Word: crimean
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Those defeats were followed by two other stunning losses. On June 7 German forces supplemented by troops from Romania began a monthlong final offensive against the great Crimean port of Sevastopol, pounding it with Luftwaffe raids before sending infantry units to wage bloody street battles. By the beginning of July, the city collapsed. The fall of Rostov-on-Don, the so-called gateway to the Caucasus, was even more ominous. The siege was embarrassingly brief, and whole Soviet units reportedly fled in panic. Suddenly the way south to the oil fields of Baku was open. With German armies simultaneously dashing...
...signs of tension when she accompanied her husband to the London economic summit in July. Drawing aside Barbara Bush, Raisa confided her worries about Mikhail's political future, even hinting that she feared for his life. Soviet officials in Europe report that she became hysterical several times during her Crimean captivity, and speculate that she has suffered a stroke and a heart attack...
...late as 4 p.m. Sunday, working at his Crimean vacation retreat at Foros on the speech he intended to give at the treaty signing, Gorbachev telephoned Georgi Shakhnazarov, an aide and friend, who was vacationing nearby. They chatted briefly; Shakhnazarov heard nothing to indicate that his boss was in any way troubled. Less than an hour later, however, at 10 minutes to 5, the head of Gorbachev's security guards entered the President's office and, as Gorbachev later recounted the story, announced that "a group of people" was demanding to see him. Who were they, asked Gorbachev...
Mikhail Gorbachev did not return from his Crimean captivity a hero. Worse, he did not realize it. If he had, he might have better used the drama of his 72 hours in the hands of the secret police to advance his standing among a people disgusted with his halfhearted economic reforms and political vacillation. He could have gone out to thank the Muscovites who had struggled for him as they defied the spectral Stalinists who were trying to bring back the past. He could have publicly embraced his former foe, Boris Yeltsin, and accepted with a flourish the sudden, almost...
...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...