Interregional Deputies Group

Birth of the first legal parliamentary opposition

The group emerged on 7 June 1989, when democratic-minded deputies from Moscow held their founding meeting inside the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR, the body elected that spring in the first contested elections under the electoral law of 1 December 1988. Its proclaimed aim was to transform the Soviet political regime from totalitarian to democratic. A 25-member Coordinating Council was created at a second meeting on 10 June, and the first conference of 29-30 July elected five co-chairs.

Structure and composition

The co-chairs were Sakharov, Yeltsin, Afanasyev, Popov and Palm, with Murashev as secretary; the co-chairmanship itself was a device to break with party tradition. As of 30 July 1989 the group counted 388 deputies out of 2,250. It included journalists, scientists and writers as well as Communist Party members and deputies from the Baltic popular fronts. It was a heterogeneous alliance from the outset: its real unifying device, proposed by Sakharov, was a "least common denominator of negation", a coalition not around a positive programme but around opposition to Article 6 of the Constitution, the clause on the party's leading role. Popov recalled that Sakharov and Yeltsin were "completely incompatible people", and that the group spanned monarchists, anarchists, left communists and social democrats.

Programme: Article 6 and multiparty politics

The platform adopted at the second conference of 23-24 September 1989 demanded repeal of Article 6, democratisation of the electoral system, a democratic press law, laws on land and property, and a new Union Treaty. At the Second Congress of People's Deputies in December 1989 the group declared itself an opposition to the Communist Party. It also proposed renaming the USSR the "Union of Eurasian Republics", an initiative withdrawn from the agenda after objections from the Kazakh delegation.

Many of the platform's demands were partially met by the Third and Fourth Congresses of People's Deputies, while others fed into the programmes of the new democratic organisations founded in 1989. The group's political techniques were later transplanted to parliamentary blocs in CIS states, including Ukraine's Verkhovna Rada.

Dissolution and legacy

In January 1990 Communist Party members within the group formed the "Democratic Platform" faction, and in the March 1990 elections to the Russian Republic the group's offshoot, Democratic Russia, won and secured a large bloc in the Russian Supreme Soviet. The centre of gravity shifted from the union parliament to republican and local soviets, and after Sakharov's death in December 1989 Yeltsin emerged as the single leader.

The absence of a common programme became apparent immediately after the failed August 1991 coup. Popov recalled that once victory came, "it turned out that we had no constructive programme acceptable to the whole opposition, and the single bloc disintegrated". The group was dissolved in 1991.

Assessment and dispute

The group is assessed both as the first legal parliamentary opposition and organisational starting point of democratisation, and, in a conspiratorial reading, as a creature of foreign forces. The former rests on the group's having tested the grammar of democratic parliamentary politics before the USSR's collapse; the latter tends to rely on limited and unverified claims. Either way, the group's own fragmentation exposed both the heterogeneity of the late-Soviet reform camp and its lack of a constructive programme once power was won.