Word: kremlins
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...vintage performance, full of the verve Gorbachev displayed at the height of his powers. Former staff members also described how the boss had tried to buck up their flagging spirits the day before his television address with an unsentimental farewell chat in the Kremlin office, assuring them that they need not worry about the future. As a participant put it, "The moment anyone was tempted to give way to gloom and doom, he just would not allow it." But those who could read Gorbachev's lexicon of looks saw something more going on last week behind the remarkable show...
What feelings did I experience watching the Soviet flag being lowered over the Kremlin...
None of the "conspirators" in that peaceful second putsch could bring themselves to deliver the final political coup de grace. Instead the Soviet President was left to go through the motions of office while Yeltsin methodically chipped away at his powers, placing the entire territory of the Kremlin under Russian control, and pro-Yeltsin television commentators made daily calls for Gorbachev to step down...
...Yazov and KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, are said to have begun plotting in December 1990. If so, eight months later they still had not organized the most obvious, and essential, opening moves: arresting, or preferably killing, potential opponents (some supporters of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev operated unmolested from a Kremlin office almost next door to Yanayev's); assuring themselves of the loyalty of military units and then moving them into position to crush resistance speedily (army and KGB units flatly refused to storm the White House, the marble-faced Moscow headquarters of the Russian republic and the center of resistance...
They are not expecting any dramatic improvements either when the red hammer- and-sickle flag is lowered over the Kremlin, giving way to Russia's white- blue- and-red banner, and Gorbachev finally steps down as Soviet President. Both might happen momentarily. Meeting Saturday in the Kazakh capital of Alma- Ata, presidents of 11 former Soviet republics -- only Georgia was absent -- signed documents formally creating a Commonwealth of Independent States to succeed the U.S.S.R. and settled some of the last details. For example, they agreed to form a military council to exercise unified control of the armed services...