Word: parliament
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...over many generals with more experience, manages to hang on because of his loyalty to his patron. As commander of the Soviet Airborne troops during the attempted coup in 1991, he refused to storm the building where Yeltsin was holed up; in October 1993, when the leaders of Parliament dared to challenge Yeltsin in the streets, he sided with the President. According to people close to the President's office, Grachev even reminded Yeltsin after the October putsch: "Boris Nikolayevich, I have twice saved you." Officers have nicknamed the Defense Minister "the President's shooting crutch...
...include servicemen, and some of which have their own paramilitary structures. They are supposed to provide for the social and legal defense of servicemen, but such goals may quickly change if instability in Russia grows. Then these nonpolitical organizations might carry out armed actions, and the military deputies in parliament may also grab their Kalashnikovs and urge their fellow officers to join them at the barricades...
...boys at the front staged demonstrations in Moscow and Vladivostok; on Friday mothers in Yekaterinburg lay down in front of army vehicles transporting their sons to Chechnya. Russians everywhere spoke out angrily against the war. "Yeltsin has betrayed our democracy," declared former dissident Gleb Yakunin, a liberal member of parliament. Even when Chechnya's presidential palace is in Russian hands, President Boris Yeltsin will not have won the war or restored his own political prestige...
Grachev seemed fully aware of the military's plight only two months ago when he warned the Russian parliament that "no army in the world is in such a poor state as ours." It was a sin, he said, to keep it "half-starved and destitute." That was no exaggeration. Thousands of troops who were pulled back from the far reaches of the Soviet empire are living in barracks and with relatives in Russia because there is no housing for them. Large-unit field exercises have not been held since 1992. Russian pilots fly only an hour...
...commanders went public with warnings against an invasion of Chechnya. Deputy Defense Minister Boris Gromov, the last commander of Soviet troops in Afghanistan, said on television: "It will be a bloodbath, another Afghanistan." The Russian press reported that 11 generals, including the commander of the ground forces, wrote to parliament questioning whether the troops could "accomplish their tasks under present conditions...