Word: dmitry
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Nothing causes more alarm for Russians than the prospect of a bleak winter without food. Famine has recurred with frightening regularity during seven decades of communist rule. "Hunger did not start with perestroika," explains Dmitri Pushkar, a deputy on the Yaroslavl regional council, who monitors food supplies in the countryside. "It began with the coming of Soviet power." Vadim, a local taxi driver, puts it more bluntly: "I remember the postwar famine of 1947, when we had nothing to eat but nettles and goose feet. So what else...
...squirreled away in foreign banks. But a string of mysterious suicides casts doubt on such disavowals. Five days after the coup fizzled, party treasurer Nikolai Kruchina threw himself out a window. Six weeks later, his predecessor, Georgi Pavlov, fell to his death the same way. And two weeks ago, Dmitri Lisovolik, former deputy chief of the party's international department, also leaped out a window several weeks after investigators found $600,000 in U.S. dollars in the office of Lisovolik's boss, Valentin Falin, at Central Committee headquarters...
...failed Soviet coup nearly dismantled the conference. The invitation was accepted last March by Soviet Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov, who became one of the coup organizers. Yazov was subsequently yanked from power, but the military men still made the trip. During their classes younger members of the group tended to accept the American explanation of recent world events. Older ones stuck with harder ideological positions. Such differences did not prevent the entire group from jumping up to do the "wave" at a Red Sox baseball game in their final week...
...when the moment came to strike, Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov was unable to bring his firepower to bear. Gorbachev's drive for reform across all strata of society had left fault lines among the military as well, and the coup rapidly widened them. The air force stood aside altogether, refusing orders to participate. As for the army, the 10 tank crews that defected to Boris Yeltsin symbolized the greater number of soldiers who refused to countenance the violent overthrow of the government. Even troopers nominally supporting the junta were reluctant to fight...
...cannot be made by a single individual. U.S. experts say Moscow's strategic nuclear "button" is in reality a two-part system, in which the Minister of Defense controls one half and the President the other. If Gorbachev's codes had wound up in the hands of Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov, a member of the junta, he would theoretically have had the wherewithal to order the missiles to be launched. But the codes are no more than a release authority, and the actual firing would still have required the cooperation of many people...