocked some of the streets in the center of the city. Demonstrators came out anyway, and no blood was shed. Once again, no one had won: the struggles between Yeltsin and Gorbachev, between the conservatives and the democrats, between the unionists and the pro-independence forces continued, almost ploddingly. On June 12, Yeltsin was overwhelmingly elected president of the Russian Republic. The new union treaty was scheduled to be signed on August 20.

Alexander Nikolaevich was, by turns, terrified, dismayed, and angry. In late April he wrote Gorbachev a letter warning him that conservative forces were gaining the upper hand. The only way forward was to stop Gorbachev's incessant political zigzagging. If Gorbachev was not going to lead decisive political and economic reform, then Alexander Nikolaevich would try to do it himself. "I must be, I absolutely must be honest before my country, before my people, before my self!" he wrote. "I shall seek dignified ways to fight incipient fascism and the Party's reactionism, to fight for the democratic transformation of our society. I don't have that much time left."²⁹ Alexander Nikolaevich was speaking not so much about the time he personally had left—he was sixty-eight, just eight years older than both Gorbachev and Yeltsin—as about the country, where, he felt, the window of opportunity for change had nearly closed.

Alexander Nikolaevich decided to help form a new political movement, the Movement for Democratic Reform. It had three foundational principles. Politically, it would renounce the vision of the USSR as a unitary state in favor of creating a federation with a clear division of rights and responsibilities between members and the center. Economically, it would set out a clear program of transition to a market system, in which, for the interim period, the state would retain only a third of all property. Most important, it would create a safety net for those who would be hardest-hit by economic reform.³⁰ The difference between a "movement" and a "party" was as confusing as everything else in the USSR. A movement exists to create change while a party strives to govern. But in the new Soviet reality a movement could include several parties. But then, a megaparty—the megaparty—was starting to include different movements. For Alexander Nikolaevich, it was key that he did not need to leave the Communist Party to become one of the leaders of the new movement. He was still hoping that the massive weight of the Party could be tilted in favor of reform. On July 20, 1991, he delivered an inspired speech at the founding congress of his new movement. He spoke of the painful discoveries that he had made, most of them in the six years since perestroika began: