by the time they took a vote, Ligachev had apparently prevailed: the Politburo resolved to take the traditional approach. The assembled Party elders drafted an unrevealing twenty-three-word statement to be issued by the state news agency, TASS—and designed to combat what the Central Committee’s official spokesman called “bourgeois falsification . . . propaganda and inventions.” Whatever Gorbachev’s intentions, it seemed that the old ways were best after all.
