Word: czars
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...will have to be watched most carefully: Boris Yeltsin is turning into Leonid Brezhnev right before our eyes. In a rerun of the Kremlin drama circa 1978, the President is ever more frail and shambling, his eyes glazed and his speech slurred. He rules like a czar--from on high, without much attention to detail, and by decree. Like Brezhnev, Yeltsin has no intention of stepping down, and the people around him will do anything to keep him in power, lest they lose their own. Last week they launched what may be their campaign for re-election...
MOSCOW: The tycoons whose money reelected Boris Yeltsin in 1996 have chosen their presidential candidate for 2000, and it's not "Czar Boris" -- it's the man he fired as prime minister last Monday. Viktor Chernomyrdin commands only 5.7 percent in the polls, but his backers point out that Yeltsin's numbers looked no better at the start of the 1996 campaign...
What Mike Espy, the former cabinet secretary, did is just awful, members of Congress will be the first to tell you. But what gets a Cabinet officer like Espy indicted (about $35,000 worth of tickets and favors from the likes of chicken czar Don Tyson) turns out to be perfectly legal for the lawmakers clamoring for his head. So many members find their way to the Super Bowl each year that they almost have a quorum in the stadium. Last month, Speaker Newt Gingrich flew to London first class with his wife ($20,268), staying at Claridge...
Groping for solutions, Zedillo has put the military in charge of police agencies. The results so far have been disastrous. Last February the President had to order the arrest of his new antidrug czar for being in the pay of a major drug lord...
...this tale of what went wrong with the Russian Revolution, Cambridge historian Orlando Figes deals vividly with starvation, disease, tribal hatreds, sociopathic bloodlust, religious mania, governmental terrorism and most other sources of human misery. Plus, Figes argues, stupidity ruled the times, quite literally in the stiff presence of Czar Nicholas II. A smarter leader might have led to a better 20th century...