The Hot Summer of 1988
The major event of the year had been announced beforehand. The whole country, the whole world, awaited the Nineteenth Conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). All of the happenings of spring were assessed in relation to the approaching Conference and how they might influence its outcome. The many sceptics who tried to suggest that the country's fate would not be settled at a conference were not given credence. The country lived in expectation. Probably never before in the history of Soviet society had the preparations for the next Party forum provoked such universal and lively interest.
The pendulum swung first to the left and then to the right. Liberal hopes had been raised by Gorbachev's speech at the January 1987 Plenum of the CPSU Central Committee and 'informal' left groups had gained the opportunity to organize officially their own conference in the summer of the same year and found a Federation of Socialist Social Clubs (FSOK). But the autumn turned into a 'crisis of glasnost' when Boris Yeltsin, the most popular and radical Party figure, was accused of a multiplicity of political errors and forced to resign his post as First Secretary of the Moscow City Committee (gorkom). When, in March 1988, Sovietskaya Rossiya published Nina Andreeva's letter -- 'I cannot give up my principles' -- which contained essentially a call for the restoration of the Stalinist order, many perceived it as a bad omen: was this the beginning of a turning back? No one had any doubts that behind Nina Andreeva stood
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