RUSSIA
On June 2, 1990, the day Mikhael Gorbachev left Moscow for a
summit meeting in Washington, two activists who had spent the
previous year studying Russian arrived in Moscow from Washington
to deliver copies of Proposition One to members of the Soviet
Politboro. The journey was informative. They learned that the
idea of eliminating nuclear weapons was popular among the Russian
people. They collected hundreds of signatures per hour on a
Russian language version of a petition they circulated in the
streets of Moscow. They learned there was a warm governmental
attitude toward the idea through personal interviews with seven
members of the Supreme Soviet who also signed the petition.
The
most exciting information gleaned by the activists from the
Moscow trip was the knowledge that the Soviet Republic of
Kazakhstan had actually succeeded in closing the nuclear weapons
test site at Semipolatinsk through grass-roots democracy. Since
then the world witnessed nationwide Soviet voter decision-making
in the form of a government-initiated ballot to determine the
future of the Soviet union, which is no more. Thus we see the
power of real democracy.