A Few Notable Dates

March 1985: Mikhail Gorbachev becomes the new Communist Party General Secretary, beginning a month later to make personnel changes at the top.

May 7, 1985: Decree of the Council of Ministers On Measures for Overcoming Drunkenness, Alcoholism and Eradication of Homebrewing. It was to prove mainly ineffectual.

February 1986: Gorbachev delivers a speech at the 27th Party Congress, with a proposal to reform Soviet society through openness (glasnost) and transformation (perestroika).

April 26, 1986: Chernobyl nuclear disaster and empty Soviet denials shows glasnost is still only a theory.

May 23, 1986: Council of Ministers issues a decree, On Measures for Strengthening the Struggle Against Non-Labor Revenues, designed to take on the black market.

November 19, 1986: USSR Supreme Soviet passes the law On Individual Labor Activity, opening the door to private cooperatives and small private businesses.

December 16, 1986: Andrei Sakharov released from internal exile.

January 1987: Gorbachev proposes competitive elections with secret ballots.

May 6, 1987: The first unsanctioned demonstration by a non-governmental and non-communist organization: the nationalist society Pamyat, in Moscow.

July 30, 1987: Passage of laws offering citizens real hope of redress for wrongs by the state, and giving state enterprises greater economic freedom.

August 1987: All restrictions lifted on subscriptions to newspapers and journals. This led to an explosion in magazine and newspaper print runs.

November 11, 1987: Boris Yeltsin begins his fall from Party graces.

March 13, 1988: Publication of Nina Andreyeva’s article in Sovietskaya Rossiya, titled I Cannot Abandon My Principles, in which she asserted that perestroika was harmful. A shiver of terror ran through society; many feared that perestroika might end.

May 26, 1988: Passage of the Law, On Cooperatives in the USSR, legalizing small, privately-owned companies.

July 28, 1988: Supreme Soviet passes decrees that allow citizens, for the first time, to take part in demonstrations without fear of arrest.

March 1989: The first free election of candidates to the Assembly of Peoples Deputies of the USSR. Boris Yeltsin is elected a deputy by Moscow voters in a landslide.

March 1990: “Leading role” of the Communist Party abolished; Presidential rule established.

August 19, 1991: Hardliners stage a putsch.