Soviet elections get out of hand THE ELECTIONS for the Congress of People's Deputies on March 26 marked an important turning point in the USSR. There was a significant step forward in the politicization of the broad masses. The top echelons of the nomenklatura suffered a political defeat of unforeseen dimensions. The democratization process, although certainly still very partial, has gone one stage further. ERNEST MANDEI
USSR
* In Kiev, the third largest city of the USSR, the party chief Masik was edged out, along with the mayor.
* In Yaroslav, where there was an important strike last year, the party candidate, General Snetkov, was beaten by a lieutenant colonel who proposed that students be exempted from military service.
* In Lithuania, the radical-democratic, nationalist mass movement Sajudis won 30 out of 42 seats. The president of the SSR and the prime minister, who opposed this movement, were not elected.
People's Front victory in
Estonia * In Estonia, the party chief was only elected with the support of the People's Front, which won 15 of the 23 seats decided in the first round of the elections.
* In Latvia, the prime minister was beaten by a television journalist.
* In Tomsk, Siberia, more than 50% of the electorate crossed out the name of the sole candidate on the ballot.
* Important military chiefs — such as the admiral of the northern fleet, the head of the Soviet Army in East Germany and the KGB chief in Estonia - were defeated.
# In Moscow, the mayor and the party's second secretary bit the dust.
* In a series of constituencies, "reform" candidates are in a good position for the second round: notably the long-time proKhrushchevian dissident, historian Roy Medvedev; the prosecutor Gdlian, who led the inquiry against the Brezhnev family; the philosopher Atzhin; and the economists Emelianov and Oleg Bogomolov.
* The most spectacular result was obviously the veritable referendum in favour of Boris Yeltsin, who won 89.4% of the vote in the whole of Moscow (a nationalterritorial rather than a local district), that is, 5.1 million votes. And this was after the Central Committee decided to start disciplinary proceedings against him.
PERESTROIKA
ERNEST MANDEL
T IS NOT YET possible to make a complete assessment of the electoral results. But the information available from various Soviet sources and from Western press correspondents in the USSR is already impressive:
* Thirty-four out of 150 regional secretaries of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) were defeated.
* A candidate member of the Political Bureau, Yuri Solovyev, was defeated in Leningrad.
* Also in Leningrad, the three other "supreme chiefs" of the bureaucracy were beaten, notably the mayor and the first secretary of the CPSU in the town - the latter by an ordinary worker from the naval shipyards.
* The oldest member of the Politburo and head of the bureaucracy in the Ukraine, Vladimir Shcherbitsky, the only candidate in the workers' stronghold of Depropetrovsk, had his name crossed out by 27% of the electors.
* In Zhitomir, an independent journalist, Alla Yaroshinskaya, won out over four party candidates.
"Conservative" bastion demolished
* In Lvov, the capital of the Western Ukraine, independent groups that were unable to run candidates called for crossing out the names of the CPSU candidates. Three of these candidates failed to get 50% of the vote.
* In Moldavia, independent intellectuals beat most of the party leaders.
* In Byelorussia, considered a bastion of the "conservatives," and where there was only one candidate everywhere, the candidates registered all failed to get 50% of the vote, thereby making necessary a second round.
* In Armenia, the official press estimates that 53% of the voters cast ballots in Erevan (as against an average of 85% for the Soviet Union). But independent observers maintain that there was massive fraud, and that more than 50% of the voters heeded the call of the Karabakh Committee for boycotting the elections. This action was taken to press the demand for release of the 11 arrested members of the Committee, several of whom wanted to run in the elections and had a good chance of being elected.
* In Kirghizia, the apparatus candidates failed to win in the first round and are poorly placed to win in the second. One of them was beaten by Izvestia's local correspondent.
* In Volgograd, an ultra-conservative writer backed by the party and the extreme right group Pamyat was beaten by an unknown young Komsomol (Communist Youth) candidate.
GASMOST Ges
USSR
Three myths were given their coup de grace by these election results. The first is that glasnost, democratization, is of interest only to the intellectuals. It is clear that the toiling masses, first of all the working class, used them as a means of expressing their discontent.
The German weekly magazine Der Spiegel reports in its April 3 issue that at a demonstration for Yeltsin, shouts broke out of "We want the heads of the mafia of bureaucrats!" Red flags were waved. An elderly woman shouted, "Why, this is a bit like 1917, minus the soldiers and sailors." The British Sunday Times (April 2) wrote:"One can no longer contrast the independence of mind shown for years by many Soviet intellectuals with the apathy and conformism of the workers. Millions of Soviet citizens have become serious actors on the political scene, for the first time since the years immediately following the revolution." Results were not a setback for Gorbachev
The second myth swept away was the so-called contrast between the minority nationalities and Russia, which was supposed to be a bastion of conformism and conservatism. The elections in Moscow and Leningrad have shown that it is not at all like this.
The third is that the democratization pro- - do muld crater. cess underway was tightly controlled, manipulated and channeled by Gorbachev. All you need to do is study the instructions given by Politburo members before the elections and the commentaries of Gorbachev himself to see that things to a large extent went over his head.
Does that mean that the elections were a setback for Gorbachev? That is obviously not true. His "centrist," or more accurately Bonapartist, position has rather been strengthened for the immediate future by the appearance of a more radical and massive left confronting the conservative right. In the medium term, everything depends on the breadth of mass mobilization and mass discontent. So, we should remain cautious.
If Sakharov is also finally elected to represent the Academy of Sciences, which will be decided in a few days, that will mean that two leaders of the opposition will enter the parliament.
For the USSR, the least that can be said, is that this is a first. And regardless of the fact that the positions of most of the oppositionists elected are still vague and not very political, three general progressive threads emerge from the programs of many of them, especially Yeltsin and Sakharov — against privileges for the bureaucracy, for more equality (Sakharov calls for free food coupons for the poorest 40% of the population); for opening up a debate on the multiplication of political 4 platforms and the possibility of a multi-party system. * International Viewpoint #161 • April 17, 1989
New advance for Baltic movements, Sajudis' perspectives FOR THE FIRST TIME, the Communist Party has been put in a minority in formally sovereign republics of the Soviet Union. In all three Baltic republics, the nationaldemocratic People's Fronts won landslide victories. (The relationship of forces is a bit less clear in Estonia, where the local CP and Front are in an alliance, but it seems clear that the Front is the predominant political force.)