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372 Meeting the Demands of Reason might otherwise be committed in the future. Indeed, its operative assumption was that only by remembering past crimes could the commission of future ones be prevented. In this respect Memorial was trying to be proactive, and its emphasis on the rule of law and the autonomy of the individual made it the one organization Sakharov joined about which he had no serious qualms either while he was a member or retrospectively.82 Nowhere in his writings can one find any criticism of it. In Memorial Sakharov was still acting as a dissident, seeking to influence policy without participating in the process by which policy was made. This would soon change. With his election in the spring of 1989 to the First Congress of People’s Deputies, he became a politician. He offered himself as a candidate, formulated a program he would follow if elected, and for two weeks in late May and early June played a prominent role in the inaugural congress of the first institution in Russia since the Constituent Assembly in 1918 that represented, however imperfectly, the wishes and interests of the people as a whole rather than those of the Communist Party. Prior to the congress, Sakharov was a figure familiar to and respected by a small proportion of the educated elite. To the rest of the population he was either unknown or a dim memory from an earlier era. When the congress was over, he was a national figure with mass popularity.83 The outpouring of grief and adulation that followed Sakharov’s death in December 1989 would not have been possible without his nomination, election, and participation in the congress in the winter and spring of that year. 24 The Congress of People’s Deputies There were moments of high drama at the First Congress of People’s Deputies after it convened in late May 1989. Sakharov was involved in several of them. But the one that captured most poignantly his ambivalent attitude toward both Gorbachev and the program of reform the latter believed would save the Soviet Union occurred on June 9, the last day the congress was in session. The assembled delegates were contemplating a resolution supportive of perestroika. Sakharov thought the resolution did not go far enough. By this time in his political evolution, the perestroika he favored was more radical and should be carried out more rapidly than the version Gorbachev preferred. Never one to remain silent when a matter dear to him was under discussion, Sakharov asked Gorbachev, who was presiding over the proceedings, to give him fifteen minutes 82. Anatolii Rybakov, “Memorial,” Literaturnaia gazeta, August 31, 1988, 2. 83. Archie Brown, who considered the influence the dissidents had on perestroika to be minimal , states nevertheless that at the time of his death, Sakharov was “the most respected upholder of democratic and liberal values in the country.” Brown, Gorbachev Factor, 8, 10. The Congress of People’s Deputies 373 to explain why he was voting against the concluding resolution. Gorbachev, however, allowed him only five, and when Sakharov simply kept speaking after his allotted time expired, Gorbachev promptly turned off his microphone so that none of the deputies save those in the first few rows could hear him. But the microphones that the television and radio stations had installed in the chamber were still functioning, and Sakharov’s oration in its entirety reached the much larger audience outside the chamber that was watching or listening to the proceedings.1 What this incident illustrates is how reformers more radical than Gorbachev caused him to lose control of the congress, so that by the time it concluded, his political authority was arguably less than what it had been when the session began. To the degree to which the conflicts and divisions among the delegates increased as the proceedings unfolded, the congress not only mimicked the collapse of the Soviet Union but contributed to its collapse as well. The question this raises, of course, is why Gorbachev created the congress—for which there was no precedent in the entire history of the Soviet Union—in the first place. The answer is that Gorbachev realized not long after perestroika began that the Communist Party was an imperfect instrument for reforming the Soviet system. For perestroika to succeed, the party had to relinquish its monopoly of power. But if it did so, Gorbachev would lose whatever chance he had of controlling perestroika, which in the wrong...

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