SPECIAL EDITION: CRISIS IN THE KREMLIM : The March of Perestroika

Key events in Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s six years and five months as the leader of the Soviet Union: 1985

March 11: Mikhail S. Gorbachev, 54, is elected secretary general of the Soviet Communist Party following the death of Konstantin U. Chernenko, 73. He undertakes a reform of party structures.

July 2: Gorbachev replaces longtime Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko with Eduard A. Shevardnadze, head of the Georgian republic’s Communist Party.

Oct. 15: Gorbachev presents a plan of economic restructuring, known as perestroika.

1986

March 6: The 27th Communist Party Congress votes for substantial changes in the party leadership.

Dec. 23: The dissident and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Andrei D. Sakharov returns to Moscow after seven years of internal exile at Gorky. Sakharov died Dec. 14, 1990.

1987

May 30: Defense Minister Sergei L. Sokolov is dismissed and replaced by Dmitri T. Yazov following the landing on Red Square of a Cessna light aircraft piloted by West German Mathias Rust.

Dec. 8: U.S.-Soviet treaty on the elimination of intermediate-range nuclear missiles (INF) is signed in Washington during the third Gorbachev summit with President Ronald Reagan.

1988

Feb. 28: Violent clashes between Armenians and Azerbaijanis at the Caspian Sea port of Sumgait spark a series of interethnic conflicts in the region involving minorities in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, with unrest spreading later to some central Asian republics.

May 18: Arrival of first convoy of troops withdrawn from Afghanistan. (Operation was completed Feb. 15, 1989.)

Oct. 1: Gorbachev is elected head of state as the bulk of the conservative Old Guard from the Leonid I. Brezhnev period (1964-82) is eliminated.

Dec. 1: Supreme Soviet adopts new constitution strengthening presidential powers.

Dec. 7: Addressing the U.N. General Assembly, Gorbachev announces pullout of 500,000 Soviet troops based in Eastern Europe.

1989

March 26: Free elections to the newly created Congress of People’s Deputies sweep out 20% of party leaders standing for election.

May 16: Gorbachev meets Deng Xiaoping in Beijing to normalize Sino-Soviet relations.

May 25: Gorbachev is granted a five-year mandate with enhanced powers.

July: About 200,000 miners in the Ukraine and Siberia strike.

July 6: Gorbachev envisages a “common European home” and scraps the “Brezhnev doctrine” of limited sovereignty for Eastern European states.

Dec. 1: Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, are received by Pope John Paul II at the Vatican.

Dec. 2: The first summit between Gorbachev and President Bush following the upheavals in Eastern Europe effectively ends the Yalta postwar settlement.

1990

Jan. 15: State of emergency is declared in Caucasus after further ethnic clashes.

March 11: The Baltic republic of Lithuania declares independence.

March 14: Gorbachev is elected the head of a presidential system of government.

May 29: Radical reformer Boris N. Yeltsin is elected president of the Parliament of the Russian Federation.

July 10: Gorbachev is reelected party chief at the party’s 28th Congress.

Dec. 20: Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze resigns and warns of a movement toward dictatorship.

1991

March 17: An all-Soviet referendum on the Union Treaty gives a 76.4% majority in favor of a “renewed Union of Soviet republics.”

June 17: Yeltsin is elected president of Russia by universal suffrage.

July 25-26: At Gorbachev’s prompting, a plenum of the Central Committee drops references to Marxism-Leninism in favor of social democratic principles.

Aug. 16: Gorbachev adviser Alexander N. Yakovlev, chief proponent of perestroika , resigns from the party and warns of an impending coup.

Aug. 19: Gorbachev is replaced as Soviet president in an apparent right-wing putsch.

SOURCE: Agence France-Presse