Congress of People's Deputies Convenes

May 25, 1989

Boldly we wage the fight,
For the power of the Soviets,
And as one we’ll die,
Fighting for that.

Смело мы в бой пойдем
За власть Советов
И как один умрем
В борьбе за это.

When I was young, almost nobody took this old revolutionary song seriously anymore. During breaks in school (when the teacher was out of earshot) we would sometimes sing: “Boldly we wage the fight/For soup with potatoes/And will kill the cook/With a cafeteria spoon.”

For us, “power of the Soviets” was nothing more than a slogan out of the distant past we learned about from old newsreels that showed people marching across Petrograd at a ridiculously fast pace carrying banners reading “All Power to the Soviets.” It had nothing to do with us. Of course, we knew there were still soviets (the Russian word for councils) – how could we not? There was the District Soviet, the City Soviet, the Supreme Soviet. They were where elections were held, bizarre affairs where you could pick one out of one of the proposed candidates from the “Coalition of Communists and Non-Party-Members.” Our teacher explained that it simply wouldn’t make sense to have several good candidates run against one another, since whoever lost would have their feelings hurt... at which point she would nervously adjust her glasses.

We were also familiar with the hard-to-watch but utterly fascinating film by Gleb Panfilov, I Request the Floor (Прошу слова), about the chairwoman of a city soviet executive committee, played by the fabulous Inna Churikova. Her character, Yelizaveta Uvarova, was a fanatical believer in the communist idea and was so dedicated to her work in the soviet that she went to her office straight from her son’s funeral. Her faith does not do anyone much good, and it ties Uvarova up in knots.

Uvarova practices target shooting, and when things get tough, she goes to the shooting gallery. At the film’s end, her daughter, a cynical opportunist who pretends to be following her mother’s example, picks up a rifle. Panfilov seems to be asking, “What will the next generation of soviet officials be like?” I Request the Floor was filmed in 1975, ten years before perestroika, so just when that daughter would have come of age and, rifle in hand, led the way forward, everything changed, the old world toppled. Every day new slogans were appearing: “Acceleration!” “Glasnost!” “Perestroika!” New Thinking!”  And among them, out of the distant past we started to hear “All Power to the Soviets!”

To the soviets? What soviets? Those good-for-nothing district soviet executive committees? No, these would be absolutely new soviets – genuine government of the people.

Today it is not hard to understand where this idea came from in the late eighties. The soviets that the Bolsheviks established were supposed to be part of a people’s government, but they were transformed into a piteous appendage of the mighty party apparat. Now, in the turmoil of perestroika, when the Communist Party was losing ground with each passing day, it seemed that, if we could only return to those first days of revolution, we could restore some forgotten, long-lost justice.

In the 1980s, Russia’s past was changing rapidly. It was turning out to be utterly different from what Yelizaveta Uvarova and many of her generation had thought. This transformation of the past came quickly, but in stages. First, questions started to be raised about the Brezhnev era, which suddenly looked more like a torpid era of stagnation than an era of developed socialism. Then it turned out that the Khrushchev era was not an unruly period of voluntarism and misguided corn planting, but a time of freedom, perhaps limited, but still, there had been a Thaw. Next came an important moment when you could finally talk frankly about the Stalin era. By then, all of the idols had started crashing down, left and right: the Five Year Plans, industrialization, collectivization. Now you could go beyond euphemisms about a “cult of personality” and talk about brutal oppression, tyranny, despotism, the Gulag, and countless innocent deaths.

But what came before Stalin? Here, there was a brief pause in the wave of revelations. Condemning the Lenin era was hard for many to swallow. Young and old, people were reluctant to shatter that idol. So, for a short while in the late 1980s, millions of people found themselves in the grip of an intoxicating illusion: that there had been a beautiful moment in our country’s history when revolutionary forces overthrew the autocracy and created a government that was genuinely of the people: the soviets. Later, as the illusion went, Stalin and his henchmen destroyed this government. Clearly, what we need to do was return to our revolutionary roots.

And so, in the spring of 1989, elections were held: “alternative elections.” This redundant phrase, which today provokes smirks, back then had everyone in a state of euphoria. We had a choice! We could actually choose, even if there was still only one party in the Soviet Union, the Communist Party, even though Gorbachev was going through various machinations to assure that the Communists got enough votes.

On May 25, a huge number of Communist Party bureaucrats and members of the nomenklatura convened at the Palace of Congresses, and as became clear several days later, they were the ones who would determine many of the congress’s decisions. But next to them were people of a very different sort: Andrei Sakharov, Boris Yeltsin, the historian (and later rector of the Russian State University for the Humanities) Yuri Afanasyev, the economist Gavrila Popov, and many others who would later become important engines of perestroika.

Today we see how much of the congress was empty talk, how those involved in founding the Interregional Deputies Group, the seed from which future democratic parties grew, wound up going off in a million different directions, how those who sat together at the congress later found themselves on opposite sides of the barricades (in some cases quite literally). But for now, these two weeks in late May and early June was a time of unadulterated joy.

The deliberations were, amazingly, broadcast live. Nearly every speech voiced ideas that would have been extremely dangerous just a few years earlier. The delegates grew hoarse debating regulations, elections, Stalin, the KGB, the economy – you name it. Nothing got done in the country, since everyone was glued to their televisions.

June 1 was a very important day in schools back then, since that was when graduation exams were held throughout the entire country and students spent six hours writing essays. How we teachers suffered, sitting in our classrooms watching the students hunched over their exam booklets! Who cared about Lev Tolstoy at that moment? What could you write about literature when right then, in the Palace of Congresses, something astounding was going on? And yet we had to sit there for six hours, totally cut off from the news. But wait! One clever teacher brought a small transistor radio to the exams and listened to the congress through earphones. When Academician Sakharov came to the podium, all sense of pedagogical duty went out the window. The fortunate radio possessor went racing out of his classroom, leaving the students unattended (a serious violation of discipline!) and scrambled from office to office so that everyone – both students and teachers – would be able to listen in on what was being said.

By the congress’s conclusion it was clear that the proponents of reform were in the minority, and the majority, using the phrase that Yuri Afanasyev hurled in the face of the assembly, were “aggressively-obedient.” Which is why it took great effort for Yeltsin to make it to the Supreme Soviet, the members of which were elected at the congress, and why the speeches of many liberals were drowned out by stomping and clapping. Overall, the congress held many clues as to what lay ahead.

We might have foreseen the inability to reach consensus, the unbelievable ambition of some and the cynicism of others, the failure to assemble a precise agenda and then follow it, and we could have traced the countless fault lines that would form and the conflicts that would break out in subsequent years.

Today, I understand this all very well. And yet, I will never forget my colleague’s ecstatic face as he dashed out of his classroom with the transistor radio in hand yelling: “Sakharov is speaking!”

That big, intoxicating breath of freedom may have been full of false promises, but it was still marvelously exhilarating.