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First USSR Congress of People's Deputies

The First USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, which convened in Moscow from 25 May to 10 June 1989, was a media sensation. The long hours of the two-week-long meeting were broadcast in full on live television across the USSR. So many people watched the Congress that production rates fell across the country’s economy during the time that it met.
 
The Congress was unparalleled in other ways, too. It began as a decree laid out at the conclusion of the Nineteenth All-Party Conference in Moscow in summer 1988, when Gorbachev promised the creation of a new, popularly elected parliament to bolster perestroika. In October 1988, detailed proposals for the design of the Congress appeared in print. Then a Special Session of the USSR Supreme Soviet amended the 1977 Soviet Constitution to create the USSR Congress of People’s Deputies and a new electoral law that laid out how members, numbering 2250, would be elected. Elections electrified the country when they took place from January through May 1989.
 
In the clip above, four speakers—including future mayor of post-Soviet St. Petersburg and Putin mentor Anatoly Sobchak (1937-2000)—contribute to the debate around electing the chairman of the Supreme Soviet, the highest organ of state power since the advent of the “Stalin Constitution” in 1936. Ultimately, the job would go to Mikhail Gorbachev (1932-2022), but the speakers of 25 May were passionate in their insistence that the body consider alternatives. As Sobchak put it, the requirement that any aspiring participant in Soviet government be a Communist Party member was a relic of Stalinism. Following perestroika, it was crucial that “every Soviet person, regardless of their affiliation with this or that party—or his non-partisanship!” have the right to stand for election to any government post.
 
The intense media coverage of the Congress—which included live television broadcasts as well as live radio broadcasts and extensive daily newspaper coverage—galvanized popular interest, just as reformers had hoped. But the media buzz also proved more than reformers were prepared to handle—as evidenced, for instance, in a famous speech given by Andrei Sakharov (1921-1989). In part because of the “disruption” caused by Sakharov’s courageous intervention, subsequent meetings of the Congress in December 1989, March 1990, and September 1991 were not broadcast live. In September 1991, the Congress was disbanded following the attempted GKChP coup the month before.