Word: gorbachev
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...Union was seized by a sinister anachronism: its dying self. Men with faces the color of a sidewalk talked about a "state of emergency." They rolled in tanks and told stolid lies. The world imagined another totalitarian dusk, cold war again, and probably Soviet civil war as well. If Gorbachev was under arrest, who had possession of the nuclear codes...
...judged to be politically passive, even receptive to brutal rule. At first the coup seemed to confirm the norm. The news administered a dark shock, followed immediately by a depressed sense of resignation: of course, of course, the Russians must revert to their essential selves, to their own history. Gorbachev and glasnost were the aberration; now we are back to fatal normality. "Every country has the government it deserves," Joseph de Maistre wrote...
...before that, of czarist autocracy, the Russians may get a government they have earned -- a democracy. For the first time, they did not subside into an acceptance of overlords. Instead they turned last week's reactionary coup into a transforming rite of passage, an epochal event that forced even Gorbachev to re-examine his most basic beliefs and resign his post as head of the Communist Party...
...Center for Strategic and International Studies, is "to seize control of all the centers of power in one fell swoop, to paralyze the situation." Even banana republics know this. The Gang of Eight was inexplicably though mercifully inept. Perhaps the conspirators picked up some debilitatingly humane manners during the Gorbachev era. They did not launch a coup but proffered a sort of half-coup, saying complimentary things about Gorbachev and holding out the possibility of working with him again. The Gang was a bit like an assassin named Karakozov, who tried to shoot Czar Alexander II in 1866, missed...
...biggest mistake the Emergency Committee made was not to kill both Gorbachev and Yeltsin. But the plotters craved constitutional legitimacy for their illegitimate act and could not bring themselves to be ruthless about it. "They may have had Leninist nostalgia," says Luttwak, "but they didn't have a Leninist temperament -- which is to shoot the bastards...