Word: gorbachev
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...thing can be said for Mikhail Gorbachev: he certainly has a strong survival instinct. After committing enough errors of judgment to have wrecked the careers of a dozen or so Western politicians, he was back on the job at the Kremlin last week, chastened, humiliated, but as determined as ever to hold on to his powers as President of the Soviet Union. Never mind that the Communist Party was no more, the central government dissolved, the security services and armed forces undergoing a painful purge and the Soviet parliament in total disarray. The failed putsch may have left a gaping...
...victory on the barricades of Moscow, the resurgent Russians, led by Boris Yeltsin, seemed to have had other plans in mind for the President once they restored him to power. Yeltsin has been thinking of a considerably weakened role for his former rival in a future bare-bones Union: Gorbachev glad-handing visiting heads of state, Gorbachev keeping the country's electric grid in working order or Gorbachev making certain the trains run on time. As one brazen Russian slogan put it, "Misha, don't forget under whose flag you were rescued...
...most chilling aspects of last week's coup attempt is that -- for 76 hours -- the Soviet Union's top-secret nuclear release codes were in the hands of men later denounced as "adventurists" by Mikhail Gorbachev. According to the Washington Post, a member of the Russian delegation that accompanied Gorbachev back to Moscow said the men who put the Soviet President under house arrest in his Crimean dacha also seized the "black box" (actually a briefcase) containing the codes. Could the coupmakers have launched or threatened a nuclear attack? Or was the Soviet deterrent effectively paralyzed for three days...
...launch any of the country's estimated 27,000 nuclear warheads 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...
...tanks from moving against Boris Yeltsin. As it turned out, President Bush later told reporters gathered at his vacation home in Kennebunkport, Me., that U.S. intelligence detected no signals or movements indicating "a nuclear threat of any kind" during the interregnum. By Wednesday, the infernal briefcase was back in Gorbachev's safekeeping, and the world could breathe a little easier...