Effects of Gorbachev's failure to reform the CPSU and Gov

• The Twenty-Seventh Party Congress:

  • The Twenty-Seventh Party Congress held in February and March 1986 set out a new programme for the Communist Party.
  • First time the party had ever adopted a set of priorities since 1961.
  • Gorbachev’s new programme committed the Party to the “systematic and all around improvements of socialism”
  • “Genuine democracy, power for the people and by the people”
  • Gorbachev linked democratisation to glasnost.
  • However, there were signs of openness at the Party Congress.
  • The adoption of a new programme was a symbol that Gorbachev wanted to break the past.
• Republic elections, 1990:

  • Anti-Communist trends were also obvious in the March 1990 elections in the republics.
  • In Moscow, a group called Democratic Russia won 85% of the seats.

  
  

  • Gorbachev had assumed that democratisation would strengthen the radicals within the Communist Party.
  • Soviet Elections however weakened the whole party, increasing the power of the Anti-Party and nationalist groups.
  • Consequences of democratisation was the same as glasnost consequences, were much more radical than Gorbachev had wanted.