Word: mikhail
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...furor over Eduard Shevardnadze's resignation had the air of a dry run for a much bigger event that suddenly seemed entirely plausible: Mikhail Gorbachev himself quits in disgust or exhaustion or defeat, and the world is abruptly confronted not just with a new Soviet leader but a new -- or perhaps an old -- Soviet Union...
...parliamentarians arrived at the Kremlin Palace of Congresses one day last week, they were handed copies of an open letter to Mikhail Gorbachev demanding that he "stop the chaos" and "prevent a collapse of the country." If necessary, it said, the President should declare a state of emergency and rule by decree to halt the activities of "separatists, subversives and nationalist militias...
Shortly before he became head of the Soviet Communist Party in March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev ambled along a Black Sea beach with his old friend Eduard Shevardnadze, the party chief in Georgia, discussing what needed to be done. "We were walking and talking," Gorbachev recalled later. "We compared notes. He said that everything was rotten through...
...words were even more shocking than his manner. Shocking to the nearly 2,000 members of the Congress of People's Deputies, meeting in a Kremlin auditorium; to his longtime close friend, President Mikhail Gorbachev, watching on the tribune behind Shevardnadze; and to a world that had been wondering with increasing apprehension which way the U.S.S.R. was going. Shevardnadze thought he knew: back toward the terrible past. "Reactionaries" were gaining power, he said, and nobody would speak out against them. "Comrade democrats!" Shevardnadze shouted, "You have scattered. Reformers have slunk into the bushes. A dictatorship is coming...
...paper, Mikhail Gorbachev has accumulated more power than most heads of state ever dream of possessing. Last week the Soviet parliament granted him even greater authority by approving a presidential plan to place the government directly under his control. Only this time, Gorbachev's victory seemed more like a retreat from his pursuit of democratic reforms. Under growing pressure to halt the country's descent into political and economic chaos, the Soviet leader appears to be recasting himself in a conservative mold...