Word: kremlins
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...ceremonial signing of a new union treaty with the presidents of the Russian and Kazakh republics; other republics were expected to sign later. The treaty would transfer so many powers -- over taxes, natural resources, even the state security apparatus -- to the republics as to make restoring ironfisted Kremlin control of the whole country impossible. Moreover, a new national Cabinet would have been named by representatives of the republics. Some of the eventual coup leaders, including KGB chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov, Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov and Interior Minister Boris Pugo, would almost certainly have lost their jobs. The plotters could not afford...
...might want to kill the Soviet President. The thought that some of the plotters might try to execute him in a last attempt to save the coup occurred to Gorbachev as well. One of his first calls on Wednesday was to the chief of his personal guard at the Kremlin, working out arrangements to guarantee his safety on a return to Moscow...
Yeltsin has at various times been dismissed, both in the Kremlin and in the West, as a buffoon, an opportunist, a would-be autocrat wrapped in a populist mantle. His judgment has often been questioned -- along with his sobriety. Cynical speculation has abounded about his conversion to democratic principles. His assertiveness and impulsiveness have always exasperated more conventional politicians like Gorbachev, who viewed Yeltsin for years with wariness and distrust...
...whatever his detractors and enemies said, Yeltsin's extraordinary political career time and again has demonstrated that he had one thing they lacked: an intimate relationship with the Russian masses. "Yeltsin rises on a turret and around him there are no ghosts of past Kremlin rulers, but real Russians, not yet vanished," observed the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Yeltsin, unlike his peers in the Kremlin, has experienced a mercurial rise based on shaking off the past and embracing the radical opportunities of the uncertain present...
...attempt to break the ministries' stranglehold on the economy, Gorbachev made decentralization one of the cornerstones of perestroika. Under the slogan of demokratizatsiya, he created conditions around the country for popular local leaders, frequently outspoken nationalists, to defeat Moscow's minions. As a result of glasnost, the Kremlin faced up to some of the uglier truths of Soviet history, including the illegality of Stalin's annexation of the three Baltic republics...