The Nineteenth Party Conference and the First Contested Elections

We Cannot Go On Living Like This

By the time Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary in March 1985, the Soviet Union had reached its limit by every measure, from macroeconomic indices to everyday experience. The growth rate of national income had been falling since the late 1960s and approached zero by the early 1980s; in 1986 the collapse of world oil prices wiped out the largest single source of foreign currency. The Chernobyl nuclear explosion in April 1986 laid bare systemic incompetence and became a decisive political asset for the reformers. Gorbachev himself later said 'Chernobyl was the real cause': a catastrophe brought on by a closed information system and bureaucratic paralysis was irrefutable proof that the old system could no longer be sustained. Even within the upper reaches of party and state, the phrase 'we cannot go on living like this' was openly exchanged.

The Gorbachev camp responded first with uskorenie ('acceleration'). In 1985–86 they poured massive investment into machine-building and heavy industry, attempting a recovery within the existing framework. But the old planning apparatus could not absorb the funds; instead of rising output, the budget deficit ballooned to roughly 10 percent of GDP by 1988. By the autumn of 1986 the leadership had concluded that economic reform alone could not alter the structure. The decisive turn came at the Central Committee Plenum on 27 January 1987. In his report 'On Restructuring and the Party's Personnel Policy', Gorbachev publicly declared that the top party leadership had, 'primarily for subjective reasons', failed to recognise the need for change and bore responsibility for the 'stagnation and phenomena alien to socialism' of the Brezhnev era. No General Secretary since Stalin had said such a thing. The remedy he proposed was not a mere reshuffle of cadres but democratisation of the political system itself: multi-candidate ballots, secret voting, and a transfer of real power to the soviets. He had begun to appeal over the heads of the party apparatus, directly to the people.

The backlash surfaced in two major clashes. First, at the Central Committee Plenum of 21 October 1987, Boris Yeltsin delivered an unscheduled speech attacking the slow pace of reform, Yegor Ligachev's intrigues, and the cult of personality forming around Gorbachev. He was immediately removed from his posts as First Secretary of the Moscow City Party Committee and candidate member of the Politburo, and the split between reformers and conservatives became irreparable. Second, on 13 March 1988 the Leningrad chemistry lecturer Nina Andreyeva published 'I Cannot Forsake My Principles' in Sovetskaya Rossiya, a full-throated defence of Stalinism and a broad assault on perestroika. Central Committee Secretary Ligachev ordered the piece redistributed to regional newspapers, and during a two-day Politburo session on 24–25 March, Vorotnikov and Ligachev defended it as 'an understandable reaction to the negative view of the Soviet past'. Gorbachev and Alexander Yakovlev finally ran a rebuttal in Pravda on 5 April, labelling the letter 'the manifesto of the anti-perestroika forces'.

In this deadlock Gorbachev reached for a weapon unused since 1941: the party conference. Under party rules the Central Committee had the right to convene an all-union party conference between congresses, but the Brezhnev era had never exercised it. Gorbachev's choice of a conference over a congress was deliberate: congress delegates were elected through the 'circular flow of power' controlled by regional party machines, whereas a conference was convened directly by the Central Committee, giving the conservative nomenklatura relatively less grip on the delegate list. And by the spring of 1988, in the political atmosphere immediately following the Andreyeva affair, Gorbachev had reached the conclusion that reform could not succeed through persuasion within the party alone. It needed the external shock of elections. When 4,991 delegates assembled in the Kremlin Palace on 28 June, the question they carried with them was one: would reform save the party, or would it dismantle it?

The First Party Conference Since 1941, and the Fiercest Debate Since the 1920s

The 19th All-Union Party Conference was the first nationwide party gathering of its kind in 47 years, since the 18th Conference in 1941. Under party rules, a conference could be convened between congresses when the Central Committee deemed it necessary, but the institution had been effectively dead since Stalin's death. Gorbachev's revival of the format was calculated: a conference lacked the authority of a congress to elect a new Central Committee, but it could ratify the direction of political reform at the all-party level and thus bypass conservative resistance within the apparatus.

The road to the conference was rocky. On 13 March 1988, Nina Andreeva, a chemistry lecturer in Leningrad, published "I Cannot Give Up Principles" in Sovetskaya Rossiya. Defending Stalin's industrialization and wartime leadership while attacking the "denigration" of Soviet history under perestroika, the article had been edited by Yegor Ligachev and approved by several Politburo members. It was read inside and outside the party as the signal of an organized conservative counteroffensive. After three weeks of silence, Gorbachev ordered a rebuttal published in Pravda on 5 April, and thereafter sharply raised the stakes of political reform. On 23 May the Central Committee plenum approved ten theses to be submitted to the conference.

When the conference opened in the Kremlin on 28 June before 4,991 delegates, it produced scenes unprecedented in Soviet political history from the very first day. Gorbachev's three-and-a-half-hour opening address was broadcast live across the country, laying out the core design of political reform. The central idea was to transfer power from party organs to elected soviets. Specifically: a new 2,250-seat Congress of People's Deputies, with two-thirds elected through competitive contests and one-third reserved for the party, trade unions, and other public organizations; the Congress would in turn elect a standing Supreme Soviet of some 400 members and a president with real executive authority. The package also included multi-candidate secret-ballot elections for soviets at every level, a two-term (ten-year) limit for all officials, and a requirement that party secretaries simultaneously serve as soviet chairs, exposing party officials to popular votes.

The smooth passage Gorbachev had hoped for did not materialize. From the second day proceedings went behind closed doors, with only twenty-minute edited excerpts broadcast. Ligachev's appointment as conference chairman made the conservative counterthrust explicit. The liberal economist Leonid Abalkin criticized the combined party-soviet chairmanship as a violation of the principle of separating party from state. Delegate Dmitri Motorny from Kiev warned of the social costs of closing failing enterprises.

The decisive scene came on the closing day, 1 July. Boris Yeltsin, sacked as Moscow party first secretary and removed as a candidate Politburo member for his "politically mistaken" speech at the October 1987 Central Committee plenum, took the podium. "My only mistake was the timing," he declared, arguing that the entire Politburo bore responsibility for the years of stagnation, and asked the conference to rescind the disciplinary finding against him. Ligachev rose from his seat and shot back: "You, Boris, are wrong. We now differ not only in tactics... Your energy is not creative but destructive!" He attacked Yeltsin for ten minutes. Watched live across the nation, the confrontation seared the image of an openly divided party leadership into public consciousness and turned "Boris, you are wrong" into a national catchphrase.

Facing conservative resistance, Gorbachev sprang his proposal for the Congress of People's Deputies on the exhausted delegates on the final day and won its approval. The conference adopted five resolutions, including "On the Democratization of Soviet Society and Reform of the Political System," and adjourned. Gorbachev later wrote in his memoirs: "If we try to define the meaning of political reform, we can say that it 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. It was a devilishly complicated political operation, one could say, 'with a fatal outcome' for the party nomenklatura."

When the Lone Candidate Lost, the Names Were Crossed Out, and 89 Percent Spoke

March 26, 1989, was the first day in Soviet history when the ruling party could not control an election's outcome. The electoral law itself remained in the party's grip. Of the 2,250 seats, 750 were reserved in advance for public organizations: the Communist Party, Komsomol, trade unions, the Women's Committee, the Academy of Sciences, and filled by internal balloting, not by ordinary voters. Even the 1,500 directly elected seats had to pass through a three-layer filter to reach the ballot: nomination by a meeting of at least 500 voters, majority support at a constituency caucus, and final approval by a district electoral assembly composed of representatives of worker collectives. Of the 5,074 candidates who cleared these hurdles, 399 constituencies ended up with only one name, and roughly 85 percent of all registered candidates were party members.

Voters found a way to disable these safeguards anyway. The Soviet ballot worked by crossing out the names of candidates one opposed, not by marking the one one supported. A candidate running unopposed could still lose if more than half the voters crossed out the name. Yuri Solovyov, Leningrad region first secretary and a non-voting Politburo member, stood alone on his ballot and lost when two-thirds of voters crossed him off. The Kyiv city party first secretary and the Kyiv mayor ran unopposed and suffered the same fate. So did the Tomsk regional first secretary. Nationwide, one-third of regional party first secretaries lost their races; one Politburo member and five Central Committee members failed to win seats.

In contested districts the outcomes were more dramatic still. Running in Moscow's citywide at-large constituency, Boris Yeltsin took 89 percent of 5.7 million votes cast, crushing the official party candidate Yevgeny Brakov, who got under 7 percent. It was Yeltsin's return to power two years after being driven from the Politburo in 1987. Leningrad city first secretary Anatoly Gerasimov was routed 15 to 74 percent by Yuri Boldyrev, a 28-year-old shipyard engineer. Moscow mayor Valery Saikin fell to Nina Ageyeva, a house-painter forewoman. In the three Baltic republics, nationalist popular fronts swept roughly three-quarters of the seats in Lithuania, 25 of 29 in Latvia, and half in Estonia.

When the Politburo convened on March 28, Gorbachev said "the people are once again ahead of us"; Ligachev blamed the media and argued that "where necessary we should use power"; and Nikolai Ryzhkov, chairman of the Council of Ministers, called March 26 "a turning point." But what the party leadership truly had to fear was not the election results themselves but what they proved: after 71 years, the legitimacy the party had monopolized no longer came automatically.

Thirteen Days When the Whole Country Pressed Radios to Their Ears, and Gorbachev Cut the Microphone

On May 25, 1989, the First Congress opened in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses before 2,250 people's deputies. The very first day, the Congress unanimously elected Gorbachev chairman of the Supreme Soviet, but not before deputy Alexander Obolensky put himself forward as an alternative candidate and challenged the single-candidate ritual head-on. He was not registered, but it had never happened before in the history of the Soviet parliament.

On the second day, May 26, the Congress began electing the 542 members of the standing Supreme Soviet. Boris Yeltsin, who had won his Moscow at-large seat with 89 percent, was voted down. The numbers laid bare the party apparatus's two-year hostility toward him. Three days later, on May 29, Alexei Kazannik, a legal scholar from Siberia, announced he was giving up his seat to Yeltsin. "I think it is only fair that Yeltsin enter the Supreme Soviet," he said. The words stunned the country and made Kazannik famous overnight.

Every session was broadcast live on television and radio. Soviet citizens pressed transistor radios to their ears at work, in barber shops, on buses; industrial productivity collapsed. For the first time, the population watched uncensored political combat in real time. From the rostrum, the historian Yuri Afanasyev called the conservative bloc of deputies "the aggressively obedient majority," and the phrase became an instant byword for the era.

On June 2, Sergei Chervonopisky, a wounded veteran of the Afghan war, confronted Sakharov from the rostrum, demanding he answer for telling a Canadian newspaper that Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan had become murderers and oppressors. The presidium and the majority of deputies backed Chervonopisky, and the sight of Sakharov standing under a hail of jeers and shouts streamed live across the country.

On the closing day, June 9, Sakharov took the rostrum again, having already exhausted his allotted speaking time. The nub of the "Decree on Power" he was carrying was the repeal of Article 6: the end of the Communist Party's monopoly on power. Gorbachev cut him off. "Time's up. Don't you respect the Congress?" He switched off Sakharov's microphone. Sakharov replied, "I respect the country and the people more." Inside the hall the microphone was dead, but the television broadcast microphone was still live. The 2,250 deputies did not hear him; millions of viewers heard every word.

That same day, 388 deputies gathered around Sakharov, Yeltsin, Afanasyev, Gavriil Popov, and Viktor Palm as co-chairs and formed the Inter-Regional Deputies' Group: the first legal parliamentary opposition in Soviet history. The Congress brought no decisive transfer of power, but as Sakharov said, it "burned all bridges behind us." In thirteen days, everyone understood there was no way back.

The Forty Days That Brought Down Article Six

On 4 February 1990, the largest demonstration in Soviet history filled central Moscow. The crowd that set out from Krymsky Bridge marched along the Garden Ring to Manezh Square, right in front of the Kremlin. Police put the number at 200,000, Moscow Radio at 300,000, and the organisers at half a million. Placards bore a single digit: 6. The demand was the abolition of Article 6 of the constitution, which declared that "the leading and guiding force of Soviet society is the Communist Party of the Soviet Union." On the platform, Gavriil Popov called for "uniting all democratic organisations into a single anti-bureaucratic front"; Boris Yeltsin, disgraced two years earlier, also spoke.

The very next day, 5 February, an expanded Central Committee plenum opened. The agenda was the draft platform for the Twenty-Eighth Party Congress, but everyone spoke about Article 6. Gorbachev proposed two things: the abolition of Article 6, which enshrined the party's monopoly on power, and the creation of a presidency. As Anatoly Sobchak later recorded, "practically everyone who spoke was negative about the abolition of Article 6. They denounced the 'so-called democrats' in the sharpest terms. And then they voted unanimously for it."

Gorbachev himself had been ambivalent until the very eve of the plenum. At the June 1989 Politburo meeting he had argued that merely "correcting" Article 6 was enough. At the Second Congress of People's Deputies in December 1989 he blocked Andrei Sakharov's motion to abolish Article 6 from even reaching the agenda. Yet barely two months later he stood on the opposite side. What had changed?

First, the street. The 4 February demonstration, a crowd questioning the party's very reason for existence pressing against the Kremlin walls 24 hours before the Central Committee convened, showed party officials viscerally that the system's legitimacy was dissolving. Second, the party's own fragmentation. By early 1990 the exodus of members was accelerating, the Lithuanian Communist Party was moving toward secession from the all-union party, and the Azerbaijani party organisation was in a state of effective collapse. Third, there was Gorbachev's calculation. He was trading Article 6 for a presidency: stepping beyond the framework of collective party leadership to become a powerful chief executive legitimised by election, initially indirect election by the Congress but election nonetheless. The trade worked on conservatives too: they were willing to surrender the party's constitutional monopoly in the expectation that Gorbachev, as president, would restore order.

The plenum voted overwhelmingly on 7 February to amend Article 6. A month later, on 12 March, the Third Extraordinary Congress of People's Deputies convened. Two historic decisions emerged from the four-day session. On 14 March the constitutional amendments passed. Article 6 did not disappear entirely. The new Article 6 read: "The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, other political parties, as well as trade union, youth, and other public organisations and mass movements… participate in the formulation of the policy of the Soviet state and in the management of state and public affairs." The Communist Party still came first, but the phrase "other political parties" now appeared in the Soviet constitution for the first time, and the party's "leading role" was struck. The vote was 1,771 in favour, 164 against, and 74 abstaining. That 236 of the 2,245 deputies did not participate in the vote at all revealed the party's division.

The next day, 15 March, Gorbachev was elected the first president of the Soviet Union. For the first term alone the election was by the Congress rather than by popular vote. Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov and Interior Minister Vadim Bakatin were also nominated but both withdrew, leaving Gorbachev the sole candidate. Of 2,000 deputies voting, 1,329 voted in favour (59.2 percent), 495 against, 54 ballots were spoiled, and 122 deputies refused to vote at all. He cleared the two-thirds threshold by a mere 46 votes. From the rostrum Gorbachev declared he would retain his post as general secretary: "You cannot let the dog off the leash."

What actually happened was the opposite. Under a constitution from which the party's leading role had been deleted, the party no longer stood above the state. And the formidable powers Gorbachev gained as president, commander-in-chief, the right to nominate the prime minister, and the power to declare a state of emergency, paradoxically created a new centre of power that bypassed the very party that had produced him. As Ivan Frolov said at the plenum, "what we are now discussing is formally called amending Articles 6 and 7 of the constitution, but in reality it is literally a coup, the full completion of the transformation of the political system." The party had dug its own grave.

The Door That Was Opened Would Not Close Again

What the 19th Party Conference settled can be stated in a single sentence: the Soviet Union would no longer have single-candidate elections; party organs would be separated from state organs; and supreme power would belong not to the Party Central Committee but to the elected Congress of People's Deputies. These principles, declared in the party's name, were codified into law through the constitutional reform of December 1, 1988. At this point, the conference marked a point of no return. The mere fact that a party conference, the first since 1941, had become an arena of open, televised debate meant that Soviet politics had already crossed a threshold from which there was no going back.

But what the conference did not settle was as consequential as what it did. The concrete direction of economic reform remained unclear. Yuri Afanasyev observed shortly afterward that "many problems were posed, but there was no clarity as to solutions." The nationalities question was barely discussed, even as it was preparing to emerge as the central fissure that would shake the Union within two years. And the question of whether the party could survive competitive politics was not even asked. At the Politburo meeting of July 4, 1988, Gorbachev declared that the conference had shown there was "no need for other institutions beyond the party." Barely two years later, the party surrendered Article 6 of the constitution, its own monopoly on power.

Among historians, the sharpest disagreement concerns whether the conference's institutional design itself precipitated the party's collapse. The principle of combining party and soviet posts, whereby a party committee first secretary would also serve as chair of the corresponding soviet, was Gorbachev's mechanism for making party officials accountable to voters. Instead, it became a conduit through which party elites migrated out of party structures and into soviet ones. Aleksandr Shubin describes this as a process in which "administrative resources and the most active party cadres flowed into soviet structures," arguing that the Soviet collapse was not an inevitable systemic failure but the result of inter-elite power struggle.

A further debate surrounds Gorbachev's own intentions: did he seek to preserve the party's leading role, or did he deliberately dismantle it? In his memoirs, Gorbachev wrote that his aim was "to transfer power to the soviets," asking rhetorically on what basis 20 million party members could rule 200 million people. Yet at the same time, he sought to preserve both socialism and the Union, and conceived the conference as a means of neutralizing the opposition and consolidating society. As Andrei Kolesnikov puts it, Gorbachev "could never have imagined that by loosening the screws and ushering in glasnost and elements of a market economy he would lose not only socialism, but the empire itself."

The 19th Party Conference was an experiment without precedent in world history: a one-party state introducing competitive politics by its own decision. There may be little debate about the outcome of that experiment. But what its architect intended, and whether a different path was possible, these remain open questions to this day.

Was the System Reformable, After All

Less than three years after the Nineteenth Party Conference convened, the Soviet Union was gone. The temporal proximity has pressed historians toward a single question: did the political reform of June 1988 destroy a reformable system by mistake, or did the collapse become inevitable the moment the door was opened, because the system had never been reformable at all?

The first position is the 'unreformability thesis.' Martin Malia saw the Soviet Union as a system bearing an original sin. A system hardwired with the DNA of Stalinism, he argued, could not survive partial reform: the moment genuine reform began, the foundations of its legitimacy crumbled and the whole structure collapsed. Stephen Kotkin's Armageddon Averted (2001) contends, as its title suggests, not that Gorbachev's reforms saved the Soviet Union but that the collapse was 'averted' only in the sense that it occurred without mass bloodshed. From this standpoint, the Nineteenth Party Conference was not the start of reform but the start of collapse, because the moment the party stepped back from its monopoly, nothing existed to fill the void.

The second position is represented by Stephen F. Cohen's 2004 Slavic Review article, 'Was the Soviet System Reformable?' Scrutinising the years 1985 to 1991, Cohen argued that all five of the system's fundamental components (the official ideology, the Communist Party and its dictatorship, the nationwide network of soviets, the monopolistic state economy, and the union of republics) turned out to be remarkably reformable. The party accepted multi-party politics, the economy passed the Law on Cooperatives, and the union was debating a new framework of sovereign republics. For Cohen, the failure lay not in the system's nature but in the political management of reform and in the 'lost alternatives', above all the choice to pursue political reform first in 1988 rather than price reform and economic restructuring in 1987 to 1988.

Archie Brown's The Gorbachev Factor (1996) centres the argument on individual agency. The Soviet Union was in deep crisis but not on the verge of collapse. The turn to political reform in 1988 was not a structural inevitability but Gorbachev's own judgement, a judgement born of the reality that the party bureaucracy was blocking economic reform. Vladislav Zubok's Collapse (2021) takes this further. The structural problems of the Soviet economy, he argues, were manageable without dismantling the political system, as China would demonstrate. Gorbachev's decisive choice was to pursue political reform ahead of economic stabilisation, and at the very moment reform was most needed, the combination of catastrophic consumer-goods shortages and newly granted freedom of travel triggered a defection of elites from the system.

Beneath this debate lies a more fundamental question. Gorbachev himself, in his post-presidency memoirs, called the failure to enact price reform in 1987 to 1988 a 'strategic misstep,' but he never retreated from his conviction that without political reform, even economic reform would have been blocked by bureaucratic resistance. The Nineteenth Party Conference was the product of that conviction, and its consequence. What the conference settled is clear: a system in which the party monopolised power was finished. Whether that outcome was a failure of reform, proof that reform was impossible from the beginning, or evidence that a different path was available, that question remains, more than three decades later, unresolved.

What Was Settled, and What Was Never Settled

When the Nineteenth Party Conference convened, and still now more than thirty years later, historians agree on only two things. One: the conference set in motion an irreversible transformation of the Soviet political system. Contested elections, a televised parliament, a legal opposition, none of this would have been possible without those four days in June 1988. Two: assessments of the direction and meaning of that transformation remain sharply divided.

What the conference actually settled was the principle of competitive elections itself. In March 1989, Soviet citizens chose among multiple candidates for the first time in their lives, and the result was the mass defeat of regional party secretaries. Without those elections, there would have been no Congress of People's Deputies, no Inter-Regional Deputies' Group, and no deletion of Article 6. On this point, as Archie Brown argued in The Gorbachev Factor (1996), the conference was "the decisive breakthrough that transformed the Soviet system from within."

But what the conference failed to settle, or settled with built-in contradictions, is a longer list. First, it enshrined two incompatible principles in a single resolution: separation of powers and the combining of party and state posts (sovmeshchenie). Declaring that the party apparatus would be separated from the state while simultaneously requiring first secretaries to chair the corresponding soviet provoked fierce debate even among the reform's own architects. In the words of Aleksandr Shubin, this was "a safety valve designed to preserve party control beneath a democratic façade." Tellingly, it was almost the only institutional issue Boris Yeltsin publicly opposed from the conference rostrum.

Second, the allocation of 750 of the 2,250 seats to "public organizations," with the largest bloc reserved for the CPSU itself, was a major exception to the very principle of competitive elections. The party had opened the door while keeping half of it still bolted. As Boris Mezhuev noted, this provision functioned as "a structural brake preventing the reform from becoming full democratization."

Third, on the nationalities question, the conference produced only a vague resolution "On Inter-National Relations" without any substantive restructuring of the federal system. Five months after the conference closed, Estonia declared sovereignty; within a year, all three Baltic republics had launched the "parade of sovereignties." As Vladislav Zubok emphasizes in Collapse (2022), Gorbachev fatally underestimated the explosive potential of the nationalities question, and the criticism that political reform inadvertently opened an institutional channel for centrifugal forces is one he cannot easily escape.

The sharpest debate revolves around a counterfactual: could the reform ever have succeeded? Brown regards the conscious dismantling of one-party dictatorship, the peaceful passing of the Soviet system, as itself the measure of success. Zubok, from the opposite side, sees the reform's very design, too radical and too timid at once, unleashing everything while never quite releasing the party's grip, as the direct cause of state collapse. Some Russian scholars seriously entertain the "Chinese path," economic reform without political liberalization, but the counterargument is no less forceful: by the time of the conference, economic reform had already foundered on the resistance of the party apparatus, making political reform not a choice but a necessity. The question remains open to this day.

One Question the Historians Themselves Have Not Settled

One fundamental question about the Nineteenth Party Conference and its aftermath remains unsettled even among historians. Was the Soviet system reformable at all, or did the very attempt at reform guarantee its collapse?

The Oxford political scientist Archie Brown argued in The Gorbachev Factor (1996) that Gorbachev crossed from improvement within the system to systemic transformation from the January 1987 Central Committee plenum onward, and that the introduction of contested elections at the 1988 conference was the product of a genuine commitment to democratisation, not a tactical maneuver. For Brown, the collapse of 1991 was not proof that the system was unreformable; rather, reform was derailed by contingent events, the hardliners' coup and the republics' breakaway, before it had enough time to succeed.

The strongest counter-argument comes from the Princeton historian Stephen Kotkin. In Armageddon Averted (2001), Kotkin argued that the Soviet system rested on four pillars: ideology, the party, the planned economy, and the union. Any attempt to fundamentally reform any one of them was bound to bring down the whole structure. The moment Gorbachev weakened the party apparatus and introduced competitive elections at the 1988 conference, the system was already on an irreversible path.

The most sophisticated case in this debate was made by the NYU political scientist Stephen F. Cohen. In his 2004 Slavic Review article, "Was the Soviet System Reformable?," Cohen rejected the unreformability thesis as retrospective determinism. Examining each of the system's five components, official ideology, party dictatorship, the soviet network, the state-owned economy, and the union of republics, he showed how dramatically each had in fact transformed between 1985 and 1991, and concluded that all of them turned out to be remarkably reformable. What needs explaining, then, is not some built-in defect of the system but the specific political and personal conditions under which reform unfolded.

Another axis is the perspective offered by Jerry Hough in Democratization and Revolution (1997). Hough overturned the conventional view of Gorbachev as a weak leader by documenting his staggering personnel power: between 1985 and 1987 he replaced 62 of 69 Central Committee members and 108 of 150 regional party first secretaries. Hough's Gorbachev had ample power to drive reform but made decisive errors in the sequencing and method of economic change.

Within Russian scholarship the assessments also diverge. Historians such as Aleksandr Shubin argue that Gorbachev had a serious vision of a "socialist state under the rule of law," what he outlined at the 1988 conference, and sought to achieve socialist democracy through multi-candidate elections within the soviet system, not through a multi-party system. Military historians such as Dmitri Volkogonov, by contrast, hold that regardless of intention, the Soviet Union was placed on a straight path to collapse by the reforms, and the four days of June 1988 were the point of no return.

If there is one point of agreement across all these arguments, it is this: the political reforms launched at the 1988 Party Conference altered the trajectory of the Soviet system irreversibly. Whichever interpretation one follows, those four days remain an event that redrew the political map of the late twentieth century.