May people ask a simple question: how could Gorbachev lead the USSR to decline and disintegration in the presence of a strong communist party? Nobody stopped him? Well, as the saying goes, every simple question has a simple answer which is wrong. So the answer here is not simple.

There were senior party members who did try to backpedal the process. For example, Lukyanov was an early political ally of Gorbachev and supported him in his initial economic reforms. Lukyanov was with Gorbachev in his fight against corruption. Was there corruption in the Promised Land? Did you personally see any? You ask.

In the first part of this article, I talked about moving from Moscow to Baku. I simply wanted to change my field of study. I had seen many students do it, so my senior friends tried to help me out but failed. We did not have gifts for the officials who had the authority. As a result I was thrown to faraway Baku. Lesson? If you had convincing presents for the bureaucracy, you could get the decision in your favour; if you did not, you faced the consequences. My forced movement to Azerbaijan was sort of a punishment for not being able to gratify the apparatchiks.

Anyway, Lukyanov who was one of the strong supporters of Gorbachev soon realised that Gorbachev’s policies were unleashing forces that would destroy the USSR. By 1988, Lukyanov increasingly sympathised with the party establishment and foresaw the disaster coming. I remember Lukyanov being appointed a secretary of the CPSU Central Committee in 1987 and a candidate member of the Politburo in 1988. Then there was Sokolov, the Soviet defence minister, who was removed by Gorbachev in 1987 after the Mathias Rust Affair in which a German amateur pilot had landed in front of the Kremlin.

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I was in Odessa, Ukraine, when all hell broke loose at the soft landing of a foreign plan without being shot or intercepted from Helsinki to Moscow. This was a great embarrassment for the Soviet government and reflected a decline in Soviet preparedness to defend itself. This also gave Gorbachev a chance to get rid of Sokolov and a couple of other senior military officers who could pose a threat to Gorbachev’s policies of loosening the communist grip on power. Gorbachev brought in a new defence minister, Yazov, expecting him to be better than Sokolov but later events -- Black January in Baku in 1990 and the putsch in 1991 -- proved he did more harm to Gorbachev than Sokolov could have done.

Another senior member, Ligachev, was initially viewed as one of Gorbachev’s primary allies but when Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost deviated from communism and resembled social democracy, Ligachev distanced himself from Gorbachev. By 1988, he was known as the leader of more conservative, anti-Gorbachev faction of Soviet politicians. To counter him, Gorbachev brought in Yeltsin considering him pro-reform and a counterbalance against Ligachev. But Yeltsin was repeatedly humiliated and reprimanded by Ligachev who took advantage of his more senior position in the CPSU. When Yeltsin sought Gorbachev’s help against Ligachev, no response came and Yeltsin became bitter and anti-Gorbachev.

When the CPSU senior leadership started showing reluctance to Gorbachev reform, he diluted the power of the CPSU by creating a Congress of People’s Deputies (CoPD) through a major constitutional change. At the 19^th Party Conference in July 1988, Gorbachev won the backing of the delegates to create a new supreme legislative body, CoPD. It was an attempt by Gorbachev to bypass the resistance from the ‘old guards’ who were resisting liberalisation. He changed tack, and with constitutional changes tried to separate the Party and the State.

By isolating his conservative opponents, he published detailed proposals for the CoPD for public consultation. He wanted the new CoPD to create a new Supreme Soviet (legislature). The necessary amendments to the 1977 Soviet Constitution were carried out to enact a law on electoral reform. The CoPD had 2,250 members, would gather twice a year and would elect the Supreme Soviet (SS) consisting of a smaller number of deputies. The SS would then serve as a permanent legislature to decide most issues -- but not amendments that were left to the CoPD.

In March-1989 general elections, with almost 90 per cent reported voter participation, CoPD seats were filled. In May, the CoPD proceeded to choose the 542 Supreme Soviet members. To reduce the power of the Supreme Soviet, Gorbachev had reduced its strength from previously 1,500 to now just 542 from all over the country. Gorbachev retained his position as the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet. The new Supreme Soviet convened in June 1989 and the new council of ministers, headed by Nikolai Ryzhkov, was announced. Gorbachev had made Ryzhkov the prime minister after removing Tikhonov in 1985, and now through the new legislature he was again leading the government.

The elections of March 1989 were a milestone in the Soviet history for being actually competitive. For the first time, multiple candidates were allowed instead of one CPSU-approved candidate for each seat. For the first time, lively debates started taking place with different viewpoints expressed because -- from communist to pro-Western -- a variety of different political positions were represented. Gorbachev had struck a major blow to his own party, albeit with good intention to introduce democracy. In this tug-of-war, Gorbachev swayed between the two factions of Ligachev and Yeltsin. He antagonised Yeltsin who became his worst enemy in 1988 onwards.

This factionalism also precipitated the disintegration of the Soviet Union on the peripheries, mostly in the non-Russian areas. The Baltic region had started mass dissent in 1987, with Estonia demanding autonomy followed by Lithuania and Latvia. Gorbachev did not want to crack down, lest it damaged his credentials as a democrat in the West where he sought support for his reforms. Then Trans-Caucasus region followed with Armenian population revolting in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan. Massive demonstrations in Armenia voiced solidarity with the secessionists. The Popular Front of Azerbaijan had been established in 1988 and started struggling for the independence of Azerbaijan from the Soviet Union.

In 1989, the Supreme Council of Azerbaijan had adopted the law on ‘Economic Sovereignty of Azerbaijan’. The programmes of Armenians in Azerbaijan prompted the Soviet authorities in January 1990 to send army into Baku city. Hundreds were killed and wounded in the Baku operation led by Yazov, minister of defence. But it all hastened the end of Soviet power there. Similar Pandora’s Box was opened in Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, Byelorussia, and the Central Asian Republics. These movements weakened the power of the central government as well as republican communist governments.

Gorbachev retained Ligachev in the Politburo till 1990, but in the 28^th Congress of the CPSU in 1990, Ligachev harshly criticised Gorbachev for circumventing the Party. Ligachev argued that glasnost had gone too far and challenged Gorbachev for Party leadership as the ‘Leninist’ candidate. Ligachev lost and left the Politburo. At the same CPSU Congress, Gorbachev inducted a new Politburo member, Yanayev, whom he promote in December 1990 to the newly created position of vice-president of the Soviet Union without anticipating that just eight months later Yanayev would lead a putsch against Gorbachev.

Yanayev was a known conservative and had opposed glasnost and perestroika. At his selection as the VP, foreign minister Shevardnadze resigned protesting that the number of conservatives was increasing in top political offices. By then Shevardnadze had already dismantled Soviet supremacy in Eastern European countries by allowing their people to make their decisions without Soviet intervention. Almost immediately after taking office, Yanayev joined other conservative communists -- led by the KGB chairman Kryuchkov -- to persuade Gorbachev to declare a state of emergency. But Gorbachev was working on his proposal for a New Union Treaty to form the Union of Sovereign States, to transform the Soviet Union into a confederation.

The conservatives believed that the new treaty would lead to the disintegration of the USSR. Finally, when Gorbachev was on vacation in August 1991, a last-ditch effort was made to save the Soviet Union floundering since the implementation of Gorbachev’s glasnost. Hardline communists organised a coup d’état by kidnapping Gorbachev and announcing his resignation on ‘health grounds’. Vice President Yanayev declared himself the new leader of the Soviet Union. Interestingly, by that time I had come to Pakistan and was working as a copywriter at an advertising agency under the direct supervision of Sarmad Ali, now MD of the Jang Group. He broke the news of the coup to me and we spent the evening discussing the new world scenario.

After the coup, massive protests were staged in Moscow, Leningrad and many other cities. Though the defence minister, Yazov, was one of the plotters, his orders to soldiers to quell the protesters fell on deaf ears. General Lebed was given orders to send tanks but he never took any action against the demonstrators and Boris Yeltsin who had come to oppose the coup. The soldiers refused to fire on their fellow countrymen and after three days of protests the coup failed, failing to get the cooperation from the military, plotters surrendered. They simply did not have the power to subjugate massive demonstrations.

After the coup, events unfolded rapidly and within a few months the Soviet Union completely collapsed. Nobody could turn the clock back and the tide of dissent had become too strong to stop. Gorbachev had returned to Moscow but he was even worse than a lame duck president. He had to concede power and on December 25, 1991, he resigned and the USSR -- one of the superpowers -- ceased to exist. A Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) was formed by most of the independent countries of the former Soviet Union.

Fifteen newly-formed independent countries emerged and have been struggling for the past 25 years to develop their economies, reorganise their political systems, and solve their territorial disputes. These countries have fought wars, and most of the former Soviet Republics have suffered severe economic hardships. But responding to the first question in this article, I have given the details of the inner party struggle rather than commonly propagated heroism of Yeltsin who did play an important role in the Soviet dissolution but he was more of a hero for the West.

So finally, was I sad at Soviet disintegration? Yes, I was. Am I longing now for the good old communism? No I am not. So what do I want? Perhaps a democratic, humane, secular, and welfare state that offers all good things of the erstwhile Soviet Union, but without its totalitarian streaks.