Word: kremlins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...President of the union, Gorbachev is still commander in chief of nearly 4 million troops and an arsenal of almost 30,000 nuclear weapons. Yet the central command faces an uncertain future. Last week's interim agreement between the Kremlin and 10 republics raised more questions than it answered about what kind of state will emerge. Even if they accept Moscow as the capital of a loose confederation, the republics are sure to demand a high degree of control over forces on their territory...
Well, could be. Almost anything might yet emerge out of the chaos that has followed the second Russian Revolution. But on two central facts everyone is agreed: the old unitary state in which the Kremlin tightly controlled every aspect of life is dead; the Other Superpower that overshadowed the 20th century -- and the American imagination as long as most of us have lived -- is no more. "The former Union has ceased to exist, and there is no return to it," says Leningrad Mayor Anatoli Sobchak, a prime mover in attempts to devise some arrangement to replace...
Something new is being born, improvised on a grand scale. But its final shape has yet to be chiseled. Even the greatly diminished degree of control from Moscow foreseen under the Treaty of Union, worked out between the Kremlin and nine of the Soviet Union's 15 constituent republics in June, suddenly seemed far too much. Two weeks ago, the treaty looked so radical that it triggered a coup attempt by communist hard-liners, nostalgic for the bad old days of dictatorship, who figured they dared not let the pact go into effect. Now, in the wake of the popular...
...knows the jovial, square-jawed Minnesotan, whose deliberate step and stolid bearing (6 ft., 210 lbs.) evoke his earlier days as a lumberjack and steelworker. He's a rough-hewn American version of the Soviet bear, who would look equally at home in overcoat and shapka on the Kremlin reviewing stand with Brezhnev (his favorite Soviet) or in a gimmie-cap at a Fourth of July picnic in Des Moines. He mixes an earthy Midwest charm with a trace of Finnish ancestry ("yahs" sprinkle his speech), which makes it difficult to fathom his lingering bad-guy notoriety. But behind...
Former Vice President Gennadi Yanayev and then Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov were deep into the toasts at a party at Pavlov's dacha when they were suddenly summoned to the Kremlin to take part in the coup. Pavlov, who turned up semi-coherent at one meeting of the plotters, was eventually hospitalized for "hypertension," sometimes a euphemism for imbibing too much distilled potato spirit. After the putsch fizzled, Yanayev was found unconscious on his office floor among empty vodka bottles. Said Kuranty, a radical daily: "We could have had a government by drunks...