Word: coupes
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...past two years -- and not just the past two weeks -- have put Hall's beliefs to the test. The Iron Curtain opened, and the Berlin Wall toppled. Eastern Europe gained its freedom, and the Germanys united. Capitalists started selling Big Macs in Pushkin Square. Now come the failed coup, the dismantling of the Soviet Communist Party and the race toward independence and a market economy. While conceding that these events mark a "serious detour," Hall finds solace in this quote: "If current events are negative, then look long range...
Hall learned about the coup while at a family reunion in Minnesota, and then hurried back to New York. Though he calls the action unconstitutional, Hall evinces some sympathy for its plotters. "It was an attempt to deal with real problems, but in a wrong way," he explains. He dislikes Boris Yeltsin ("Now I think he becomes the biggest danger") as well as Mikhail Gorbachev (an "opportunist" who "tends to sit on both sides of the fence"). A hard- liner at heart, Hall blasts both men for leading the Soviet Union down the capitalist road. Once capitalism's failures emerge...
...coup attempt sparked a flash of excitement at party headquarters, which is located across the street from the Chelsea Hotel in downtown Manhattan. About 8:30 a.m. every workday, Hall's chauffeur-driven Oldsmobile (he buys American and uses a cellular phone) pulls up to the curb in front of the eight-story brownstone, where staff members, still harboring paranoia left over from the days when the FBI tapped their lines and read their mail, answer the phone "4994" and dispatch envelopes without the party's name. Once in the building, Hall, a four-time presidential candidate, climbs into...
Former Vice President Gennadi Yanayev and then Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov were deep into the toasts at a party at Pavlov's dacha when they were suddenly summoned to the Kremlin to take part in the coup. Pavlov, who turned up semi-coherent at one meeting of the plotters, was eventually hospitalized for "hypertension," sometimes a euphemism for imbibing too much distilled potato spirit. After the putsch fizzled, Yanayev was found unconscious on his office floor among empty vodka bottles. Said Kuranty, a radical daily: "We could have had a government by drunks...
...building until last week was the mighty, monolithic power center of a party that had run the country for more than 70 years using a combination of ruthless terror and plodding bureaucracy. Like party offices all across the country, it was shut down after the failure of the attempted coup, its assets frozen and its employees out on the street. Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as its leader and the national parliament suspended its activities...