Word: gorbachev
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...Mikhail Gorbachev specializes in the politics of the impossible. Even his job description -- to preside over a country that is falling apart -- is a contradiction in terms: . He may be the most widely disliked figure in the Soviet Union, yet he is convinced that he alone can avert outright warfare among tribes and factions that hate one another even more than they hate...
Traditionally, politicians build coalitions of supporters. Gorbachev has done the opposite. He has managed to make a peculiar virtue out of having detractors on all sides...
Boris Yeltsin has supplanted Gorbachev as the Soviet politician who seems most committed to following through on reform. Unlike Gorbachev, Yeltsin has openly broken with the Communist Party, and he wants to legalize private property and introduce a real free market. His vision for the future -- independence for some republics, a loose confederation for the rest -- is, in the long run, probably more realistic than Gorbachev's. But in the near term it tempts disaster in the form of a much more serious backlash than what has already occurred. While Yeltsin's boldness resonates with the impatience of much...
...long as Gorbachev stays in power, George Bush will try to work with him. But Administration officials worry about what might happen if Gorbachev is replaced, or co-opted, by a military junta. Suppose, for example, the new regime attempted an outright conquest and occupation of the Baltics, which called on the U.S. for help? Or suppose it not only repressed internal dissidents but also canceled Gorbachev's plans to pull remaining Soviet troops out of Eastern Europe...
...Mikhail Gorbachev may hold out hope for the return of perestroika, but he won't be getting much encouragement. "Among Gorbachev's top advisers, just about everybody is gone," claims John Mroz, president of the Institute for East-West Security Studies. Many other reform-minded leaders have left the country altogether. The latest departure: Boris Fyodorov, the respected finance minister of the Russian republic, who will take up a job in London later this month at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Most of Gorbachev's policy shapers have been replaced by unknowns from the Central Committee's ideology...