Word: gorbachev
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...travels and meetings on behalf of victims, of Jews and of memory, the backdrop and players are the events and names of tomorrow's history books. The list of Wiesel's acquaintances is impressive--United States presidents and Israeli prime ministers, other Nobel laureates, Francois Mitterrand, Mikhail S. Gorbachev and many others. Wiesel does not attempt to recount the history of the past 30 years, but he calls on it. He provides his reactions to the Bitburg Affair and to events in the former Yugoslavia. He assumes knowledge of current history that we should all share. I doubt...
...down and wept. Helmut Kohl, who as Chancellor from 1982 to 1998 unified Germany, was forced to resign as honorary chairman of the opposition Christian Democratic Union, his reputation soiled by a spreading financial scandal. In the end the statesman who counted Ronald Reagan and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev among his peers was brought down by the likes of a French wheeler-dealer nicknamed Dede the Sardine...
...Year's addresses, dull ceremonial affairs for most heads of state, have a habit of taking a dramatic turn in Russia. On Christmas Day in 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev announced the end of his presidency and, simultaneously, the end of the Soviet Union. Three years later, Boris Yeltsin raised his glass to the Russian army, which was at that moment storming the Chechen capital of Grozny. As the President's New Year's greetings were being broadcast, a 1,000-man unit of the Russian army was annihilated in the streets of Grozny. This year, with Russian troops again trying...
...unexpectedly to the Chechen town of Gudermes, where he awarded hunting knives to troops who had distinguished themselves in the fighting. Meanwhile, as word of the resignation spread across Moscow, the Russian stock market jumped about 20%; politicians paid their predictable tributes, and ordinary citizens responded largely with indifference. Gorbachev, who is spending the New Year's holiday in Paris with his children and grandchildren, told the French press agency that Yeltsin should have resigned earlier. Human-rights activist Elena Bonner--Yeltsin nominated her husband Andrei Sakharov as TIME's Person of the Century--was scathing. "After eight years...
There was, in fact, little beauty in Yeltsin's career, though there was much drama and passion. Yeltsin, born in 1931, was a tough, disciplinarian Communist Party chief from Sverdlovsk, in the Urals. He made his career in Moscow under Gorbachev but constantly fretted that he was not given the authority he deserved. In mid-1991 Yeltsin became President of the Russian republic, then just a part of the Soviet Union. His finest hour came a few months later, when, with Gorbachev isolated in the Crimea, Yeltsin faced down a junta of ham-fisted communist leaders who were trying...