Word: gorbachev
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...came in here today thinking this might be the last interview with Gorbachev as President, but from the way you talk, it doesn't sound like that...
Through it all, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev fought to hold off the burial of the state he officially ruled. "I'll use all my political and legal authority" to keep playing a major role, he said in an interview with TIME. But his position now seemed largely irrelevant. Whether he resigns in short order, as is widely expected, or continues to sit in his Moscow office a while longer, his political and legal authority is virtually gone, and there is nothing much left for him to preside over...
Yeltsin had been trying to introduce radical free-market reforms in Russia, but was balked partly because the remnants of the central Soviet ministries kept getting in the way. To remove them, some new form of union had to be invented, but negotiations were stymied by Gorbachev's desire to preserve at least a pared-down central government and the insistence of several republics on complete independence. The overwhelming vote for independence in Ukraine on Dec. 1 brought the tug-of-war close to a crisis; both Gorbachev and Yeltsin had said there could be no union at all without...
Meeting in Moscow two weeks ago, Gorbachev and Yeltsin agreed that one last effort had to be made to keep Ukraine in some sort of union. To that end, Yeltsin took advantage of an already scheduled trip to Belorussia to sign a trade agreement and invited Kravchuk to join the discussions at the forest dacha. According to their aides, the three initially tried to revive a Gorbachev idea to form a fairly loose Union of Sovereign States that would still have a central government of sorts. But all day Saturday, says Russian Deputy Prime Minister Gennadi Burbulis, they kept hitting...
...Gorbachev fought desperately to hang on. He called the agreement unconstitutional and warned of anarchy, potential civil wars and fascist takeovers if the union fell apart. Founders of the commonwealth agreed that those were real dangers, but described their association as a "last chance" to avert them. Gorbachev tried to convene the Congress of People's Deputies, the national legislature, to work out some kind of compromise between the new commonwealth and his Union of Sovereign States, but was blocked when legislators from the commonwealth republics refused to attend. The Soviet President huddled with army commanders to appeal for military...