Soviet elections get
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
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
Turther.
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
* 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
* 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
* 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
* In Zhitomir, an independent journalist,
Alla Yaroshinskaya, won out over four par-
"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
* 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 corres-
* 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.
CALASKST
Ges 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
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out of hand
New advance for
Baltic movements,
In its February 5 issue, the Polish Catholic paper Tygodnik
Powszechny, a semi-independent institution, published an interview with Vytautas Landsbergis, the chair of Sajudis. It was censored in some places. The following is a somewhat shortened translation.
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.