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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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time
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030689
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03068900.023
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1990-09-17
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WORLD, Page 45SOVIET UNIONHeading into the HomestretchElection rules lead to controversy and occasional setbacks
The corridors of the neoclassical House of Trade Unions
building were dark when Boris Yeltsin, 58, Moscow's former
Communist Party leader, emerged from a conference room to speak to
journalists and admirers waiting in the hall. Yeltsin looked weary
but triumphant. "Boris Nikolayevich! How does it feel?" shouted a
foreign reporter. "All of Moscow will vote!" Yeltsin beamed. "Can
you imagine what that means?"
Only minutes earlier, 886 electors had cast ballots approving
Yeltsin's candidacy for city-wide representative to the Congress
of People's Deputies, a recently created legislature that Mikhail
Gorbachev is counting on to boost his floundering reform drive.
Yeltsin's success was a signal turnabout. Sixteen months ago,
Gorbachev ousted the Moscow party boss after he passionately
attacked the slow pace of Soviet reform. Last week Yeltsin overcame
that taint as one of two candidates to survive the emotional
twelve-hour meeting called to decide how many of ten proposed
candidates would appear on the ballot for Moscow's elected
representative in the new body. Thus the Soviet Union's first real
electoral campaign, in which several candidates will be able to vie
for the same seat, entered its final phase.
Across the country, lists of candidates were approved after
weeks of often stormy preliminary meetings. The sessions became
controversial because they included only specially chosen local
voters with the power to eliminate candidates before the March 26
vote. "Why should we, 886 people, make a decision for all of
Moscow?" asked a delegate at the meeting that nominated Yeltsin.
"We need a system that is fully democratic."
Many popular contenders failed to get past the electoral-
district gatherings. Vitali Korotich, editor of the popular weekly
magazine Ogonyok, walked out of a seven-hour session in Pravda's
House of Culture, charging that the delegates had been stacked and
that the meeting was being manipulated by the chairman. Two weeks
ago, Andrei Sakharov withdrew his candidacy by publishing a short
announcement in a Moscow newspaper saying he would run only as a
representative of the Academy of Sciences, which turned him down
as a candidate last month.
In the Ukrainian Republic it appeared that at least 40 of 175
districts would have only one candidate on the ballot. Gorbachev
made a hasty trip to the region, where he exhorted citizens and
party officials to make better use of their democratic rights.
Speaking to a group of coal miners in Donetsk, the Soviet leader
warned that his reform program needed the Ukraine's support. Said
he: "If every republic doesn't make its contribution, then of
course perestroika will slip into neutral."
Many Soviet citizens needed no urging to take advantage of
their new democratic prerogatives, and some were already champing
to go further. Candidate Yeltsin, for one, called for an open
discussion of the possibility of introducing a multiparty system
before the next Soviet election. Seated in a hall beneath a banner
that proclaimed THE ELECTION OF U.S.S.R. PEOPLE'S DEPUTIES IS A
SCHOOL FOR DEMOCRACY, nuclear scientist Yasen Shevelev, 63,
marveled at the change in political climate. Said he: "It's hard
to believe any of this is happening."