Word: politburo
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...Mikhail Gorbachev's three-day ordeal was over came shortly before 9:30 p.m. last Wednesday, when the television lights in the auditorium of the Foreign Ministry suddenly flashed on. For three hours the Moscow press corps had been waiting impatiently for a delegation of party officials, led by Politburo member Alexander Yakovlev and Vice President Anatoli Lukyanov, to bring news of the final hours of the plenum of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. The event had been billed as a make-or-break meeting for the Soviet leader and his unprecedented program of political and economic...
After a rancorous debate, the 249-member Central Committee approved a draft platform that will in effect end the Communist Party's seven-decade-long monopoly on political and economic life. Furthermore, the Central Committee proposed an overhaul of the party's ruling Politburo and the creation of a presidential system of government, putting extensive authority into Gorbachev's hands and granting him, at least on paper, more power than any other leader in Soviet history. Not bad for a party man who only two weeks ago was rumored to be resigning...
Despite the harsh words directed at his programs over the next three days, Gorbachev, who has been known to lose his temper in public, betrayed little emotion. He made a point of exchanging pleasantries with Politburo member Yegor Ligachev, the de facto leader of the conservative opposition, when Ligachev returned to his seat after delivering a demagogic rebuttal to Gorbachev's platform. When the vote to approve the document was finally taken -- and passed with only one dissenting vote, from populist Boris Yeltsin -- the Soviet leader broke with tradition and invited the 108 candidate members of the Central Committee...
...Politburo and Central Committee should be reorganized into new party councils...
Liberals expressed disappointment last week that there had been no personnel changes in the Central Committee. Gorbachev may have decided that there was no point in shuffling the Politburo if the institution's days are numbered anyway. Current plans call for the creation of a Central Committee Presidium of about 30 members, presided over by a chairman and two deputies. In a bid to halt the secessionist trend begun by the Lithuanian Communists, the Presidium would include representatives from all 15 republics...