I would like to begin by asking you about Gorbachev’s political development. Whatever happens in the future, he has become someone considerably more important in the history of the Soviet Union, and the history of the world, than Khrushchev. When did this qualitative change in his role take place? When did he become radicalized and why?

Ihave been thinking about this quite a lot because I wrote a book about him which needed updating. I found that his radicalization started at the end of 1986, when preparations were underway for the Central Committee Plenum on problems of ideology and leadership. At this time the conflict was growing sharper between the conservatives and the liberal or democratic wing, and the plenum was actually postponed three times because Gorbachev’s report was more radical than the Central Committee was prepared to accept. A number of specific measures during this period had a kind of spontaneous character: in the case of Sakharov, for instance, Gorbachev seems to have acted over the heads of the KGB and taken a personal initiative to secure his release from exile in response to requests from the Academy of Science and cultural organizations that were suffering from an American boycott. When the plenum finally took place in January 1987, Gorbachev had to compromise, but at least it decided to lift censorship from the general media. Shelved novels like Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat were cleared for publication, and the press started to take on a quite different character. If we take the example of Chernobyl, the press had been full of stories of heroism throughout 1986, but in 1987 material began to emerge which showed all this in a very different light. As glasnost started to become a reality, it affected Gorbachev himself, because he was not a personwho knew everything. On the other hand, conservative forces continued to put up strong resistance in 1987, including attempts to block various publications. The Yeltsin affair was a good indicator that there was trouble within the party leadership. Gorbachev’s report on the 70th anniversary of the October revolution, together with his book Perestroika, were more or less traditional ways of trying to compromise between different groups. But then the very poor performance of the economy in 1987 seemed to necessitate a series of reforms which Gorbachev expected to come into effect early in 1988. After several postponements Bukharin and other major figures were finally rehabilitated. And then there was the difficult decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, which only happened after the removal of Sokolov and other military leaders and the appointment of the relatively young and unknown Yazov as Minister of Defence. So I think we can say that ’87 was important for the beginning of glasnost, and ’88 saw the start of real economic and political reform. Gorbachev made a large number of discrete changes before he became truly radical.

Would you say that the Party Conference in June 1988 marked a new stage?

Yes, that’s right, although things were not all that clear at the time. The conference itself had a definite air of caution because it was convened according to the old rules: a complete process of indirect election or selection gave advantages to the conservatives, who formed the great bulk of delegates from the provinces if not from Moscow and Leningrad. However, this conservative majority didn’t have any thought-out programme, so Gorbachev was able to get through his reorganization of the party or state system and the proposals for election of a People’s Congress.

Was it really understood at the time that such an election could result in the defeat of many officials?

No, no, it was entirely unexpected, even by Gorbachev. Under the new system, a preliminary sorting took place at district level where there were often ten or twelve nominations and the election committee was able to refuse some nominations and accept others—few districts had more than two candidates, and about a fifth had only one. The second safeguard was the election of the Supreme Soviet by the Congress of People’s Deputies as a whole. The final insurance was a bloc of seats to be filled by nomination of the party or of various other official bodies or associations more or less controlled by the party. Most members of the Politburo and Central Committee, and many other key figures, were elected through the party to safe seats, in the Congress, and later to the Supreme Soviet.

How, then, do we explain that a hundred official candidates, and I think thirty-eight regional Party secretaries, failed to be elected?