Word: kremlins
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...force immediately. Within a few minutes of the address being aired, he had handed over the powers of office--including control of Russia's strategic nuclear forces--to 47-year-old Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Russian TV showed Yeltsin, already wearing his overcoat, holding the door of his ornate Kremlin study open for his successor. "Your office," he told Putin, with a stiff sweep of the arm. Soon afterward, the traffic in central Moscow was stopped, perhaps for the last time for Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin, as his convoy sped to his country residence. And a couple of hours later, Putin...
...deep inside the Kremlin, unknown to Russians, Yeltsin's top strategists began toying with the idea of an early resignation. Gleb Pavlovsky, the political consultant who is one of the Kremlin's main electoral strategists, told TIME that he proposed the idea last summer. Two key conditions had to be fulfilled for the gambit to work, Pavlovsky said. The President needed a successor he could trust completely, and all serious contenders for the presidency would have to be weakened beyond the point of presenting any danger. The first condition was fulfilled when Sergei Stepashin, who had followed Primakov into...
...tough reformer. He is, for instance, a fan of former KGB head and Soviet leader Yuri Andropov, on whose grave he publicly laid flowers in June. Last fall, when riot troops stormed the Moscow headquarters of Transneft, the Russian oil-pipeline monopoly, and installed a new CEO of the Kremlin's liking, Putin did not intervene. A charitable observer, Mikhail Berger, editor of the Segodnya daily, suggests that he will turn out to be a "free marketeer...with a strong hand. 'Disciplined reform' may be the best way of putting...
...spending the New Year's holiday in Paris with his children and grandchildren, told the French press agency that Yeltsin should have resigned earlier. Human-rights activist Elena Bonner--Yeltsin nominated her husband Andrei Sakharov as TIME's Person of the Century--was scathing. "After eight years in the Kremlin, sadly, what has Boris Nikolayevich achieved? Nothing. He left Russia with a dangerous constitution that was made just for him, and now Putin will exploit it." Other former associates remembered Yeltsin warmly. Boris Nemtsov, a onetime Yeltsin favorite, declared, "Yeltsin has proved that as a politician he is much stronger...
...through the military's news blockade --could turn public opinion against both the war and the Prime Minister. The other is the truculence of Yeltsin, who tends to fire overly successful Prime Ministers. Putin's aides say this will not happen. But should Yeltsin decide to dump Putin, the Kremlin's electoral technicians may return to last week's results and put a new spin on them: with enough money and media, you can get absolutely anyone elected...