Word: chechnya
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...died Monday at age 76, for overseeing the economic reforms that reduced many of them to penury and for the geopolitical surrender that - briefly - rendered an erstwhile superpower irrelevant to global events. They will remember his thuggish treatment of political enemies and the brutal folly of his war in Chechnya; and they will remember the whiff of corruption over his inner circle and his bargain-basement sale of the Russian state's most lucrative economic assets to a cabal of oligarchs in exchange for their funding of his reelection in 1996. Indeed, it is in the context of the failings...
...that was the high point in Yeltsin's career, and much of what followed in the interceding years will define his legacy in Russia: economic chaos, the first war in Chechnya, episodes of alcoholic boorishness, worsening health and plummeting popularity, even as his country's global status declined precipitously. Even the White House legislature itself became a symbol of another kind two years after Yeltsin's tank-top speech, when troops acting on his orders shelled the building, turning its upper half into a charred hulk, while putting down a rebellion by legislators against his reforms. And the following year...
...therapy" delivered the shock, but no therapy. Russia got more corrupt. Russians felt more desperate (another enduring image of Yeltsin's Russia: the poor babushkas on the streets desperately trying to sell whatever they could - knives and forks, books, old socks). Russia lost territory. It launched a war in Chechnya. It careened from crisis to crisis...
...William Ury, director of the Global Negotiation Project at Harvard University, who addresses that struggle in his new book, The Power of a Positive No: How to Say No and Still Get to Yes. Ury, a professional negotiator whose work has taken him to such conflict-ridden locales as Chechnya, Israel, Nepal and Aceh, Indonesia, is widely known for co-writing the 1981 book Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, a volume that remains required reading in fields from mediation to industrial psychology...
...rescue. Gerard Schroeder, then Germany’s chancellor, seemingly so idealistic in his opposition to the Iraq War and his shunning of George Bush, cultivated a close friendship with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president. He never criticized Russia’s brutal suppression of Chechnya and even negotiated an agreement between Russia and Germany to build a natural gas pipeline that punitively bypasses Poland—the Baltic gas pipeline, placing Warsaw in a precarious economic and political position. But no one heard any complaints from Poland’s EU partners about this frosty Baltic revenge...