Word: coupes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...after 74 years of communist dictatorship and, centuries before that, of czarist autocracy, the Russians may get a government they have earned -- a democracy. For the first time, they did not subside into an acceptance of overlords. Instead they turned last week's reactionary coup into a transforming rite of passage, an epochal event that forced even Gorbachev to re-examine his most basic beliefs and resign his post as head of the Communist Party...
...course of the coup was surreal. Has television, which helped unravel the putsch, come to enforce its own brief attention span upon history? Recent great events -- the breakup of Eastern Europe, the Persian Gulf war, the failure of the coup -- seem to be enacting themselves in shorter and shorter time frames. Three days last week undid 10 centuries of civic dormancy. It is possible that the world is dividing between blood feuders and channel changers. The blood feuders, like zealots in Ireland or the Middle East, cannot forget revenge, even over many years; the impatient channel changers of the electronic...
...Gang of Eight was caught between the feud and the change. Its coup looked like Stalin's ruthlessness written on the fifth carbon, a smudgy, illegible piece of work. It was fitting that stupidity should be a prevailing theme. An oafish brainlessness has for decades hung over the Soviet communist venture like one of Nikita Khrushchev's suits. Its secret has never been intelligence but rather ruthlessness. The cardinal rule of coupmaking, says Edward Luttwak of Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies, is "to seize control of all the centers of power in one fell swoop, to paralyze...
More broadly, the cabal failed because it was an old-style coup in a new- style society. The Russian people have been transformed over a period of years. They are not the Russians whom Bertrand Russell was talking about when he justified Bolshevik despotism by saying "If you ask yourself how Dostoyevsky's characters should be governed, you will understand." The new Soviets owe much of their transformation and fearlessness to Gorbachev -- and by last week they were using that freedom to outgrow...
...coup was not necessarily doomed to failure. Many millions of Soviet citizens did not demonstrate against the takeover, but sat back, awaiting the outcome. If other conspirators try again to overthrow the government, they will have learned some lessons from August 1991. They will not make the same mistakes. Suppose the plotters had killed Gorbachev and Yeltsin, found army units to invade the Parliament Building, locked up the country's media, communications, airports and roads . . . The outcome might have been infinitely messier and more dangerous, both for the Soviets and for the world. And a spirit of vindictiveness against...