Word: kremlins
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...summer the Family has kept a fearful eye on the forces advancing on the Kremlin. Yuri Luzhkov, Moscow's mayor and the chief (if undeclared) aspirant to Yeltsin's throne, has long been the Kremlin's top rival. In early August, when Luzhkov's party allied with a bloc of Russia's muscular regional leaders (once loyal Yeltsin vassals), Yeltsin was infuriated. The alliance laid bare how fast and far power was draining from the Kremlin. Luzhkov's courtship of Yevgeni Primakov, the former Prime Minister sacked in May, to lead his party in the Duma campaign further caused Yeltsin...
Stepashin, meanwhile, had turned coy about his own presidential ambitions. Like Primakov before him, he had become too popular for the Kremlin's liking. Over the weekend, as polls showing Stepashin pulling even with Luzhkov landed on Voloshin's desk, and militant separatists in the Caucasus reappeared on Russian TV screens, the Family gathered and Yeltsin pulled the trigger. "Stepashin made no major mistakes," says a Kremlin aide. "He simply failed to become the good dictator...
...addition to a fondness for wrestling and judo, he professes admiration for the iron discipline of Yuri Andropov, the former KGB boss who ruled the U.S.S.R. in the early 1980s. On the 85th anniversary of Andropov's birth in June, Putin laid flowers on his grave at the Kremlin wall and cited Andropov's enduring popularity as proof "there's a demand for people like Andropov--honest, decent and tough...
Putin is expected to be confirmed by the Duma this week, but few give him a prayer of becoming Russia's next President. His anointment is less a strategic move in a long-range plan than a sudden turn taken by an enfeebled President preoccupied with survival. "The Kremlin's not playing chess," says Alexander Oslon, Russia's leading pollster. "They're playing checkers--they're living one day at a time." With the end of Yeltsin's second term 10 months away, the Family is beset by fear of humiliation, if not prosecution. ("The Ceausescu scenario," a Kremlin staff...
...raised the specter of unconstitutional moves. Inside Russia, Putin is known as an "ice-head" or tough hardened guy--not the ideal pedigree for shoring up the nation's rickety democratic system. But while Putin and Yeltsin could declare a state of emergency, disband the Duma or cancel elections, Kremlin aides insist that Yeltsin appreciates the importance of a peaceful transfer of power...