Word: gorbachev
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...sickle. The 13 judges, seated at a nearby tribunal, did not appear to be completely comfortable in their new black robes with white linings. Minutes after the hearings opened, the court became embroiled in a free-for-all about how to deal with the fact that former President Mikhail Gorbachev had refused to show up. Show trials have always been a staple of Soviet political discourse, but the proceeding that began in Moscow last week is different. This time the Communist Party is in the dock, as Russians struggle to come to terms with seven decades of history. At issue...
...that question might have seemed self-evident. After all, there was Boris Yeltsin, the first freely elected leader of Russia, addressing a joint session of Congress and seeming to wed his country rhetorically to the great Western traditions of democratic freedom. Just two months earlier, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was laying to rest the cold war at Fulton, Mo., the place where Winston Churchill declared it back in 1946. That vision must have disturbed many older- generation Soviets nurtured on the ideological red meat of East versus West, of a Soviet Russia saving the world from its capitalist original...
...other thing. Until recently, some Yeltsinophobes at the National Security Council continued to gaze upon portraits of Gorbachev at work. Maybe it's time to take them down...
Eager to display an openness surpassing Gorbachev's glasnost, Yeltsin surmised that a few Americans missing in action in Vietnam and earlier wars might still be somewhere on former Soviet territory. Some members of Congress suggested holding up the aid until they could investigate, but Yeltsin hurried to reassure them. "Even if one American has been detained in my country and can still be found," he promised, "I will find him." A joint Russian-U.S. commission has been set up to check on all missing military personnel on both sides...
...first official summit, Yeltsin accomplished far more than anyone had predicted. If the new nuclear accord holds firm, bilateral arms negotiations, long the meat of East-West relations, are probably now complete, making Yeltsin seem absolutely vital to the promising new shape those relations are taking. In Washington the Gorbachev image is beginning to fade...