Word: dachas
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During the attempted coup, the Gorbachevs took frequent walks outside the dacha so that they could talk without fear of being bugged. By showing themselves, they also hoped to disprove the plotters' assertion that the President...
...Mikhail became a Secretary of the Central Committee and the couple moved to Moscow, where Raisa felt very much the outsider among the spoiled communist elite. Once, at a gathering at a state dacha, she warned the children not to break the chandelier. "I was told: 'Not to worry. It's government property, it can be written off.' " By March 10, 1985, the night before he was chosen to replace Konstantin Chernenko as General Secretary, Gorbachev was so frustrated with the party's self-satisfied sclerosis that he told his wife, "((The country)) just can't go on like this...
Former Vice President Gennadi Yanayev and then Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov were deep into the toasts at a party at Pavlov's dacha when they were suddenly summoned to the Kremlin to take part in the coup. Pavlov, who turned up semi-coherent at one meeting of the plotters, was eventually hospitalized for "hypertension," sometimes a euphemism for imbibing too much distilled potato spirit. After the putsch fizzled, Yanayev was found unconscious on his office floor among empty vodka bottles. Said Kuranty, a radical daily: "We could have had a government by drunks...
...Moscow City Council, for example, the Communist chairman, Valeri Saikin, transferred 33 city buildings to the party free of charge. Top party leaders bought their palatial government-owned country houses for ludicrously low prices. Former Politburo member Alexandra Biryukova reportedly paid only 19,000 rubles for her dacha west of Moscow, although its real value was assessed at 754,000 rubles. Communists even turned to capitalists in an effort to conceal or divert their cash. "The Central Committee and other party organizations have been investing finances in shareholding companies, joint ventures, commercial banks and other commercial structures of various kinds...
...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...