 Inadvertently undermining the power of the communist party, Gorbachev set the stage for a devolution of power into a federated state structure which essentially resulted in the devolution of power to the governments of the fifteen Soviet republics.This devolution of centralized power to republican legislatures ("soviets" in the terminology of the Soviet Union) was matched by a simultaneous explosion of mass participation in the now open debate about the Soviet future.In the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, as elsewhere in the Soviet Union, political activity was expressed in various ways, including by organizing groups and clubs independent of the government that had long withheld the right of association to any sort of civil organization.