Word: gorbachev
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...After Gorbachev handed over custody of the nuclear arsenal and the codes that permit strategic missiles to be launched, Yeltsin declared himself sole inheritor of "the button," as he called the code box. "There will be only one button," he said. "The other republics are not going to have any other buttons." Even so, he said, he had agreed with the Presidents of the other three republics where the missiles are still located that any decision to use them would have to be made unanimously by the four...
Apprehension about the uncertainty that fogs the former U.S.S.R. is not misplaced. At the same time, the world should remind itself that coexistence with a unitary Soviet state for seven decades was not anxiety-free, and that its deconstruction is not necessarily a bad thing. Though Gorbachev insisted that he intended to retain the union and advance freedom, there was no way he could do both. In the face of the republics' passionate rejection of the central government, the Communist Party and Russian domination, Moscow could have held the union together only with armed force...
...military force would have doomed Gorbachev's reforms and any hope for democracy. To be democratic, the republics had to gain their freedom. And now that they are independent, they are also free to re-create the institutions they believe they need to coordinate defense and economic policies. In that experiment, they have no room for a union, a central government -- or a Gorbachev...
...overwhelming rejection of Gorbachev in the new Commonwealth -- still surprising to many Westerners -- is due mostly to his unfulfilled promises. He spoke constantly of democracy but clung to the power and bureaucracy of the Communist Party, which he headed long after it had been revealed as the main obstacle to perestroika, his plan for restructuring. Even when the party resorted to violence against him in the aborted coup last August, Gorbachev publicly pledged his loyalty to it. That was the moment at which Yeltsin succeeded to Gorbachev's authority and pushed him to close down the party...
...Gorbachev also talked repeatedly about granting "sovereignty" to the union's republics, yet he never devised a form of qualified freedom that had any appeal for the nationalist forces rising in all of the republics. When the three Baltic states insisted on regaining their separate status, he was even willing to look the other way last January as security forces used tanks and guns to suppress the independence movements...