21 results in The Rebirth of Politics in Russia
11 - Reform, reaction and rebellion: the calamity of the first republic
- Michael Urban, University of California, Santa Cruz, Vyacheslav Igrunov, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow, Sergei Mitrokhin, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow
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Summary
On the morning after the August coup's defeat, a special session of the Russian Supreme Soviet shelved a motion to replace the national flag with the tricolour – unofficial ensign of the democratic resistance to communism – on the grounds that the Constitution had consigned the designation of state symbols solely to the Congress of People's Deputies. That afternoon, however, El′tsin – who had sat sphinx-like during the Supreme Soviet's deliberations – interrupted the progression of distinguished officials addressing the rally from the back balcony of the White House to put that same question directly to the crowd. Thus an acclamatory chorus adopted the new flag which fluttered from state buildings, including the Kremlin, on the following day. During that evening, Gorbachev appeared before Russia's Supreme Soviet to take unwitting part in a ritual marking the passage of power from the Soviet president to the Russian one. Here, El′tsin publicly humiliated his nemesis, answering his appeal not to blame the CPSU for the coup with a decree signed on the spot that suspended all CPSU activities on Russian soil, bullying him to read aloud the minutes of the recent meeting of the USSR's Cabinet of Ministers at which one after another of his ministers had betrayed him. The television cameras zoomed in on the dramatis personae, capturing a forceful Russian leader in full control of the situation and a spent Soviet president, confused, indecisive and unable to control his own slackened and quivering jaw that testified to his new, subordinate status.
These vignettes at the dawn of Russia's post-communist transformation previewed the authoritarian-populist strategy employed to effect it.
5 - The informal movement: politics on the margins of the soviet order
- Michael Urban, University of California, Santa Cruz, Vyacheslav Igrunov, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow, Sergei Mitrokhin, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow
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The terms ‘informals’ (neformaly) and ‘informal groups’ (neformal'nye gruppy) would refer to those millions of Soviet citizens who took advantage of the relative liberalization introduced by perestroika to band together in associations independent of the party-state's direct sponsorship. By 1989, some 60,000 of these associations were functioning in the country, spanning a wide range of activities and interests: music, sports, literature, history, culture, religion, social service and politics. The origins of the name for this amorphous mass movement have remained unclear. By the mid–1980s, ‘informals’ or ‘informal groups’ had entered the argot of Soviet journalism as a deprecatory descriptor for those people congregating outside of the ‘respectable’ world of the establishment, but a decade earlier it had also been used in Soviet sociology as a euphemism for teenage gangs. However, the source of the name would not be as important for our purposes as would be an understanding of the significance that it came to hold for those to whom it was applied. It was precisely because the informal movement was rooted in one or another form of rebellion against the stifling restrictions of the Soviet order that informals would wear this veiled epithet as a badge of honour. The name became for them a vivid distinction separating their subculture – wherein authenticity, free expression and relevance were paramount – from the official world around them that they had come to regard as dominated by insincerity and pretension, one not only repressive but top-heavy with stupidity.
Unofficial groups – from discussion clubs to insurrectionist organizations – had been to one degree or another a part of the Soviet social landscape throughout the post-war period.
Part III - Politics and revolution
- Michael Urban, University of California, Santa Cruz, Vyacheslav Igrunov, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow, Sergei Mitrokhin, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow
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The chapters in this part of the book trace the course of Russian politics over the period bounded at one end by the convening of perestroika's centrepiece, the Congress of People's Deputies, and at the other, the dissolution of this same assembly in the wake of the failed coup of August 1991. During this brief epoch, the scope of political life was massively enlarged and its character fundamentally transformed. What had begun as a conflict inside the Soviet tent over the pace and character of reform quickly gave way to the formation of an opposition standing outside of it, offering an alternative group of political leaders and an alternative vision for the country's future. Chapter 7, which focuses on this question, locates the genesis of this (initially reluctant) opposition in the context of a regime (‘above’) that systematically blocked its reformist initiatives and an emergent mass movement (‘below’) that radicalized the would-be reformers and summoned them to supply the leadership that the movement required.
The dynamic interaction between leaders and movement entered a new stage during the Russian elections of 1990, the topic of Chapter 8. During the electoral contest, the country's democratic movement situated itself – tentatively, uneasily – within a political–territorial and cultural space: Russia. Its opposition to the communist system took on the character of a national liberation struggle directed against the Soviet order and aimed at the establishment of a sovereign Russian state.
6 - National elections and mass politics
- Michael Urban, University of California, Santa Cruz, Vyacheslav Igrunov, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow, Sergei Mitrokhin, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow
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Consummated by an increasingly radical press and informal political movement, midwifed by the political reforms of perestroika, Russian politics was reborn in the national elections of 1989. The birthplace itself spanned myriad sites: voters' assemblies at factories or meeting halls, often raucous, occasionally violent and sometimes lasting till the wee hours of the morning; cramped apartments where candidates huddled with their staffs and volunteers discussing tactics, composing leaflets, arguing philosophy; city streets and public squares where contestants for office engaged the public directly, holding rallies, answering questions, distributing campaign literature. By the time the electoral process had run its course, the circle of political activism had expanded enormously, fanning out from cloisters of informal groups and enclaves of democratic orientation ensconced in official organizations to include millions of citizens who, for the first time in their lives, would have the opportunity to vote. Yet, for three related reasons, it would be mistaken to regard that voting as commensurate with an actual election. First, irrespective of the results of the balloting, there was no possibility whatsoever that the Communist Party could be removed from power. Its ‘leading role’ was still enshrined in the Soviet Constitution, while the legislature which was to be filled by successful candidates had not been designed either to choose or to control a government. The CPSU's political monopoly would remain intact; this election could neither turn it out of office nor serve as a mandate for the continuation of its rule.
Second, there was no organized challenge to its monopoly on power. Outside of the small Democratic Union (which, moreover, boycotted these elections), no other political party existed.
Contents
- Michael Urban, University of California, Santa Cruz, Vyacheslav Igrunov, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow, Sergei Mitrokhin, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow
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3 - Perestroika: renewal, transition or transformation?
- Michael Urban, University of California, Santa Cruz, Vyacheslav Igrunov, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow, Sergei Mitrokhin, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow
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Standard nomenclature includes under the term ‘perestroika’ a number of initiatives advanced by the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev that would change (‘restructure’) social, economic and political relations in the former USSR. As Mary McAuley, for instance, has described it, perestroika
intended to produce major changes in the economic and political system. In the economy, the aim was to introduce elements of a market mechanism, and a variety of forms of ownership; in the political sphere, the vision was of a reformed Communist Party, still firmly in control, but a party whose officials … would, to some degree, be accountable to elected bodies.
However, as soon as we descend a rung or two on the ladder of abstraction and attempt to characterize perestroika more concretely, we immediately find ourselves in a thicket of controversy. What prompted the adoption of this policy? What were the actual intentions lying behind it? Did it represent merely an attempt at liberalizing the Soviet regime or were its implications, if not design, more broad-reaching, thus heralding the introduction of democratic government? Has its ultimate failure shown that Soviet communism was, as many have maintained, unreformable or, conversely, should failure here be ascribed to perestroika's partial, half-hearted and conservative thrust that proved inadequate to its announced task of reversing the decay of the Soviet system?
These questions in fact contain three distinct perspectives on perestroika captured in shorthand by the terms set out in the title of this chapter. The first two, which involve the perceptions and intentions of policy makers, refer to renewal. They direct our attention to leadership strategies, stated objectives and the calculations that may have gone into them.
9 - Parties in movement: the articulation of Russian political society at the close of the Soviet period
- Michael Urban, University of California, Santa Cruz, Vyacheslav Igrunov, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow, Sergei Mitrokhin, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow
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By lifting the constitutional ban on political parties in March 1990, the USSR's Congress of People's Deputies opened the way for the next step in the logical sequence of political organizing. It seemed that those amorphous, fluid and ad hoc forms that had hitherto populated Russian political society – informal groups and voters' associations, loose electoral and legislative coalitions – would now give way to the genuine article: political parties. However, the rather motley collection of groups that came forth to claim this title scarcely measured up to the expectations that their leaders, as well as many observers, had entertained for them. While a few managed to attract more than 10,000 members, most numbered their followers in the hundreds. Measuring even their collective roster against that of the multi-million CPSU made them appear all the more insignificant. Their programmes were topheavy with platitudes, neither specifying concrete measures to be implemented nor doing much to distinguish one party from another. It seemed anyone's guess just whom and what they represented.
Much of this confusion resulted from timing. Since the authorities had not removed the prohibition on parties until after the 1990 elections, all the new parties were latecomers, arriving on the scene only after the ball had ended. With neither identifiable constituencies to represent nor upcoming elections to prepare for, the development of Russia's political parties was ingrown. In each instance, it amounted to a collection of leaders and activists consciously pursuing the project of being a political party in the absence of clear connection to events in the world. Congresses were called, platforms debated, charters adopted and officers elected – all to the effect that there were now these ‘parties’.
Part II - Perestroika and the return of political life
- Michael Urban, University of California, Santa Cruz, Vyacheslav Igrunov, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow, Sergei Mitrokhin, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow
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This part of our study concerns a pivotal period in Russia's political rebirth, commencing with the ‘beginning of the end’ for the communist order and concluding with the ‘end of the beginning’ for the reappearance of political life. The four chapters in this section approach this double-sided process from two directions. Chapter 3 serves as a general introduction to those that follow. It surveys the party-state's grand attempt at reform, perestroika, from three different perspectives that characterize it, respectively, as: first, a reform designed to ‘renew’ the socialist system; second, a variant of the transnational process of transition from authoritarian to democratic government; and third, the initial stage of a systemic transformation that remains ongoing at this writing. Although each of these vantages proves useful, that provided by the concept ‘transformation’ seems most suitable to our purposes. It allows us to consider perestroika from the perspective of structural relations and thus to develop the relationship between civil society and property order that explains why the attempt at renewal had failed and why a transition of the Soviet system to democracy had been aborted. The remaining chapters make concrete the abstract discussion of these questions contained in Chapter 3. Each recalls our categories of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ structures and illustrates in a specific instance how the weak structures associated with the Soviet form of organization proved incapable of transformation.
Chapter 4 focuses on the mass media under the impact of glasnost.
Notes
- Michael Urban, University of California, Santa Cruz, Vyacheslav Igrunov, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow, Sergei Mitrokhin, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow
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Preface
- Michael Urban, University of California, Santa Cruz, Vyacheslav Igrunov, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow, Sergei Mitrokhin, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow
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This book got its start in Moscow during the ebullient spring of 1991. Still as fresh, hopeful and innocent as spring itself, political life had sprouted forth again in Russia, bringing to a close that seventy-year political ice-age, communism. In the face of that, it dawned on me and my colleagues – Vyacheslav Igrunov and Sergei Mitrokhin – that someone needed to write this story and that we might as well be the ones to attempt it. Ironically, however, the subject of our concern soon became the undoing of our collaboration as politics demanded more and more of the working lives of my Russian partners until autumn 1993 when, following their successful campaign for seats in the State Duma, it claimed them completely. Although the writing thus fell to me, they continued to participate in the project throughout: first, by composing segments for chapters 2, 4–6 and 8 that I have translated, reworked and blended into the text; and, second, by commenting on the draft chapters that I had produced, pointing out my errors, suggesting alternative perspectives on one or another question, sharing their knowledge and acumen with me. As such, the first-person plural pronoun has been used in this book to record that degree of collaboration that we managed to sustain.
Our study proceeds along two parallel lines. Along the first of these, we sketch Russia's political rebirth in broad strokes, offering an interpretation of that process that draws on structural, organizational and communicative perspectives to frame it in interactive terms. In our view, this topic can be neither exhausted nor explained by consulting the preferences, projects, calculations, actions and reactions of the individuals participating in it.
4 - Glasnost, mass media and the emergence of political society
- Michael Urban, University of California, Santa Cruz, Vyacheslav Igrunov, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow, Sergei Mitrokhin, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow
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During the late 1980s, the word ‘glasnost’ entered the international lexicon. The unprecedented openness and frankness that had begun to appear on the pages of newspapers and on television screens in the Soviet Union astonished the world. Perhaps inspired by what had been achieved in the USSR, perhaps unduly idealizing this achievement, citizens of this country or that began to employ the word ‘glasnost’ themselves, obliquely suggesting thereby that if such a thing could come to pass in, of all places, the Soviet Union, then surely they had a right to demand more information, more truth-telling, from their own governments.
What was this sensation, glasnost? Our answer to this question differs fundamentally from those accounts of this phenomena known to us. The difference, however, consists solely in the manner in which the question itself is framed. Drawing from our discussion of the various ways in which perestroika has been characterized, we notice that, from the perspective of renewal, glasnost appears as a more or less conscious and deliberate strategy of the communist leadership designed to attain certain ends. Accordingly, this view tends to focus on the intentions of the leadership, the means they employed to realize them and the results of their efforts. The transitions perspective shares some of these same emphases, viewing glasnost as a strategy of liberalizers within the regime who use the mass media to strengthen their own position, both by permitting into common circulation certain information and ideas that would discredit their rivals and by appealing to potential allies in society. Each of these approaches, then, frames the question by foregrounding the role of the leadership.
2 - Regime and opposition in the pre-political period
- Michael Urban, University of California, Santa Cruz, Vyacheslav Igrunov, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow, Sergei Mitrokhin, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow
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This chapter surveys a period that we call ‘pre-political’. It can be likened to those intervals – pre-dawn or twilight – that separate night from day, intervals during which neither is quite present yet both seem to be there at once, incongruously, cancelling one another out at the same time. Pre-political suggests such an interval to us. It describes a period that is neither political in the sense of that term as we have used it, nor altogether anti-political as we have characterized communism. What defines the interval in this way would be the appearance and development of a small but none the less significant social movement that came to be known as ‘the dissidents’. The presence of this novel element on the inhospitable terrain of state socialism represents a critical turning point for our subject, for it introduces a new and unique position into the field of cultural-political expression that reverberates as a series of reactions and permutations on the part of other actors. Moreover, the discursive practices associated with this movement would both anticipate a return of political life in Russia and contribute at least indirectly to that return itself.
Short exegeses of certain theoretic concepts, introduced to organize the discussion and to provide an inter-related set of categories for its principal elements, punctuate this chapter. One of these concepts – ‘cultural–political field’ – can be briefly introduced, here, by noting three aspects of its use pertinent to our discussion. First, the compound adjective is employed to connote politically related practices that have their origins in the sphere of cultural production.
Frontmatter
- Michael Urban, University of California, Santa Cruz, Vyacheslav Igrunov, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow, Sergei Mitrokhin, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow
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Part IV - Ground up: politics in post-communist Russia
- Michael Urban, University of California, Santa Cruz, Vyacheslav Igrunov, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow, Sergei Mitrokhin, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow
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The word-play in this part's title both underscores the perspective that we have employed to frame Russia's political rebirth and suggests something about the fate of those forces in political society that brought it about. On one hand, our interpretation of the recovery of political life – as much as it may have depended in its early stages on certain dispensations issued by the Gorbachev leadership – has emphasized the fact that it was a mass phenomenon involving countless choices, risks, sacrifices and acts of courage by individuals and groups of people. Politics, that is, came from the ‘ground up’. On the other, the particular path followed by political society, the path of struggle against the Soviet party-state, also shaped its institutions and its relations with the Russian state in critical and, perhaps, fatal ways. In the end, those forces accounting for Russia's political rebirth have been ‘ground up’ themselves; defeated, coopted or marginalized by the executive apparatus of the state.
Organized as a reverse-order counterpart to Part I, the chapters here are laid out along diachronic and synchronic lines. The narrative in Chapter 11 traces political society's division to the statist/monetarist strategy of transformation adopted by Russia's post-communist leadership. Ironically, this strategy progressively undermined the coherence of state institutions while it simultaneously contributed to the political capital of the most extreme forces arrayed against the government. The violent termination of that struggle inaugurated a new constitutional order in Russia inscribed with executive dominance.
8 - The 1990 elections and the politics of national liberation
- Michael Urban, University of California, Santa Cruz, Vyacheslav Igrunov, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow, Sergei Mitrokhin, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow
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Summary
The 1990 elections represented a critical phase in the disintegration of the communist order in Russia. Already, Gorbachev's project to renew the Communist Party – disentangling it from state administration, ending its petty administrative tutelage over every aspect of life and focusing its efforts on solving the country's ‘strategic’ problems which would earn for it the support of the citizenry – had been racking up results quite contrary to those intended. Members were deserting the CPSU in large numbers, either actively by turning in their party cards or passively by not turning in their party dues and otherwise lapsing inactive. Circulation of the party press plummeted, activists were transferring their skills and energies to its competitors, and open political warfare among contending factions broke out within it. By the time that these elections were called, the self-proclaimed vanguard was approaching total disarray. Opposition foci were springing up within, around and outside of the Communist Party. Now it would take another pounding at the polls.
Our concern in this chapter is to analyse political organization under the conditions of Russian national and local elections that commenced with the nomination of candidates in December 1989 and concluded with the balloting of 4 March 1990 and the various run offs and repeated elections that followed. These elections functioned like some great centrifuge, sorting political society into distinguishable layers, separating those forms and forces whose hour had arrived from those for whom it had passed. This centrifuge, of course, had first spun a year earlier, yielding more or less distinguishable opposition groupings to the left and right of Gorbachev.
1 - Politics and communism: figure and ground
- Michael Urban, University of California, Santa Cruz, Vyacheslav Igrunov, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow, Sergei Mitrokhin, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow
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The rebirth of politics in Russia is historically coextensive with the collapse of Soviet communism. More than mere contingency informs this temporal relationship. The key terms in it – politics and communism – define one another, like figure and ground, thesis and antithesis. On one hand, communism had represented a double-excision of politics: suppression of political activity, plus compulsory participation in ubiquitous pseudo-political rituals sponsored by the party-state. Here, we have in mind not only the repressive functions performed by the secret police, informers, prisons and labour camps, but also the appropriation of political forms for the purpose of preventing political practice, such as the empanelling of millions of individuals on Soviets by means of single-candidate ‘elections’ who would represent their constituents by unanimously endorsing whatever measures the authorities had placed before them. On the other, the return of political life in Russia would witness a double-relationship to communism. Politics would be reborn as a struggle against the communist system that had denied it. It would reappear as heroic action, challenging, resisting and defying the communist system in the name of human dignity, national restoration, freedom and democracy. Measured against standards such as these, the prosaic aspects of political activity – ambition, advantage, influence and so on – would seem so many miscreants subverting this struggle from within. But the institutional inheritance bequeathed by communism to the new Russian polity would complicate the matter of rebirth in far more profound and ramified ways.
12 - Neither democracy nor dictatorship
- Michael Urban, University of California, Santa Cruz, Vyacheslav Igrunov, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow, Sergei Mitrokhin, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow
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The face of contemporary political life in Russia combines both democratic and dictatorial features. Their co-presence has been inscribed by the victors of October 1993 into the country's constitution which retains institutions and practices associated with modern democracy – freedom of expression and association, public elections and popular assemblies – but drastically restricts their influence on the executive agencies of the state. The legislative power of the popularly elected lower house of the Federal Assembly (the State Duma) is hemmed in by the upper chamber (the Council of the Federation) the vast majority of whose members owe their seats directly or indirectly to the president, the president's own law-making and veto prerogatives, and a nominally independent Constitutional Court, whose loyalties have leaned toward the justices' patron – the president – as evinced, for instance, in the way in which they have freighted the legislative process with a definition of the majority required to pass a bill: half-plus-one of all seats in the Duma, no matter how many are vacant at a given time owing to truancies, assassinations or failure to hold elections in certain districts. Consequently, the executive's power dwarfs that of the legislature. This distribution of authority in the constitutional order calls to mind the pattern of ‘delegative democracy’ as described by Guillermo O'Donnell, a sort of elected dictatorship unencumbered by a legislative counterweight that enables the president to enact his putative popular mandate to perform surgery on an ailing body politic (‘reform’). However, that concept would have limited purchase in contemporary Russia where two of its key components go partly or entirely missing.
10 - Restoration and revolution
- Michael Urban, University of California, Santa Cruz, Vyacheslav Igrunov, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow, Sergei Mitrokhin, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow
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Faced with politically mobilized societies in most of the union-republics mustered behind their respective sovereign states, the Soviet regime responded with a politics of restoration. In autumn 1990, it launched a ‘low-intensity’ coup d'état, menacing, probing and pressuring the national-democratic movements on a variety of fronts in a war of manoeuvre. From the standpoint of political organization, this meant a reassertion of nomenklatura rule by relying on those state agencies with the capacity for physical violence: the KGB, the army, paramilitary forces (OMON) and the police. From that of communication, it involved a reassertion of the regime's longstanding prerogative to define and interpret the world. Each figured centrally in the politics of restoration: violence and intimidation directed against bodies on the one hand; lies, disinformation and blackouts inflicted on minds on the other. In Russia, the low-intensity coup was punctuated by two ostensible efforts at compromise. The first, in summer 1990 involving economic reform, came to nothing. The second, a negotiated revision of the federal system, precipitated the seizure of power by the self-proclaimed State Committee for the State of Emergency (SCSE) on 19 August 1991.
The protracted siege imposed by the party-state established a particular context for the development of Russia's nascent political society, erasing any possibility of ‘normal’ politics and inscribing into it the martial virtues of solidarity, resistance and heroism. This chapter analyses the political struggle that prevailed in Russia under the tacit ‘state of emergency’ that lasted from autumn 1990 till the defeat of the August coup. Its aim is to situate state-building and political development within it, demonstrating that structures of resistance, and those alone, brought cohesion and form to political relations.
Part I - The pre-political context
- Michael Urban, University of California, Santa Cruz, Vyacheslav Igrunov, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow, Sergei Mitrokhin, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow
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Summary
The two chapters in this part of the book provide a sketch of the context from which politics would reappear in Russia. Our aim, therefore, is to set out those aspects of the context most relevant to that reappearance and to develop certain concepts for analysing them. Accordingly, the first chapter begins with a model of ‘politics’ that articulates the concept across three spheres (state, political society and civil society) and along two dimensions (organization and communication). The discussion then turns to a consideration of the Soviet state that highlights from a structural perspective its relatively ineffective capacity for domination – despite certain appearances to the contrary, such as its arsenal of repressive practices. Our attention turns next to the ways in which this weak (yet repressive) state articulated with society. Its actions along the dimension of communication produced systematic distortions that had disrupted the formation of social identities and restricted their circulation to the narrow confines of face-to-face encounters. Thus, that singular exception to the Soviet state's weakness – its capacity physically to penetrate society – rendered society weak as well. This discussion then yields a number of problematics that serve as the book's principal themes.
These themes are first explored concretely in the second chapter. In contrast to the synchronic approach employed up to this point, the narrative in this chapter is organized diachronically in order to tackle the issue of how the structures of domination conditioned those of action. The time frame involved here is roughly bounded at one end by Stalin's death and, at the other, by the regime's inauguration of ‘perestroika’.
7 - The politics of opposition
- Michael Urban, University of California, Santa Cruz, Vyacheslav Igrunov, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow, Sergei Mitrokhin, Institute for Humanities and Political Studies, Moscow
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Summary
Contrary to the pattern accompanying transitions from authoritarian rule to democracy that we discussed in Chapter 3 – in which national elections had been followed by a rapid demobilization of popular forces and a de-escalation of political demands – in the Russian case precisely the opposite occurred. In the wake of the 1989 elections, the country was rocked by an explosion of political activity that fundamentally transformed the relations of power within an already shaken communist order and brought millions of people into the political process as active participants. As this post-election mobilization gathered force, leaders of the democratic forces correspondingly altered their strategy. No longer would they attempt to influence the Gorbachev leadership to adopt one or another measure through persuasion; rather, they would oppose that leadership, adopting an increasingly radical posture in so doing. Thus demands to renew the social order were replaced by those to transform it.
How can this departure from the pattern described in the transitions literature be explained? Contextualizing the structural categories used in our earlier discussion of this question, we here call attention to the manner in which the USSR's weak structures rendered the new legislature both unrepresentative and institutionally debilitated. The following section explores these questions from a number of viewpoints, arguing that within the prevailing circumstances publicity, rather than legislative activity, was the single alternative to capitulation facing those returned to office by a sector of the electorate that was already becoming an active mass base for a revolutionary-democratic movement. Through publicity, interaction between democratic leaders and the public spiralled into the creation of a loosely organized national opposition whose objective became the destruction of the communist system in Russia.
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