Word: gorbachevized
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...champion in his youth, is now building up his political muscles. He flexed them ostentatiously in his annual address to Russia's Federal Assembly on April 26, grabbing headlines with his threat to reconsider his country's adhesion to the treaty on conventional forces in Europe. Signed by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990, the treaty committed the U.S.S.R, and later the Russian Federation, to reducing its military deployment in its European territories. Given that this deal was one of the landmark indications that the cold war was over, why would Putin want to provoke the West by threatening to abandon...
...Russians accept that argument. Poland and the Czech Republic are a vast distance from Iran, so Russian public opinion needs little persuasion by the Kremlin to worry that NATO's true aim is to line up bases against Russia. Such fears have been growing since the mid-1990s. Presidents Gorbachev and Yeltsin had never imagined that NATO would recruit the states of the former Soviet bloc into its membership. But Russia at the time was on its knees economically. It could not afford to fall out with the U.S. and its allies...
...Yeltsin had moments that made one believe Russia could shed its authoritarian shackles. His defining moment was in August 1991. While Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was summering in the Crimea, dark forces opposed to Gorbachev and his stop-start reforms tried to stage a coup. Yeltsin's political instincts were still sharp, and he raced to the scene, outside Russia's White House. He climbed atop a tank and urged defiance. The putsch failed. Gorby returned to Moscow, but when he declared his unshaken faith in the Soviet state, Russia was Yeltsin's. By Christmas, the U.S.S.R. was done...
...Yeltsin was one of those few Russian leaders who became figures of world history. He was very Russian in everything, in his controversies in particular. He was also a true, born leader, capable of going against the tide of public opinion. He did so when he quarreled with Gorbachev in the Soviet Politburo. He did go against the tide, when he presided over the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He did so when he hired Yegor Gaidar and his team to launch his reform...
...There wasn't anything heroic about him fighting Gorbachev either - in fact, he continued what Gorbachev started. Gorbachev ruined the Soviet Union. Yeltsin ruined Russia. He led to having this country robbed and pilfered. He hasn't done anything good to us. All he has done has been negative. The new rich have benefited under him. But he has done nothing for the ordinary people...