His face flushed with anger, Mikhail Gorbachev sat stiffly in the Kremlin's Hall of Meetings as the Supreme Soviet thundered through its most tumultuous session yet. For hours last week, speaker after speaker denounced the Soviet leader's request for sweeping new executive powers. Without using those precise words, they accused him of edging back toward Stalinism, of reaching for dictatorial rule. Scowling down from the tribunal at the offending delegates behind rows of desks, he leaned toward the microphone and pointed an accusing finger.
"Calm down, calm down, calm down," he ordered. Those who opposed his plan, he said, were "trying to sow mistrust." This was no time for "cheap demagoguery." He had contemplated not running in the next presidential election, he said, but decided that to withdraw now would be cowardly. The national interest demanded "quick action on this matter." The chastened legislators listened well: they voted 347-24 to pass the bill and send it on to the Congress of People's Deputies for final approval.
Three days earlier, in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, a meeting of some of Gorbachev's much more determined opponents had added special urgency to his demand for expanded authority. As results of local elections flowed into the headquarters of Sajudis, the Lithuanian popular front, the architects of the independence movement gathered to take stock. The election for the republic's parliament had amounted to a referendum on secession from the Soviet Union. Backing a candidate in each district, Sajudis captured 72 of the 90 seats decided. "If this isn't a landslide, what is?" asked Algimantas Cekuolis, a Communist Party member endorsed by Sajudis. Predicted Virgilijus Cepaitis, secretary of the popular front: "This means we will have independence in the spring or summer."
Lenin once referred to the vast, polyglot Russian Empire of the Czars as a "prison of nations." Most of those captive nations, set loose briefly by the Bolshevik Revolution and the aftermath of World War I, were reconquered by the Red Army and reforged into the modern Soviet Empire: 15 ethnically diverse republics spreading almost 7,000 miles from the Polish border to the Sea of Japan.
This immense landmass, so long made immutable and monolithic by rule from the Kremlin, is now quaking under the impact of Gorbachev's reforms. The Soviet republics are beginning to snap the political and economic bonds linking them to the once all-powerful center in Moscow. With the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in the vanguard, some of the imprisoned peoples are battering the outside walls and intend to leap to freedom. It now seems certain that the center cannot hold onto all 15 republics. What was unthinkable only a few months ago has now become reality: the largest country in the world is on the brink of shrinking. Politics in the U.S.S.R. has turned into a race between the republics trying to break out and Gorbachev with his determination to build new fences and structures to keep them in.