Word: coups
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...emerge as something of a Western-style democracy. His finest hour, really his defining moment, was in August 1991. The leader of the country, Mikahil Gorbachev, was in the Crimea on summer vacation, and dark forces opposed to Gorby and his stop-start reforms tried to stage a coup...
...Cold War fear-mongering into a warm and cuddly creature, supine, pitiable and willing to perform in exchange for scraps. And for one glorious moment in the hot summer of 1991, when he stood atop a tank in front of the Russian White House and faced down a coup...
...Some of the soldiers, already doubtful of the coup's legality and loath to open fire on unarmed fellow citizens, trained their guns away from the building and joined in its defense. The coup collapsed, and within a year the Soviet Union was no more. That freed more than a dozen countries to chart their own future, offered the hope of democracy to the 150 million people of Russia, and eliminated the Cold War threat of nuclear holocaust. As Yeltsin put it in his 1994 book Struggle for Russia, "I believe that history will record the twentieth century essentially ended...
...meetings with key foreign visitors. Certainly, the challenges Yeltsin encountered in his presidency would have been enough to drive him to drink. He had to struggle back into political power without the help of the party that, though verging on collapse, still wielded considerable power until the failed 1991 coup attempt. In typical truculent fashion, he ran for parliament in Moscow instead of his old Sverdlovsk home base, taking on the party establishment directly, and winning a seat in 1989. With that as a political base, he fought successful campaigns for the chairmanship in 1990 of the Russian Supreme Soviet...
...West. But the Russia he created proved vulnerable to a reversion to authoritarian nationalism and a cooler relationship with the West. In the end, Yeltsin will be better remembered for that dramatic moment when he jumped on the tank to stop others from taking power through a coup rather than for what he achieved once in power himself...