Word: gorbachev
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...MIKHAIL GORBACHEV...
...tower. After the attack, we journalists spread out across the city, fearing a KGB round up (staff at our Intourist hotel had warned us), and took refuge in the apartments of local people, who took us in without question. There, a few nights after the massacre, I watched Gorbachev talk vaguely but ominously on TV of the need to introduce controls over the media. Gorbachev's performance that January sealed his fate. Instead of investigating the attack, dismissing and punishing top commanders, he buried his head in the sand. The KGB, the military and the party leaders did not miss...
...mood in the Gorbachev camp after Vilnius was bleak. Some wanted to leave him. Others stayed on, trying, as one put it, "to glue back together whatever we can" of perestroika. Life took on a faintly unreal quality. Between then and August, I saw a lot of one man who was, in the official hierarchy, among the top four or five leaders of the Soviet Union. (In fact his powers were more modest, though his access to information was extremely wide). We would sit in his massive office at the Kremlin, often for a couple of hours at a time...
...keep reminding myself that a year or two earlier, these conversations would have spelled the end of this man's career, and perhaps even prison for treason. We would go through the various institutions of power, discussing who was still with Gorbachev, who had already turned against him. This week I looked back through notes of one such conversation. The military commanders have not yet gone, he said almost dreamily that April. The Communist Party has, though. And the KGB is behaving with a "strange artificial neutrality," he remarked: It no longer kept the Kremlin informed about what was going...
...would end that way. The military had already drawn blood that year in the Baltics. Many of its leaders were horrified at the collapse of their super power. Vladimir Kryuchkov, chairman of the KGB and later to be the moving force in the August coup, had all but accused Gorbachev of high treason in a closed session of parliament. But still, the putsch fizzled. The first ominous lull turned quickly into a baffling loss of momentum. Soon after the events, the story leaked out that the putsch leadership was less a junta than an all-day vodka party. Most...