4 - The programme for change

Summary

From the time it was first announced in June 1987, the XIX Conference was seen as an important event in the party's life. As the first such gathering since 1941, this alone would have ensured that it was seen as an unusual development. But the conflict that had been continuing in the party over the reform programme gave it an added importance. Both sides realised the potential significance the Conference had. For Gorbachev, whose more radical proposals had effectively been swept under the carpet at the January 1987 plenum, the calling of the Conference was a means of circumventing the opposition of those in the middle and upper ranks of the apparatus by appealing to the rank-and-file which, he believed, supported his democratisation proposals, and by gaining the removal of some of the more cautious elements from the CC. For supporters of the reform proposals more generally, the Conference was seen as a means of advancing those proposals and of reversing the series of rebuffs that democratisation had sustained in the preceding eighteen months. Clear rebuffs there had been: the shelving of Gorbachev's specific measures in January 1987, the sacking of Yel'tsin at the end of 1987, and the domination by the apparatus of the delegate selection process for the Conference were all setbacks, and were clearly seen as such, by supporters of democratisation. For opponents of the more radical measures of democratisation, the Conference was seen as an opportunity to stem the impetus for democratisation that had been set in train in January 1987.