The Union: A Long, Mighty Struggle

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Another cause of skepticism about the elections was the bloc of 750 seats reserved for official and public organizations. But even there, insurgency reigned. Leaders of the Soviet Academy of Sciences produced a limp slate of 23 nominees for their 20 reserved seats, pointedly excluding physicist Andrei Sakharov, the Nobel laureate and human-rights activist. But the membership voted down 15 of them, which means that the academy's leaders must come up with new candidates, presumably including Sakharov this time. The Soviet Peace Committee, a goodwill and propaganda organization, was allotted five seats. Among those elected by the group was Patriarch Pimen, head of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Between gasps, however, some caution is in order. The Soviet Union still has a one-party system. After broaching the subject of whether other parties should be permitted, Yeltsin was subjected to an official inquiry by the Central Committee, which is still under way. Gorbachev, who says that pluralism can be accommodated within the Communist Party, calls the idea of having other parties "all rubbish."

Yeltsin will quit his job in Moscow's construction ministry and work to organize a bloc of like-minded members of the Congress of People's Deputies. "They will create pressure and strengthen their voice so it will be heard," he said after his victory. They will also, he hopes, elect him to the Supreme Soviet.

In Russian the word for voting, golosovat, derives from the Russian word golos, or voice. That also happens to be the root of the word glasnost. Likewise, the election was an extension of the openness and public airing * spawned by Gorbachev's glasnost crusade. Of the reform trinity, glasnost has wrought the most tangible changes, especially for the Soviet intellectual community, Gorbachev's most solid base of support. Nowadays the only heresy is orthodoxy. Says economist Shmelev: "Four years ago, people felt themselves living behind barbed wire. Now we have a degree of freedom for intellectuals and for ordinary people that would have been unimaginable before."

But glasnost has sparked serious problems for Gorbachev, none more threatening than the release of long-festering resentments felt by various national and ethnic groups. The world's last polyglot empire now faces renewed demands from the Crimean Tatars about grievances that go back 45 years, nationalist demonstrations in Moldavia against Russification, secessionism along the Baltic coast and sectarian violence between Armenians and Azerbaijanis.

The explosion of ethnic violence in Azerbaijan a year ago caught Gorbachev without a workable nationalities policy. The Armenians are enraged by what they claim are flagrant cases of ethnic abuse against their compatriots living in Azerbaijan. Gorbachev's prestige plummeted in Armenia when he gave a finger-wagging lecture to Armenian intellectuals who had come to present their case in Moscow last summer and when he ended his snap tour of the Armenian earthquake zone last December with another outburst against nationalists.