19th All-Union Party Conference (1988)

Background

Gorbachev lacked grounds to convene an extraordinary party congress, yet he needed his planned political reform backed by the authority of the whole party, not only the Central Committee; hence a party conference after 47 years. The institution of the All-Union Party Conference had itself been abolished by the 19th Congress (1952), which held that pressing party-policy questions could be discussed at congresses and Central Committee plenums and that there was no need to convene all-union conferences. The 23rd Congress (March–April 1966) restored in the party statute the Central Committee's right to convene an all-union conference, and the revived institution was used for the first time in 1988.

The number of delegates varies by source. Russian and English Wikipedia and others give 4,991 voting delegates, while the Encyclopedia.com entry on party congresses and conferences gives 4,976. Either way it was a far larger gathering than under the old practice.

Proceedings

Conference elections in most cases turned into appointment of delegates by the party apparatus, provoking public outrage. Thanks to democratic-public and informal demonstrations, some reformists, the 'foremen of perestroika', did become delegates, but were not given the floor to present their program.

In his opening speech Gorbachev declared political reform the key issue, aiming at the democratization of the life of the state and society and movement toward a socialist state under the rule of law. The conference adopted five resolutions: on democratization of Soviet society and reform of the political system, on fighting bureaucracy, on inter-ethnic relations, on glasnost, and on legal reform. The centerpiece was the decision to hold elections to soviets at all levels with secret ballots and multiple candidacies. For the first time since the 1920s delegates expressed independent opinions, criticizing party leadership actions, and this was broadcast on all-union television. Gorbachev, speaking at the conference, announced a course toward reform of political power and separation of party organs from soviet organs, and the conference adopted the principled decision on alternative elections of deputies to soviets at all levels, with all willing persons able to stand as candidates. From then on any officially registered organization could nominate a candidate for deputy, though local bureaucratic organs could then fail to confirm a candidate; reformers thus hoped to rely on democratically minded citizens while keeping a CPSU majority in the soviets by excluding unwanted oppositionists.

Measures were outlined to preserve the CPSU's role as well. The Supreme Soviet, previously the supreme legislative organ elected by the population, was now to be elected by a Congress of People's Deputies: two-thirds of the 2,250 deputies were to be elected by the population, with the remainder chosen by 'public organizations', the largest number of them chosen by the CPSU. This reform was given legal form at the end of 1988.

The conference also decided to combine the posts of head of the party committee and chairman of the soviet at the corresponding level, intended to bring energetic, practical people into leading party posts rather than mere ideologists.

The dramatic climax came with Boris Yeltsin's speech. Removed as first secretary of the Moscow City Committee in the autumn of 1987 after his October 1987 Central Committee plenum speech and relieved of candidate membership of the Politburo in February 1988, Yeltsin again proposed removing Yegor Ligachev from the Politburo, criticized party elite privileges, and argued that the whole Politburo 'as a collective organ', not Brezhnev alone, was to blame for the 'stagnation'. He asked the conference to rescind the October Central Committee plenum decision that had found his speech politically erroneous, saying his only mistake was speaking at the wrong time, before the 70th anniversary of October, and framing rescission as his political rehabilitation in the eyes of communists.

That Ligachev intervened during Yeltsin's speech is clear, but accounts of the scene differ. On one account Ligachev, seated in the conference presidium, interrupted Yeltsin's speech, and Yeltsin ignored Ligachev's words and continued speaking. The best-known phrase, 'Boris, you are wrong', is a somewhat altered version of words Ligachev addressed to Yeltsin on 1 July 1988 during his speech at the conference; the fuller wording was 'You, Boris, are wrong. We have long been divided not only over tactics. Boris, you possess enormous energy, but this energy is not creative but destructive! You put your own province on ration coupons…'. Accounts of Yeltsin's own words diverge: one has him recognizing his October 1987 plenum speech as a mistake, while another has him asking the conference to rescind the censure and calling only the timing of his speech an error. Accounts of how the phrase became proverbial also differ: rather than becoming legendary on the spot, it became a popular catchphrase only after the humorist Gennady Khazanov used it in one of his monologues, after which it was used ironically in everyday situations too.

Aftermath

On the basis of the conference decisions the Supreme Soviet in October 1988 adopted a draft constitutional reform, restoring, on the model of the 1918 Constitution, a two-level system of representative organs: the Congress of People's Deputies and a Supreme Soviet elected from the Congress's deputies. After all-people discussion, a new USSR law, On Elections of People's Deputies of the USSR, was adopted on 1 December 1988, together with the necessary changes to three chapters of the 1977 USSR Constitution regarding the electoral system and the establishment of the Congress of People's Deputies. This 1988 constitutional reform, providing for the creation of the Congress of People's Deputies, was carried out in accordance with the conference decisions on 1 December 1988.

Gorbachev could not rely on the circular flow of power but had to campaign for the election of pro-reform delegates, without much success; he had hoped to give the conference the authority of a party congress to shake up the Central Committee, but had to defer that step. Although he had to compromise on several objectives because of conservative resistance, the conference was a significant victory for him. In the spring of 1989 local elections saw a number of representatives of the democratic public and national movements receive mandates.

The sequence afterward runs as follows. The First Congress of People's Deputies opened on 25 May 1989 and elected Gorbachev chairman of the Supreme Soviet; the Congress of People's Deputies elected him president of the USSR in 1990. Several constitutional amendments were made, including the repeal of Article 6 and recognition of a multi-party system.

The significance of the reform is assessed in different ways. One assessment holds that these changes meant the CPSU in fact ceased to be the core of the state-power system, which entailed sharp destabilization of the political situation and launched processes of disintegration of the Soviet state. Another follows Gorbachev's own formulation: what was involved was a transfer of power from the hands of the Communist Party into the hands of those to whom it should belong according to the Constitution, the Soviets. At the June 1988 conference Gorbachev declared a course of political reform, and in Understanding Perestroika (2006) he described political reform as precisely such a transfer of power from the party to the soviets.

Two further circumstances belong to the record: Yeltsin had already been pushed from power by his October 1987 Central Committee plenum speech and by the removal of his candidate Politburo membership in February 1988; and Ligachev's removal from the deputy general secretaryship by delegates' vote at the 28th Party Congress in 1990 was the endpoint of the party struggle that ran from this conference for years afterward. The conference was also the last occasion on which an All-Union Party Conference met at all-union level.