"All of us today are just learning democracy. We are only now forming a political culture."
-- Mikhail Gorbachev at the Congress of People's Deputies
From the opening moment, when the spotlights flicked on to illuminate a towering statue of Lenin, it was clear that the days of fully scripted, party- orchestrated politics had -- at least for a moment -- come to an end. Assembled in the Kremlin's Palace of Congresses were the delegates to the Soviet Union's brand-new Congress of People's Deputies, a forum where doctrine could be questioned, where the unexpected could happen, and where the unmentionable could be spoken for all the nation to hear.
All of which came to pass, over three days of debate. The 2,250-seat Congress, two-thirds of whose delegates were freely elected, constitutes what is arguably the most democratic governmental institution in more than seven decades of Soviet rule. But the assembly also revealed a profound regard for the status quo in carrying out one of its principal jobs: the election of 542 members of the Supreme Soviet, which will serve as the country's working legislature. In voting results announced Saturday, most anti-establishment candidates, some of whom had defeated high-ranking Communist Party members to reach the Congress, lost their bids to be seated in the Supreme Soviet. The rebuffed reformers included Boris Yeltsin, the former Moscow party chief who resigned his post in the Construction Ministry earlier in the week, partly in anticipation of being elected to the Supreme Soviet. Only in delegations from Moscow and the Baltic region, a seedbed of reform, did a handful of reformers gain election to the permanent legislature. The results were a severe blow to advocates of change, who seldom attracted more than a third of the body's delegates in major votes.
Any suspicion that the Congress would turn into a totally rubber-stamp legislature, however, was dispelled minutes into the opening session, when a Latvian delegate strode uninvited to the podium. "I ask you to honor the memory of those who died in Tbilisi," urged the gray-bearded man, referring to the 20 demonstrators killed in the Georgian capital in April, some reportedly with poison gas, during clashes with army troops. That request, which prompted the delegates to rise for a moment of silence, was not merely unrehearsed, it was an explicit act of defiance that went against Gorbachev's wish that no ethnic group be singled out for sympathy.