Word: gorbachevized
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...weeks ago, the vice president of the Russian Federation, Alexander Rutskoi, quietly informed U.S. Ambassador Robert Strauss about an early version of a speech that had been prepared for Boris Yeltsin to deliver last Monday, on the eve of Gorbachev's departure for Madrid. The draft declared the U.S.S.R. defunct and Yeltsin's government the protector of 25 million ethnic Russians in the outlying republics...
...Gorbachev would obviously prefer presiding over the largest country on earth to becoming the custodian of little more than a drafty fortress on the banks of the Moscow River. His friend Bush would rather have one phone number in his Rolodex than a dozen...
...late for that. The incredible has become the inevitable. The Baltic states are gone; Ukraine and several other republics are going, and there is probably no stopping them. What one of Gorbachev's advisers, Yevgeni Primakov, calls a "unified economic space" is a lost cause, at least during the coming phase. The U.S.S.R. is, and always has been, a unified economic disaster area, and that, not ethnicity, is the main reason so many of those 280 million people want out. The U.S.S.R. has to go much further in falling apart before the pieces will have the incentive to reconstitute themselves...
...Gorbachev, diminished as he is, has his own important contribution still to make. Using what is left of his office, he can supervise an open-ended negotiation over territory, borders, security and the rights of minorities. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? That's why Gorbachev's experience in Madrid last week may come in handy at home...
...scored a considerable victory by getting the talks started at all, dramatizing its unchallenged status as the world's sole remaining superpower. Bush did not need to make that point; Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev did it for him. The Soviet Union -- "a country that exists only outside its borders," in the cruel summation of an American official -- is nominally co- chairman of the conference, and its participation enabled some Arabs to claim that they were not just knuckling under to the U.S. But Gorbachev made it clear that Moscow would now fade into the background and pretty much go along...