Word: gorbachevized
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...back to New York. Though he calls the action unconstitutional, Hall evinces some sympathy for its plotters. "It was an attempt to deal with real problems, but in a wrong way," he explains. He dislikes Boris Yeltsin ("Now I think he becomes the biggest danger") as well as Mikhail Gorbachev (an "opportunist" who "tends to sit on both sides of the fence"). A hard- liner at heart, Hall blasts both men for leading the Soviet Union down the capitalist road. Once capitalism's failures emerge, he predicts, the Soviets will scurry back to socialism. No wonder critics have dubbed...
Washington did not join in the initial rush. The U.S. never accepted Soviet sovereignty over the Baltics, but it resisted public pressure to send in the diplomats. It held back partly to avoid complicating Mikhail Gorbachev's efforts to salvage the rest of the union and partly to be sure the three states were fully in control of their own territory. George Bush called on Moscow to stop standing "against the winds of the inevitable" and formalize Baltic independence. If Moscow keeps dawdling, the White House said, the U.S. would announce recognition this week...
While officials in Moscow do not dispute the fact that the Baltics are out of the Soviet Union -- and Russia's Boris Yeltsin has recognized them -- Gorbachev still insists the final terms of their departure must be negotiated. Baltic leaders even share that view to some extent, if only to ensure a process that frees their republics from the grip of the more than 100,000 Soviet military, KGB and Interior Ministry troops still based there...
...Mikhail Gorbachev drinks alcohol only on rare ceremonial occasions. When he toasts friends and dignitaries, it is nearly always with fruit juice. After he came to power, he curtailed vodka production to save his country from alcoholism. Ironically, that may have been the vice that saved...
That would not have been an unfamiliar situation for the Soviet Union. Gorbachev has been the nation's most abstemious leader. Stalin was a hard drinker, and Khrushchev was known for making hasty decisions under the influence of alcohol. Brezhnev and his entourage loved nothing better than raising glasses and toasting "Na zdorovye ((to your health))." As vodka once fueled communist rule, so it has hastened its downfall. The American poet John Ciardi, who died in 1986, wrote prophetically about vodka...