Word: coupes
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...just the people involved in the coup who were tainted; the institutions from which they came -- the party, army and KGB -- were also finally discredited last week. If Gorbachev is really intent on perestroika, which means restructuring, this is his golden moment. He can purge, break up and decentralize at will. In fact, he and the other leaders of the society will need virtually to reinvent the government and then find new people to staff...
...force and insisting on drawn-out legal procedures. Now he can hardly order the discredited army or Interior Ministry to hold the Baltic republics by force if they are determined to depart. The union treaty will devolve real power from the center -- and Gorbachev. Yeltsin says the coup showed him that Russia will not be safe until it has its own army. He has already created a Russian KGB that is taking over internal security duties. Other republics will do the same, and because they are assuming the power to tax, they can be expected to finance their own security...
While these changes may be healthy, they will not guarantee more democratic institutions in the republics. In the Baltics they probably will, but the story could be different in Central Asia. Some southern republics that went along with the coup are uninterested in reform...
...constitutionality of his office was upheld, but not his personal claim to it. Yeltsin emerged as a formidable political force because he was elected by popular vote. The same was true of Mayor Anatoli Sobchak of Leningrad and others who rallied the hundreds of thousands to oppose the coup. Gorbachev is not even a popularly elected member of parliament, and its communist members are largely responsible for making him President...
...most chilling aspects of last week's coup attempt is that -- for 76 hours -- the Soviet Union's top-secret nuclear release codes were in the hands of men later denounced as "adventurists" by Mikhail Gorbachev. According to the Washington Post, a member of the Russian delegation that accompanied Gorbachev back to Moscow said the men who put the Soviet President under house arrest in his Crimean dacha also seized the "black box" (actually a briefcase) containing the codes. Could the coupmakers have launched or threatened a nuclear attack? Or was the Soviet deterrent effectively paralyzed for three days...