Word: gorbachevized
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...doubt largely because Yeltsin is so popular, Gorbachev detests him, and Yeltsin heartily reciprocates the sentiment. They are trying to vanquish each other with public denunciations, parliamentary maneuvers, resolutions on ballots and demonstrations in the streets. But vicious as their rivalry is, it is nothing compared with the way politics used to be in the Soviet Union -- and might be again if the advocates of a return to repression were to prevail...
Bloody Sunday, Jan. 13, when Soviet soldiers killed unarmed civilians in Lithuania, is often cited as proof that Gorbachev has already thrown in with the ultraconservatives. Actually, in the aftermath of the massacre, he showed his determination to preserve an equilibrium between right and left, between centrifugal and centripetal forces. If the hard-liners had really had their way in Vilnius, the night of horror would have stretched into a week, a month, perhaps a new era. Vytautas Landsbergis would now be dead, in jail or, if he were extremely lucky, back to teaching music. Instead he remains President...
...people than his denunciation of the privileges of the political elite. In his autobiography, Against the Grain, Yeltsin describes the opulence of the Politburo villa that he was offered (and turned down) in 1987, wickedly reminding readers along the way that the house had once been assigned to Mikhail Gorbachev. As party first secretary in Sverdlovsk during the 1970s, Yeltsin enjoyed the same perks that Gorbachev received in Stavropol province in the south. But while Gorbachev took to the privileges like an English earl to a grouse-shooting party, Yeltsin seemed to feel he had got them by sneaking over...
What motivates Yeltsin above all else is his sense that he is a player in the drama of history. By calling for Gorbachev's resignation on television last month, Yeltsin believed he was summoning destiny to his side, helping allow Soviet citizens to make their own choices about their country's future. Gorbachev deserves the credit for setting the Soviet Union free from its repressive past, but Yeltsin may yet get the credit for breaking the Kremlin's present-day grip on the union itself...
...Gorbachev has the power, Yeltsin the popularity; neither can overcome the other, and the country spins closer to a new cycle of repression...