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A House Divided: A Roll-call Analysis of the First Session of the Moscow City Soviet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Terry D. Clark
Terry D. Clark*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Extract

The March 1990 elections to republican and local Soviets in the USSR resulted in the transfer of power from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) to the nascent democratic movement in a number of republics and localities. Among these was the Moscow City Soviet (Mossoviet). Of the 472 people's deputies elected to the Mossoviet, the clear majority were elected under the umbrella of the political bloc Democratic Russia. Running on a platform calling for the rejection of continued CPSU control of political life in the Soviet Union and Moscow, Democratic Russia's candidates won decisively in a majority of the electoral districts.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 51 , Issue 4 , Winter 1992 , pp. 674 - 690
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1992

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References

The author wishes to express his appreciation to Carol Skalnik Leff and Roger K. Kanet for their encouragement and substantive critiques of drafts of this paper.

1. For an incisive analysis of the election campaign, its results, and the reasons for the communist defeat see Timothy Colton, “The Politics of Democratization: The Moscow Election of 1990,” Soviet Economy 6, October-December 1990: 285-344.

2. By mid-1991 within the Supreme Council of Latvia there were 131 deputies in the Faction of the Popular Front of Latvia (uniting deputies from the Democratic Labor Party, the Social-Democratic Party, the Liberal Democratic Party, the Movement for National Independence, the Greens, the Popular Front of Latvia and independents), 58 deputies in the CPSU faction and 12 independent deputies. Members of both the Popular Front faction and the CPSU faction described the work of the legislature to the author in numerous interviews during a visit to the republic from 29 April to 6 May 1991 as a guest of the Latvian Popular Front. Both the head of the Popular Front faction and the Second Secretary of the republic's Communist Party, Vladimir Rimashevskii, emphasized the disciplined nature of the faction which effectively denied the CPSU a meaningful voice in the legislature.

3. It has been argued that the use of behavioral methodology in Sovietology is long overdue. See Jan F. Triska and Finely, David D., Soviet Foreign Policy (New York: Macmillan, 1968 Google Scholar; Snyder, Jack, “Science and Sovietology: Bridging the Methods Gap in Soviet Foreign Policy Studies,” World Politics 40 (January 1988): 169–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Motyl, Alexander J., Thinking Theoretically about Soviet Nationalities: History and Comparison in the Study of the USSR (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992 Google Scholar. Admittedly, this paper does not test hypotheses explicitly derived from a theoretical framework. Nonetheless, the use of standard tools of statistical analysis to test hypotheses introduces the field to key aspects of behavioral research.

4. Neformal'naia Rossiia: o neformal'nyhh politizirovannykh dvizheniiakh i gruppakh v RSFSR (opyt spravochnika) (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1990).

5. Ibid., 293.

6. Ibid., 302-3.

7. Mikhail Maliutin, “Obshchestvenno-politicheskoe dvizhenie v SSSR perioda perestroiki: logika formirovaniia i razvitiia,” in Politika: Problemy teorii i praktiki, part II (Moscow: Institut molodezhi, Institut nauchnoi informatsii po obshchestvennym naukam [INION]). Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1990): 87.

8. See Colton.

9. Moscow City Soviet, Materialy pervoi sessii Moskovskogo gorodskogo sovieta narodnykh deputatov RSFSR dvadtsat'pervogo sozyva (Osnoxmye dokumenty) (Moscow: Otdel informatsii i sviazi s oblastnymi i gorodskimi Sovietami, Moskovskii gorodskoi soviet narodnykh deputatov RSFSR, October 1990): 8.

10. Maliutin, 76-77.

11. Mossoviet Press Center, Press-Release Number 8 (26 November 1990).

12. Ibid., Press-Release Number 9 (27 November 1990).

13. “Hi edinstvo ili samounichtozhenie,” Kuranty (19 February 1991): 4.