Word: gorbachevized
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...Communist states are "anti-God" and that Soviet Azerbaijan is now a "great market for the introduction of Islam." Though Iranian officials played down the crisis, perhaps fearing that Iran's Azerbaijani minority might take a lesson from events across the border, Ardebili's speech raised the possibility that Gorbachev should be less worried about Azerbaijan's becoming another Afghanistan than about its turning into another Iran...
...Communist Party youth daily, Komsomolskaya Pravda, disclosed last week that two senior colonels, both veterans of the nine-year war in Afghanistan, sent a telegram to Gorbachev and Defense Minister Yazov two weeks ago urging them not to use force in Azerbaijan. Military intervention, they warned, would lead to a "complete disruption in relations" with the local people and "trigger the growth of anti-Russian feeling...
...matter how quickly the state of emergency is ended and peacekeeping troops are withdrawn -- and that might not be quickly at all -- Gorbachev will not be able to repair fully the political damage the invasion has wrought in Azerbaijan and the rest of the country. The head of the Azerbaijani Communist Party was dismissed for "serious mistakes" and replaced by the republic's premier, Ayaz Mutalibov, but the move cannot redeem the prestige of a party now identified with the military occupation. Yazov seemed to confirm last week that Gorbachev intervened not to save Armenian lives but to prevent...
...only the outlook for perestroika that is in doubt; Gorbachev's own future seems less than guaranteed. Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov repeated the traditional response last week when asked whether the President's position was endangered: "There is no alternative to it. There are no alternative leaders. There are no alternative policies." That is not self-evident. In the Soviet Union there are always alternatives, even if they are unpleasant, and there are always ambitious leaders, even if they are unimaginative...
Most Western diplomats and scholars have long believed that Gorbachev's grip on power was solid because of his political skills: he purged large numbers of his political opponents, as well as the deadwood, at the top of the party. After more than four years of such culling, it seemed to Sovietologists that Gorbachev could not be toppled by traditional Kremlin plotting of the type that ended Nikita Khrushchev's reign in 1964. That analysis leaves open the question of a coup by the security forces, the army and the KGB. There has never been an army coup in Russia...