Word: plenum
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...Soviet party leader has had his share of bruises lately. He was apparently so angered by the harsh criticisms he heard at the Central Committee plenum two weeks ago that he threatened to resign. Gorbachev has played this trump card on at least two other occasions to rally support. But this time the conservative onslaught was especially fierce, particularly from Alexander Melnikov, party boss from the Siberian city of Kemerovo, one of the sites of coal-mining strikes that swept the nation last July. In an article in the liberal weekly Moscow News, journalist Danil Granin, who was a guest...
...Last week he retired from his final official party post -- the chairmanship of the Central Military Commission, the party organ that oversees the armed forces and thus guaranteed him supreme power over the People's Republic. Deng's retirement, announced at the end of a secretive four-day party plenum that imposed a conservative agenda of economic retrenchment on the country, surprised Chinese and Westerners alike. Had Deng conceded political and economic momentum to the conservatives? Or was he merely playing a political game...
...would have been unrealistic to expect the plenum to resolve chronic problems of empire that have bedeviled Czars and party leaders alike. Nevertheless, the outcome was noticeably flat and predictable. The party's new platform offered vague promises of economic and cultural autonomy to the 15 national republics but warned that secession or the revision of borders was unacceptable. Violence would be met with the "full force of Soviet laws," the platform warned. Yet all this has been said before, and seems unlikely to end the fighting over Nagorno-Karabakh or cool the breakaway passions in the Baltic states...
Gorbachev used the close of the Central Committee plenum to purge one- quarter of the twelve voting members of the Politburo. He ousted three aging conservatives: Ukrainian party chief Vladimir Shcherbitsky, 71; former KGB chairman Viktor Chebrikov, 66; and agriculture specialist Viktor Nikonov, 60. Gorbachev's main nemesis, Yegor Ligachev, 68, stays on, but Western diplomats believe it suits the President to have a significant figure to his right as a counterweight to Boris Yeltsin on his left so he can bill himself as a middle-of-the-roader. Gorbachev promoted new KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, 65, and chief economic...
...other problems. But if he cracks down, he will hearten the enemies, who are already making rich political capital out of the discrimination against Russians. The Soviet leader met with Baltic party and government officials last week to seek some compromise of their demands. This week's oft-postponed plenum may show if he has found a way to calm the potentially explosive ethnic hostilities threatening to shake his rule...