End the official monopoly of power of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, proud inheritor of Lenin's mantle, vanguard of world revolution?
Of the many unthinkable ideas floated in perestroika's wake, this reform ranked among the most wildly farfetched. But last week the prospect of abolishing the party's "leading role" in the U.S.S.R. gained momentum when the Lithuanian legislature voted 243 to 1 in favor of a constitutional amendment legalizing rivals to the Communist Party. While Lithuania thus became the first Soviet republic to do so, in neighboring Estonia the Communist Party Central Committee approved a similar proposal that should easily pass the legislature next month. In Armenia angry crowds surrounded parliament after legislators rejected a multiparty system. This week Andrei Sakharov and other members of the Congress of People's Deputies are calling for a two-hour strike to force the Congress to debate the repeal or modification of Article 6 of the constitution, which enshrines the Communist Party's dominance in the national government.
These developments -- and the gleeful speed with which Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia have guillotined the Communist monopoly -- must make Mikhail Gorbachev feel like the sorcerer's apprentice. Unable to control the rising flood of reforms he has conjured up, he is finding it harder to keep afloat.
Gorbachev, who has called a multiparty system "rubbish," has good reason to worry. Many non-Russians in the Soviet empire -- Ukrainians and Azerbaijanis as well as Armenians and Balts -- would flock to new parties seeking autonomy from Moscow. The Baltic republics already sport popular fronts and other freshly minted political groups whose members ran as independent candidates in national elections earlier this year and trounced establishment party hacks. In the Russian Republic itself, there is mounting anger and frustration with empty shops and suffocating bureaucracy that could easily swell the rolls of a gaggle of independent parties. Politburo member Yegor Ligachev, speaking for the Kremlin conservatives whose favor Gorbachev must still curry, has said flatly that multiple parties would "lead to the disintegration of the U.S.S.R."
Gorbachev also contends that the future of well-managed reform depends on the party continuing to run the show, an argument that would surely bring a smile to the face of just deposed East German party leader Egon Krenz. "Preserving the vanguard role for the party, from our point of view, is extremely necessary, especially in the time of perestroika," insists candidate Politburo member Yevgeni Primakov. "The party is the only consolidating force in our society, and in our federation."