Word: coupes
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...expect when we landed. I assumed we would be sent back to Frankfurt, and was planning to head for Lithuania, where friends could help me cross the border. Instead, there was an unusual absence of lines at the airport - the only people trying to get into Moscow during the coup were journalists. I flagged down a car to get into the city, and we quickly passed the first sign of the military takeover: an armored personnel carrier by the roadside. It had broken down. "Morons," the driver snarled as we drove past the soldiers. I began to wonder if this...
...time for thinking it would end that way. The military had already drawn blood that year in the Baltics. Many of its leaders were horrified at the collapse of their super power. Vladimir Kryuchkov, chairman of the KGB and later to be the moving force in the August coup, had all but accused Gorbachev of high treason in a closed session of parliament. But still, the putsch fizzled. The first ominous lull turned quickly into a baffling loss of momentum. Soon after the events, the story leaked out that the putsch leadership was less a junta than...
...military have moved against the White House if someone had given the order? Some would have, I think. Not all, but enough to break the resistance. Ekho Moskvy, the outstanding news radio that the Putin administration has been doing its best to gut this past year, reported during the coup that some of the units moving into Moscow were in a very aggressive mood. As I heard this I was reminded of conversations a few months earlier, after the Vilnius killings. Then hospitable Airborne commanders based in Lithuania had remarked quietly over lunch that they could have "finished...
...Strangely enough, of course, the coup leaders' rather hazy plans sound like what Vladimir Putin is trying to achieve. A little more discipline, more state intervention in the economy, law and order. I sometimes wonder if that is why, when Putin wanted to carry out a small covert operation of his own - an intensive series of interviews that led to his campaign biography early last year - he chose a large high-walled brick building on the edge of the city. A strange choice, you would think: It was in the same venue, on August 17 1991, that the coup leaders...
...Burton?s "reimagining" did score one outright coup. The insight that apes, if they did indeed take over a planet, would still behave very much like apes - and even more so when angry or otherwise aroused - was a clear improvement on Schaffner?s stiffly human-aping overlords. Led by Tim Roth?s manic and maniacal (if slightly hammy) turn as General Thade and Helena Bonham Carter's incredible suffusing of her liberal-princess chimp with a warm and sexy glow, the hairy actors rule this movie. And of course Burton?s choice of Rick Baker as makeup man made...