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.