Word: coups
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...immediate aftermath of the coup, bookmakers would have set odds against a Gorbachev comeback at 100 to 1. But his chances seem to be improving with each passing day. His fervent conversion to the cause of radical reform has no doubt helped boost his standing, but he has probably benefited even more from the erratic behavior of Yeltsin. The Russian president cuts a commanding figure on flag-draped balconies, issuing stirring calls for the defense of freedom, but he seems uncomfortable maneuvering in the corridors of power, where Gorbachev is most at home...
...reluctant -- sometimes too reluctant -- to use it. When the conspirators asked Gorbachev to join the plot, he refused and honored his vow as the first President of the Soviet Union to "defend the constitution." He speaks often now about the importance of zakonnost -- legality -- in the aftermath of the coup. Such admonitions are of crucial importance if a law-governed state is to emerge on the territory of the shattered Union -- and Gorbachev still has the authority to utter them...
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...