While the role of the MASSR in the Soviet Union's eventual incorporation of this land was negligible—the Soviet ultimatum to Romania did not mention the Moldovan nation, let alone use its right to national self-determination as justification for the invasion—the former autonomous republic did provide a Soviet elite ready to assume leadership in the new union republic. In the second half of the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev set the political context for the war in Moldova and redefined the political process in the union republics with a series of reforms that comprised his program for perestroika. While intended to reinvigorate the Soviet system, perestroika also undermined the strength of key institutions which provided for central control of the Soviet Union. 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. Two sets of concerns were particularly prominent in the debates that accompanied the opening of political dialogue in the late 1980s. The first was concern for the ecologic devastation that was so characteristic of Soviet industrial society. The second, and increasingly ascendant concern revolved around the Moldovan (or Romanian) language and national heritage that many felt had been trammeled by Soviet and Russian domination. These concerns found expressing in the activism of the Moldovan Movement in Support of Restructuring—a movement of the intelligentsia oriented mostly towards generalized economic and political liberalization—and the Alexei Mateevici Literary-Musical Club, which pulled together prominent cultural and political figures, activists and citizens to celebrate and discuss Moldovan language, literature and history. Cultural revival was just one of the issues championed by such informals in early 1988. However, during the course of that year events around the Soviet Union, and particularly the bloody clashes between Armenians and Azerbaijanis in Nagornyi Karabakh and the pogrom against Armenians in Sumgait, brought issues of ethnicity increasingly to the fore in the union press.