The corridors of the neoclassical House of Trade Unions building were dark when Boris Yeltsin, 58, Moscow's former Communist Party leader, emerged from a conference room to speak to journalists and admirers waiting in the hall. Yeltsin looked weary but triumphant. "Boris Nikolayevich! How does it feel?" shouted a foreign reporter. "All of Moscow will vote!" Yeltsin beamed. "Can you imagine what that means?"
Only minutes earlier, 886 electors had cast ballots approving Yeltsin's candidacy for city-wide representative to the Congress of People's Deputies, a recently created legislature that Mikhail Gorbachev is counting on to boost his floundering reform drive. Yeltsin's...