Word: gorbachev
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Some of the conservative officers in Moscow are trying to pretend the Iraqi collapse never happened. Marshal Viktor Kulikov told a Soviet news agency that Iraqi soldiers had failed, not Soviet equipment. Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, an adviser to President Mikhail Gorbachev, said any claim that the gulf war proved the superiority of American arms was "sheer propaganda...
...Because Gorbachev is relying heavily on the armed forces to keep him in office and maintain order in the country, he may ease off on future spending cuts -- scheduled to reduce the defense budget 14.9% this year. But the Soviet economy is in such dire straits that it cannot provide the enormous amounts of money necessary to create the entire industries needed to duplicate U.S. battlefield technologies. "To be able to do as the allies did in the gulf," says Abraham Becker, director of the RAND-UCLA Center for Soviet studies, the Soviets "would have to revolutionize their economy." That...
While President Mikhail Gorbachev scored a victory of sorts in last week's national referendum on the Soviet Union's future, the big winner was his archrival, Boris Yeltsin. At Yeltsin's urging, voters in the Russian Republic approved the idea of a popularly elected President. Yeltsin plans to seek that post, which is likely to intensify his confrontation with the Kremlin. And at the moment he would be the odds-on favorite to win it; leaders of a fast- growing miners' strike have already pledged their support...
Record books will have to put bulky footnotes under the 3-to-1 yes vote Gorbachev won for his proposal that the U.S.S.R. be preserved as a "renewed federation." To begin with, six of the country's 15 republics, with a combined population of 21 million, officially boycotted the referendum. Of the country's 286 million people, 184 million were eligible to vote and, - nationwide, 147 million went to the polls...
...while Gorbachev's proposal was approved by 76% of the people who voted, that is only 61% of those who could have done so. There is also the question of the almost Brezhnev-level statistics from the Central Asian Republics -- all of them above 90% approval, with Turkmenistan hitting 98% -- which hint at possible vote fraud. There have been accusations of ballot tampering in some republics...