The Union: A Long, Mighty Struggle

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The significance of the new Congress of People's Deputies is not yet certain. The 1,500 candidates who were up for election on March 26 will be joined by 750 selected by public organizations ranging from the Communist Party to the Society of Stamp Collectors. They will select 544 of their number for a new Supreme Soviet. This new legislature, of which Gorbachev is expected to be president, will jostle for authority with the Communist Party's hierarchy, of which Gorbachev is General Secretary. He may thus be able (if his footwork remains agile) to use the new Supreme Soviet to outmaneuver the conservatives in the Communist Party's apparatus and to use the party's Politburo to keep a lid on the insurgents in the Supreme Soviet.

Many elderly voters never mastered the principle that they were supposed to walk into a booth, pull the curtain behind them and secretly cross out the names of those they opposed. Instead, they picked up their ballots and walked straight to the box, as was the practice in past elections. Another change was that the party did not try to drum up turnout. "What kind of election is this?" a baffled older woman complained at a Moscow poll. "Where is the music, and what happened to the buffet?"

Yeltsin, 58, ran as Moscow's Huey Long, stoking populist passions with his calls for an end to the party elite's special privileges and his frontal attacks on Yegor Ligachev. "You're wrong, Boris!" Ligachev had shouted during the emotional Party Conference last year at which Yeltsin sought rehabilitation after being kicked off the Politburo. YEGOR, YOU'RE WRONG! read the buttons sported by Yeltsin's supporters as they marched through Moscow shouting "Down with party bureaucrats!" during the days leading up to the election. Yeltsin ended up with an astounding 89% of the vote in the at-large Moscow district.

One criticism of the election was that in 384 of the 1,500 districts, party hacks ran unopposed. Those who ran alone, however, still had to collect 50% of the vote. The most prominent victim: Yuri Solovyov, the Communist Party boss of the Leningrad region and a nonvoting member of the Politburo. Though Solovyov ran unopposed, almost two-thirds of the voters crossed out his name, and he lost. The mayor of Kiev also ran unopposed and lost. So did that city's , Communist Party boss.

Indeed, any notion that the election was totally controlled by the Communist bureaucracy was dispelled by the startling list of losers: the mayor of Moscow, the president and prime minister in Lithuania, the party boss in Minsk, the first deputy premier of Belorussia and the admiral of the Pacific fleet of the Soviet navy. Across the nation, almost a third of the party's 129 regional leaders lost. Estonians even had the courage to vote down the republic's KGB chief. The city party leader in Leningrad, running against an unknown 28-year-old shipyard engineer, received only 15% of the vote. In fact, the five top Communists in the Leningrad power structure tumbled to defeat. Valeri Terekhov, a member of Leningrad's Democratic Union, an opposition group, noted, "Gorbachev opened a volcano, and I don't think he realized the lava was so deep."