Word: gorbachevized
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...Politburo he chafed openly at Gorbachev's go-along committee style, as the new leader maneuvered to consolidate power. He began to rock the boat loudly, with sulfurous speeches that argued for rooting out corruption and injustice. In Moscow he rode the subway and workers' grimy commuter buses, barged into stores to ask why there was no meat for sale, fired hundreds of incompetents from the city's payroll and arrested hundreds of others for corruption. Embarrassed by Yeltsin's increasingly critical tone, Gorbachev in late 1987 forced him out of the Politburo and humiliated him at a closed plenum...
Lesser souls might have languished indefinitely in the deputy ministerial sinecure that Gorbachev tossed Yeltsin's way as a consolation prize. But Yeltsin nursed himself back to both political and physical health and bided his time. During the 15 months he spent in the wilderness, he built up a coterie of devoted friends and followers who have supported him in all his political ventures since then. His closest administrative and political assistant, Lev Sukhanov, who has been with him since those dark days, flew personally to the Crimea last week to accompany Gorbachev back to Moscow...
...years, as they watched Mikhail Gorbachev bull his way through history, remaking his country, his era and himself, Soviets and Westerners alike wondered whether there was anything he couldn't do. Wasn't there some innovation so radical, or some capitulation so abject, that he simply couldn't get away with it? Like scientists pondering the limits of an anomalous but potent force of nature, Kremlinologists speculated about the existence of a "red line" that Gorbachev could not cross without reaping the whirlwind...
...what about the Soviet empire? Could Gorbachev unilaterally end the decade-long occupation of Afghanistan? Could he pull the plug on Soviet support for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and pressure them into elections they would lose? More crucially, could he permit "fraternal" regimes to topple in Eastern Europe, giving up the buffer zone that Joseph Stalin had created after World War II and retiring the Warsaw Pact...
Many experts thought, if a red line existed, it ran along the 860-mile boundary of barbed wire, concrete and minefields between East and West Germany. Surely Gorbachev could not let the people of what used to be the German Democratic Republic defect en masse to the Federal Republic, taking their whole country with them. And even if he dared let something so unthinkable happen, he couldn't possibly accept the membership of a united Germany in NATO...