Word: gorbachev
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...total, belong to Soyuz (Union), a diverse grouping of military men, members of the powerful military-industrial complex and ethnic Russians living as minorities in various republics. As the Congress of People's Deputies meeting approached, Soyuz and conservatives generally seemed to be gaining influence with a frustrated Gorbachev. That should have been no surprise. The reformists' strength had always resided in an evanescent popular mood that has swung from euphoria to near despair as political breakdown has been mirrored in economic chaos and shortages of everything. The conservatives, in contrast, command the hard, physical tools of power: troops, tanks...
During the fall, Moscow was awash with rumors that the rightists had talked Gorbachev into a crackdown. German Sovietologist Nerlich, who was in Moscow in November, heard a particularly unnerving -- and unconfirmed -- story. During a Politburo meeting on Nov. 16, an army-KGB-conservative bloc supposedly presented Gorbachev with an ultimatum that Nerlich summarizes this way: "Within six weeks he had to get things under control in the republics, Moscow and Leningrad or there would be physical ways of removing him." Janis Jurkans, foreign minister of the Latvian republic, tells a different story of a November ultimatum. He said last...
Whatever might have happened behind the scenes, onstage Gorbachev moved abruptly to the right. He proposed constitutional changes, which he hopes to ram through the Congress of People's Deputies, that would further strengthen presidential authority. He announced plans to form civilian vigilante groups to combat black markets and profiteering, and put the KGB in charge of monitoring the distribution of foreign food. Most striking, he sacked Vadim Bakatin, the moderate Interior Minister, and replaced him with a two-man team: Boris Pugo, former chief of the Latvian KGB, as minister; and General Boris Gromov, an officer often said...
...Gorbachev, frustrated over the refusal of many republics to accept his draft of a new treaty of union, asserted that he would submit it to a popular referendum within each republic; the Baltic republics promptly declared that they would not let such a referendum be held on their turf. Most ominous, Gorbachev announced that he might introduce a "state of emergency or presidential rule" in areas where the "situation becomes especially tense and there is a serious threat to the state and to people's well-being." That might have been the trigger for Shevardnadze's resignation...
...possible that Shevardnadze's resignation will give Gorbachev a salutary shock that will arrest any further drift to the right. But it is equally possible that it will accentuate such a drift by removing one of the last and most eloquent advocates of perestroika from Gorbachev's inner circle. Among a parade of speakers to the Congress podium after Shevardnadze's speech, Vladimir Chernyak, a Ukrainian economist, gave a new twist to warnings of a coup: "At the head of the coup stands Gorbachev. It's possible he himself doesn't know it. By demanding for himself more and more...