Word: politburos
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Gorbachev threw his support behind Politburo member Vladimir Ivashko, 58, a tough-talking moderate from the Ukraine, committed to the Soviet leader's kind of reform. Without rejecting Ligachev by name, Gorbachev pointedly reminded the delegates that it was important that the two people at the top of the party are "close in their views." Ivashko won 3,109 votes, Ligachev 776, a showing so poor that when he was later asked about his chances of being on the new Politburo, he candidly replied, "There is no need...
...sign of trouble came barely five minutes after Mikhail Gorbachev opened the 28th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party last week. A delegate from the far eastern region of Magadan proposed an unprecedented resolution, calling for nothing less than the resignation of the entire Central Committee and its ruling Politburo. The daring delegate also wanted the party leadership to tell the 4,657 delegates why so little had been accomplished since the last party Congress, in February 1986, which had launched Gorbachev's ambitious -- and increasingly beleaguered -- program of perestroika to transform the Soviet Union...
Presiding alone amid dozens of empty chairs on the two-tier tribunal, Gorbachev managed to sidestep that first frontal attack. But there was plenty more Politburo bashing to come in the opening week of the ten-day conclave. Progressives and conservatives argued bitterly over who was responsible for the party's fading power. Nine members of the twelve-member council were forced to give accounts of themselves, and the assembly was not about to let them get away with long-winded, cliche-laden speeches. Where past Kremlin meetings greeted boiler-plate presentations with perfunctory outbursts of applause, this one constantly...
...slugfest in the Congress seems irritatingly irrelevant at a time when store shelves are empty and the nation's coal miners have given notice that they intend to stage a political strike this week. For them, reform has not come fast enough, and they only want more. As Politburo liberal Yakovlev told the assembly, the changes in Soviet society were already "irreversible" and would proceed "with the party or without it." The question that Gorbachev has to decide is whether he dares risk his political future to stay behind "with the party...
...Politburo now has 12 full and sevennon-voting members. Gorbachev has already easedsome conservatives off the body, and has shiftedsome of its decision-making functions to popularlyelected bodies